troyunrau

troyunrau, 22 days ago

Yes, but how. The details matter

troyunrau, 22 days ago

That article is light on implemention details. It talks a lot about the legislation itself, and ways in which it might be implemented.

troyunrau, 27 days ago

This is a pop-science problem and not a real science problem. Any astronomy imaging system worth its salt has image stacking algos that remove transients easily enough.

troyunrau, 26 days ago

Hi, it’s me. An actual scientist. Did grad school in planetary science. The same techniques we use to spot asteroids are the techniques used to spot satellites. But removing them is even simpler. It’s not algorithmically hard at all.

In fact, it’s so simple that I’ll write it out: take several images (at least three) in quick succession and take the median value across those images.

Oh hey, that was easy. Makes a good despeckle filter too for cosmic ray strikes or whatever else.

troyunrau, 30 days ago

Is this unmodded? I’ve never played it, and this screenshot alone intrigues me enough…

troyunrau, 30 days ago

Even more amazing that it was found in the era it was. People were pouring over the skies looking for the next big planet, and instead they found this little guy.

There are still some orbital dynamics suggestions that something large and dark is lurking out there – an ice giant. But it’s still largely conjecture. It’d be interesting to see how they define it should they find something very large (say Neptune mass), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit. Is it a planet or not? :D

troyunrau, 30 days ago

I have this Tshirt

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/0d7c2700-1e4d-46c9-98a1-ca2a335656f0.png

I get groans

troyunrau, 30 days ago

Ah shit, a switcheroo!

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Stellaris. Absolutely fantastic.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Definitely a different kind of creative thinking involved haha

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Godspeed! I don’t think Ariane 6 will go down in history as a successful rocket, mostly on account of the shift in economics forced on the rest of the industry by SpaceX. But I do get excited for debut launches – some very clever people worked very hard on this. :)

troyunrau, 2 months ago

I know one of the Long Dark devs – chill AF – and if they are a representation of their company culture, then I would consider this less of a snipe, and more of a business model observation one would make over beers.

But, yeah, it is yet to be seen if Manor Lords is a flash in the pan, or has a long tail (like Paradox games or No Man’s Sky or others).

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Business people post on LinkedIn. I do too. Gotta know your audience.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Dragon Age Origins, first run ever. Had to apply the 4GB patch, and it still crashes occasionally on modern hardware. Off and on.

BG3. Just started Act III, still in the outskirts. The third act is so imposing that I’ve taken a break just to clear headspace, hence DAO above

EU4 (Anbennar fantasy conversion mod) – geez, this game is like crack for me. I’m now well over 4000 hours. I keep circling back. Most recent run was Dwarven Adventurer into Verkal Dromak – the sleeper dwarves with the dream magic system. Long considered a hard start, you’re now aided by an early game rebellion which can sometimes cripple your main enemies, the Hobgoblin country “The Command”. Much fun.

troyunrau, 5 months ago

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

troyunrau, 5 months ago

Keep going, I’m almost there

troyunrau, 5 months ago

Wildass hypothesis I just pulled out of my ass with an undergraduate degree in applied physics: maybe interaction with particles emerging from quantum vacuum?

Okay, that sounds like great technobabble. I’m going to watch star trek now ;)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Easy. If you can afford to be a space tourist, you can afford to put $5M in escrow for your future medical expenses.

Let’s take risks people!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

A half dozen years ago, or thereabouts, I entered the Canadian version of this competition, just to see how I’d fare, and to look at the process. Made it through the first couple levels of screening (from 3200 applicants, I was still in the hunt at 300 remaining) but then got filtered.

Some interesting bullet points if you’re thinking of applying, assuming the NASA questions are similar to the CSA ones:

(1) ham radio, morse code, or other amateur radio operator experience is an asset.

(2) Anything aviation or amateur rocketry is an asset, but in particular a pilot’s license. Anything aviation adjacent is still useful.

(3) Russian language (this might be changing in the current political environment)

(4) Experience in an “operational environment” – I suspect this is military jargon, but if you’d don’t field research as a scientist out of wilderness camps, or anything like that where you’re in a small group for work/adventure might apply here.

(5) Medical degrees, or advanced science degrees.

(6) Physical fitness and perfect vision

When I applied, my Russian sucked, my aviation experience was tangential (but copious), and I was a grad school dropout (from a planetary science program), so I didn’t float to the top. But it was enough to make it through the first layers.

There person who ended up winning was a medical-degree air force pilot. Hard to compete haha.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

They are speaking truth to power at the moment, but people still play MTX mobile games so…

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I’m not mad. Just disappointed.

I kid. Everyone has their own tastes and flavour preferences. I’m a fan of the book and also think Villeneuve did a pretty bang up job with Part One.

All sci fi ages poorly, some ages more poorly. Dune has the advantage of being a universe where they fought a war with computers, thus they’ve more or less been banned. This helps them avoid references to aged tech like most sci fi, giving it a bit of a reprieve there. If you read novels that were contemporary with it, you’ll find a lot of rooms full of tapes for computer systems, and similar. But perhaps that is more your style.

Personally, I dislike “psi” powers in my sci fi. And Dune, like many others in its era, is obsessed with this notion that “you only use 10% of your brain… imagine what you could do it you unlocked more!?” Modern neuroscience has completely pooh-poohed the idea, but if you read anything classic sci fi, you need to tolerate it. In the case of Dune, I tolerate it because the world building is worth it.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Aside from the fact that anything with mass cannot travel at the speed of light… Lots of fun things happen as you approach the speed of light. There’s an excellent mostly-hard sci fi novel called Tau Zero that explores this concept in depth and, despite being older, is worth the read.

