drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Lemmy.one will be shutting down 1 day ago:
How about Deus Ex: Transcended?
I think that was the patch I ended up using my first playthrough (I’m away from my computer at the moment or else I’d check), but I might want to use something else my second time.
- Comment on Lemmy.one will be shutting down 1 day ago:
How does this compare to other community patches in your opinion?
- Comment on Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' 3 days ago:
In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.
In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.
The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
- Comment on Maybe Trump's Presidency Will Make Everything So Awful It Will Facilitate Actual Positive Change Nationwide 3 days ago:
Did any of those countries become particularly high quality places to live after the fascist regimes fell (compared to peer countries that didn’t go through a fascist phase)?
If the answer is “no, Italy and Germany and so on are not particularly notable compared to their neighbors”, then it sounds to me like accelerationism is bunk, and what you get after fascism is more-or-less what you would have had anyway if all that suffering had been avoided.
We like to believe that every dark cloud has a silver lining, that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that everything is happening according to some plan or pattern that’ll all make it work out in the end, etc, etc. Sometimes that’s true, but often times its not. Sometimes bad things happen that didn’t need to happen, for no good reason, and people get hurt and die and nothing good comes of it. That’s life. Sometimes its ugly and there’s no point to what happens.
- Comment on AMERICAN POPE LETS GO 5 days ago:
Thanks for the cannibalism tips.
- Comment on I installed Linux on this 8-inch mini laptop, and it's my new favorite way of computing 1 week ago:
For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.
The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.
Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn’t be well suited to full motion video the user interface could text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display still images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they’d probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep such a device charged with a solar panel built into the case.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 1 week ago:
The monsters in REPO are worse somehow.
Not sure if its because its relatively easier to stun/kill them or of its because their mechanics are lacking in some way compared to lethal company’s, but I feel as if they don’t have the same sauce.
- Comment on Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread 1 week ago:
Does a larger MRI produce more data than a smaller one (same data density over a larger volume), or is it the same resolution spread out over a larger space?
- Comment on The fact that even 3D games are old now blows my mind on a regular basis. 1 week ago:
Crysis is roughly as old now as Super Mario Bros 3 was when Crysis first released.
- Comment on The Machine Fired - No human could do a thing about it! 2 weeks ago:
It is from 2018, but how do you imagine that this was written by AI given that LLMs barely existed at the time and weren’t accessible by the general public?
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 2 weeks ago:
I’m surprised that the difference is apparently that low considering the efficiency of photosynthesis vs the photovoltaic effect, the fact that not all of the plant gets turned into ethanol, and the efficiency of the combustion process.
- Comment on Starbucks' new drive-thru in Texas is the coffee giant's first 3D printed store in the US 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.
- Comment on I'm jealous 2 weeks ago:
There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny insects and plants. As such [they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.
Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 2 weeks ago:
I think its less the quality of the research and more this:
Image (This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).
Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.
Also people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 2 weeks ago:
With electric cars you might not even need a special charger so much as a special charging cycle. Its already the norm for cars to tell the charger what voltage and current they want, and its already the norm for cars to carefully control their battery’s temperature during charging.
That’s not to say you’d necessarily be able to do this with just a software update, but its not too far off from the current paradigm.
- Comment on How a false X post about pausing tariffs led to multi-trillion-dollar market swings. 5 weeks ago:
IDK, it wouldn’t be the first time a news org published some random shit as fact because they’re too eager to be the first to report on something.
- Comment on YSK that if you lose your Social Security Card (USA) more than 10 times, the Social Security Administration will have to, by law, refuse to issue anymore replacement cards, for the rest of your life. 1 month ago:
How can the same SSN be issued twice?!?
The SSN system is bad in almost every way it is possible for an ID system to be bad. If you ask “does it really do this dumb thing?”, the answer is probably yes.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 1 month ago:
I think they’re both better and worse.
In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.
In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.
- Comment on In Vermont, an ultralocal social network is as popular as Facebook 2 months ago:
If someone were to visit Vermont is there anywhere you’d recommend they go?
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 2 months ago:
The way coil stoves cycle their power on and off is incredibly dumb IMO.
Induction cooktops don’t do that, but it blows my mind that it took as long as it did to get a duty cycle frequency somewhere above ‘once every 30 seconds’.
- Comment on Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic 2 months ago:
Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 2 months ago:
Not lying makes zero sense to you?
- Comment on The Algorithm 2 months ago:
Apparently that’s (quasi polynomial time)[quora.com/Is-O-n-log-n-polynomial-or-exponential], which grows faster than polynomial but not quite as fast as exponential.
- Comment on Countries across the world use more land for golf courses than wind or solar energy 2 months ago:
You’re strawmaning your opponent so hard that you’re the one that’s coming off as dumb.
Its kinda like someone saying “maybe if they didn’t all have garages we could fit more houses in the same space” and you just keep replying “WHAT!?! You want me to park my car in my living room!?!?” over and over again.
- Comment on Xenon 2 months ago:
Don’t listen to the people who say it works by displacing oxygen. It would never be used as a general anesthetic if that was the mechanism of action.
Xenon has been used as a general anesthetic, but it is more expensive than conventional anesthetics.
Xenon is a high-affinity glycine-site NMDA receptor antagonist.[155] However, xenon is different from certain other NMDA receptor antagonists in that it is not neurotoxic and it inhibits the neurotoxicity of ketamine and nitrous oxide (N2O), while actually producing neuroprotective effects.[156][157] Unlike ketamine and nitrous oxide, xenon does not stimulate a dopamine efflux in the nucleus accumbens.[158]
Xenon has a minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of 72% at age 40, making it 44% more potent than N2O as an anesthetic.[164] Thus, it can be used with oxygen in concentrations that have a lower risk of hypoxia.
- Comment on Single-photon LiDAR delivers detailed 3D images at distances up to 1 kilometer 2 months ago:
So, keep in mind that single photon sensors have been around for awhile, in the form of avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes. And avalanche photodiodes are pretty commonly used in LiDAR systems already.
The ones talked about in that article collect about 50 points per square meter at a horizontal resolution of about 23 cm. Obviously that’s way worse than what’s presented in the phys.org article, but that’s also measuring from 3km away while covering an area of 700 square km per hour (because these systems are used for wide area terrain scanning from airplanes). With the way LiDAR works the system in the phys.org article could be scanning with a very narrow beam to get way more datapoints per square meter.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the system is useless crap or whatever. It could be that the superconducting nanowire sensor they’re using let’s them measure the arrival time much more precisely than normal LiDAR systems, which would give them much better depth resolution. Or it could be that the sensor has much less noise (false photon detections) than the commonly used avalanche diodes. I didn’t read the actual paper, and honestly I don’t know enough about LiDAR and photon detectors to really be able to compare those.
But I do know enough to say that the range and single-photon capability of this system aren’t really the special parts of it, if it’s special at all.
- Comment on Even better than a cart of apples 5 months ago:
- Comment on AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING 5 months ago:
One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it’s own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.
That wouldn’t help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.
- Comment on Conclusions 5 months ago:
It’s not ai generated for what it’s worth, it’s a really old meme image that’s been badly ai upscaled for some reason. Image
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 5 months ago:
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
