If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses

Well; I was one of the people that bought Minute Of Islands when it came out. Nice game - mournful tone, but beautiful in places. Bit of a “walking simulator” disguised as a platform game, though - not much replay value, I don’t think.

What does surprise me is that Fizbin had hundreds of employees to lose, however. MoI had a really “art school indie” feel to it - I’d have guessed at more like ten employees having played through it. Gris (by Nomada) is the kind of *art platformer" that I’d draw as a comparison - Gris has much more action - and they look to be about forty people.

Obviously this is bad for everyone involved, but I suspect that the mismanagement that got them here might have been “dreaming too big” rather than purely “screwed by the publisher”.

Presumably whoever took this picture was sat on top of the beer fridge? Otherwise there’s a pretty serious omission here…

True. I’d mentally envisioned it as a whole series of “bread powered water wheels” down the side of the building, with a furnace at the bottom. Nothing actually going fast enough for friction to matter. A machine that only tried to convert all the kinetic energy at the bottom would be wasteful, as you say.

Plainly, we’re going to have to put some engineering design time into the concept of this.

Well, there’s your problem. You’ve plugged a Romantic Robot into the place where your Kempston joystick should be. Never going to win at Daley Thompson’s without perfecting your waggle. Also, the Speccy will probably crash from hammering the keyboard if you try.

Midnight Resistance is one of those weird games where the first level is the hardest; it’s not too bad to finish it if you do the first bit. Fair play on Robocop, though - that’s a hard game.

A kilogram of bread is about 2000 calories, about 9 kJ. Your body “burns” food too - probably more efficiently than you could make a steam engine for the same, but it’s about that much.

Energy from gravity is equal to mass * gravity acceleration * height. 1 kg of bread in a 9.81 m/s/s field has the same gravitational potential at “about a kilometer”.

If you’re throwing magic stake baguettes off the top of the Burj Khalifa, the energy would be about equal.

AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.

I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.

“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.

Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so “bad” chances to hit aren’t such a problem.

Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it’s promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn’t a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.

Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.

Well yeah. You barely use groups on a personal machine - maybe once and done for audio and VMs, depending on what distro you use - and at work you’d automate that shit, probably have it centralised.

For something that doesn’t run continuously, like eg. a refrigerator, then an average daily usage is more useful, no? “This product draws 1.5 kW with a duty cycle of 0.08” doesn’t really help when comparing efficiencies of potential purchases, you’d need to convert it to electricity consumed in a set period anyway.

Having the suit one corner and the rank in the other is going to make these a bastard to play games with. How would you hold them in your hand so’s that you can see both?

Impressive, since “network effects” are what keeps people on a platform. Why move off Xitter or FB when everyone’s on there, and not on the new place? Keep moving a significant fraction of a million people every week, and pretty soon, it’ll be where everyone is.

My partner, who is very non-technical, signed up for a BlueSky as well this week: “all the teacher blogs have declared that they are moving over”. Looks like everyone has had enough.