(1) Time dilation (the universe and you have different clocks).

(2) blueshifting of objects in front of you. At 0.95c, basically all visible starlight in front of you has been blueshifted into ionizing radiation. Fun fun.

(3) shape distortion. You become more needle-shaped – getting very long and skinny, as observed by the rest of the universe.

(4) you become a nuke. At .99c if you run into anything, your kinetic energy related explosion would be roughly 6x the Tsar Bomba (largest nuke ever detonated) for each kg of mass. Or, put another way, each kg of your mass would impact with the energy of 3kg of antimatter contacting 3kg of matter. Boom.

Sci fi always overlooks the last one. Near light speed combat is basically firing buckets of sand at planets and blowing them up.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Right! And that’s not even one percent of lightspeed.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

All six people who still play Diablo 4 probably bought it though…

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Depends on the stone. The coefficient of heat flow in stone is very low, so the heat will take forever to flow through the stone. But it should be quite evenly warmed at the top in a few hours if you keep feeding the fire. And it would be more or less immune to flare-ups and other issues.

However, you’d need to use a big slab of granite or something with more-or-less uniform properties, zero porosity (so no moisture or air bubbles are expanding or flashing to steam), and there’s still a chance that fast heating or cooling causes it to crack.

Or just use a metal slab with a pizza stone on top.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

It’s a fantastic little adventure platformer, wrapped up with cat physics. Some of the missions you end up doing don’t seem catlike at all, but I forgive them – most cats wouldn’t properly move a plot along without the prompting of their robot friend either. ;)

It’s a very nice game, and at a good price point. :)

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Robot opens door for cat. Cat sits and looks

troyunrau, 7 months ago

BG3 still. Just started Act 3 for the first time. Astarion as my main.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Yeah. If you’re a conpletionist like me, you just run around picking up junk to sell to vendors so that you can buy one of every available named weapon (and store it in camp and never use it)…

Oh, there’s plot? Sorry, busy systematically looting an entire castle… I kid. A little.

I’m really enjoying how each character has a good arc, and that those arcs feel so substantially different from one another.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

TV Tropes warning. I’ve always liked this scale, which describes the hardness of sci fi. tvtropes.org/…/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

Star Wars is about a one, and Star Trek a two (harder but barely), BSG a three. Etc.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

I’m looking forward to this. Combine it with eye-tracking 3D and you’ve got everything except the tactile response for a holodeck. Like this: youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Yes

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Real story: kotaku.com/palworld-pokemon-mod-nintendo-dmca-toa…

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Ugh. Are people going to see this one? Sounds terrible.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

xkcd.com/657/ every time I hear the name Primer, this is what I think of :)

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Tomb Raider was one of my first 3D games, back in an era before 3D graphics cards were even ubiquitous. Of course, it appealed as much as it could to the horny teenager in me at the time, but it was also a pretty fantastic game. Keep in mind that it was competing against games like Descent II or Duke Nukem 3D, already established as franchises at the time. But look at Tomb Raider’s legacy compared to those. Also notable, Resident Evil came out that year too.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.

Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?

troyunrau, 7 months ago

I still dream about those parties. We would gather in the youth centre, supervised, with a digital projector borrowed from the school (with permission), in sleeping bags, lying on the floor, projecting onto the roof, staying up until 4am…

Slappers only, no Oddjob. ;)

No, usually it was: autoaim off, pistols, one-hit-kills, no Oddjob.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

The youth centre was an old church (that the church had outgrown). So it had a huge white gabled roof at exactly the right angle for comfort. Was a blast

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Click bait headline. Very basic thesis.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Taking shareholders out of anything would be a benefit.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

I don’t think private business is the issue. I think publicly traded business is the issue. In a private business, you don’t have quarterly shareholder meetings with the expectation of continuous growth, and then shareholders demanding you fuck everything up.

Many private businesses are also fucked up, but so many others work just fine. Many work great, particularly small business or employee owned business or coops or similar.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Obviously there are a lot of large privately held companies, many of them owned by billionaires, some of whom are very public assholes. Forbes maintains this US-only list (Twitter is 149th and falling): www.forbes.com/lists/largest-private-companies/ But, Twitter notwithstanding, most of these giant companies just quietly go about their business. Some of them become conspiracy theory targets (Koch) due to the flex their owners exhibit on the public sphere. And some of this is clearly incorrect in their table (ie: Cargill is not making $1M in revenue per employee – they probably used US employee count, but global revenue).

Large private companies should be paying more taxes, imo, but are not strictly the problem. Large public companies are evil almost across the whole spectrum. The large private companies don’t typically fire 25% of their staff at Christmas just to massage numbers for the quarterly report.

When you look at small companies though (for example, my company is two people, both owners, no employees), I hope you’ll see that we’re just trying to make a living :)

troyunrau, 8 months ago

This is a fantastic video. Watched it on my lunch break. I was aware of the rolling method, but all of the developments after that were news to me. Very cool.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Recency bias. There’s always been good video game movies and shows, mixed in with bad ones. Most basic example: the Tomb Raider movies were pretty great (for their time). Pokemon has been running so long that people have forgotten it was created as a cross marketing opportunity to sell the game. Mortal Combat and Resident Evil are always overlooked. Hell, even the super campy Street Fighter movie is fun.

My personal favourite is Steins;Gate.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Tl;dw?

troyunrau, 8 months ago

I basically coin flip. In games like Mass Effect, I’ll play a male character and then years later play a female character – just to encounter new conversation trees.

In D&D or something like that, it is somewhat harder, due to pronoun hell at the table (I sympathize with anyone having to deal with this on a larger scale – it’s insane on a small scale, and I can barely imagine being trans and having to deal with that…)