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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • It gave your horse extra health actually, so not purely cosmetic. But I think in a single player game that also has extremely good modding tools, it doesn’t really matter. If you want to pay to win your single player game, you do you.

    Horse armour was mostly a landmark for showing companies that consumers were willing to pay for micro stuff like that. The potential return vs effort invested was crazy. Todd himself said that they try doing nice DLC that gives you good value for your money, but it’s hard to justify business-wise when the horse armour is so cheap to make and sells so well.



  • The bigotry is on the same level, but I think JK Rowling is actively militant on a far different level compared to Orson Scott Card. Just looking at their twitter for example, OSC tweets maybe once a month and 9/10 times it’s about a book signing or other such promotion. JK Rowling’s feed is a constant flow of hatred on trans people. She tries very hard to make sure you are reminded of her bigotry every single time you hear anything about her.

    The reach is different too. OSC has some 16k followers. Rowling has 15 million. It’s natural for her to attract a much higher degree of disdain.



  • There was this guy that made a pumped hydro water tank on his roof and by his calculations a cubic meter of water was equivalent to a AA battery.

    That sounds crazy. Let’s do some math. From what I can find, a double A battery contains about 10-14 kilojoules of energy. Let’s use 14 to be charitable.

    A cubic meter of water weighs about 1000kg. We know the formula for potential gravitational energy U = mgh. So if we used all the energy from the battery, we could lift the water:

    14000 = 1000 * 9.81 * h
    h = 14000 / (1000 * 9.81) ≈ 1.43 meters (4 feet 8 inches)
    

    That assumes 100% efficiency of course. Still, lifting a ton of water even two feet ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Batteries have a lot of energy.




  • is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

    He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

    If you browse through it’s not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

    He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There’s a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean “yes.” He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

    To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.


  • Your individual tastes are subjective. I was arguing that the quality difference of a mcdonalds burger and a restaurant burger is not as big a chasm as OP made out.

    I agree that they are basically the same meat from the same cows, but in my opinion there is still a big quality difference due mainly to preparation. A McDonald’s beef patty is too thin, too homogeneous, and overcooked. The lack of flavour is the result of optimizing for cooking speed.

    If you are willing to wait 5-15 minutes for your burger to be cooked you can achieve dramatically better results from the same cow.




  • The sad truth is that there are overriding geopolitical strategic interests behind the US support of Israel. The American executive power recognizes this, so military support is not going to go away as long as those interests are a concern.

    They may pay some lip service to the whole genocide thing, but this is ultimately realpolitik. Human lives do not matter when they are not American.



  • China leads the world in both renewable energy usage AND coal use. And by a lot.

    They also have some of the most people (is India ahead nowadays? I can’t keep track), and they manufacture tons of things meant for export to other (including western) countries.

    The point being, everybody is greenwashing. China is greenwashing their energy mix. Western countries greenwash their own energy by essentially outsourcing the production and thus pollution. And this isn’t about China really. I could say the same for a bunch of countries.

    The small consolation is that beside all the green propaganda, some progress is at least being made. Probably not enough, but some.