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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My understanding is there is, in-fact, a mechanical way to go about it. But it’s nothing but a design failure it’s not evident to an average user. A deadly one.

    Canadian engineers have a tradition around an iron ring as kind of “class ring” when you graduate (they’ve kind of tried to push it in the states but it didn’t catch on in the same way). The notion is “it’s heavy, but not because of the weight”. It’s meant to be a reminder as you go out into the world that what you put on paper has real implications.

    I get down on Tesla specifically because they’ve got… I don’t know, 100 years of history to learn from? Like you had the whole world on your side and you gave us the effing “explode on rear impact” pinto, but without the luxury of saving the victims the cremation costs.


  • If it were up to engineers like this we’d all be direct wiring appliances as trivial as a phone charger, and they’d be pissed people weren’t willing to do it. People really aren’t dumb, there’s a reason for the world around us and it takes different folks. I do consulting, and the engineers (who usually call me under duress) always get frustrated with finance. I use the example of that person who got millions in fake invoices from google, facebook, etc as an example. It takes different people, and dismissing use cases is tantamount to saying “I’m just not good enough to build this product”. That’s all well and good for some things. No ones saying you need to make a heart-lung machine an accountant can operate. But like… cars exists.

    They had such a huge head start, and just refused to do the real work.



  • My dad was a farmer. I AM AN ORPHAN.

    Edit: Ok, I feel bad. But like… I know one dumbass with a cough that won’t go away (7 years and counting) because they wouldn’t effing listen to me about DE, another who rolled his tractor on to himself and died. Don’t take it lightly man. The bill always comes due. We all do what we have to, lord knows I’ve done some dumb shit, but it ain’t cute to dismiss it.


  • That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.

    It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.

    Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.



  • The hubris of the company is insane. People treat the FSD updates like it’s nothing when they’re essentially rolling untested patches that may behave differently and drive into traffic it wouldn’t have yesterday. Tesla defended the auto-close mechanism on the CT (when a youtuber showed it severely pinching his finger) by saying “They were doing it wrong, by design if you’re hitting the button repeatedly it uses increased force assuming something is stuck”. They just don’t have a culture to make consumer goods. They constantly dismiss the design constraints required to be in the market they’re in.

    And it is the worst kind of engineers who dismiss that stuff with “omg people are so stupid”. Other (better) companies have worked it out. It’s a reasonable expectation. No ones forcing you to make goods for this market, but the constraints are what they are.




  • It gets even more complicated. Deer for instance, cause some property damage, sure but nothing like hogs obviously. HOWEVER, if there are to many, they’ll eat up all sorts of plants all winter that other animals and insects depend on in the spring. When state environmental authorities set bag limits, it’s not only to preserve a species, they’re also depending on hunters to remove a certain amount.

    Snow geese were a huge problem for a while because they’d migrate far up north, and spend all summer picking apart vegetation on small islands. Vegititaiton that takes forever to grow up there, and was important to making sure some of those islands didn’t erode away… which they did. So near me while the daily bag limit for most birds was 2/day, for those snow geese it was like 25, with no limit on the season.

    A good portion of what drives this are things like urban sprawl, etc, but there is no way to remove ourselves from the environment, which means we should do your best to maintain it. Most of these limits and programs are set by highly dedicated people who usually have advanced degrees in a field that pays very poorly. They do it because they care, so I tend to trust them.

    I get hunting is unpalatable to a lot of people, but predation is an important part of how ecosystems balance. Left to their own devices these things certainly would stabilize, but the “new normal” may not be pleasant. Those plants excess deer population decimate over the winter may be important to an insect population, which is an important food source for a specific bird during it’s migration, that is important to balancing a beetle that decimates a specific tree species later in that birds migratory path or something. So that deer population becomes important to several other species and ecosystems across a broad range.

    I’m not really qualified to talk about specifics, but it was really eye opening talking to an ornithologist friend of mine.

    edit: another for instance on deer: When tag limits are placed, you usually get something like 2 bucks and maybe 8 does or something (depending on region, what the environmental authority saw doing surveys etc). This isn’t just to preserve bucks, it’s also that environmentally, it’s important to remove more does. Again my point being these hunting limits aren’t just permission to a hunt a species, but a request that a species is hunted.





  • I dated a vegetarian, and I love to cook. It was wild how little it took to break through the “meatless” thing. We didn’t last but I kept the skillset, and eat vegetarian at least a few nights of the week.

    I love being able to taste things at every stage without worry about food safety. Like if I don’t think a sauce is quite right, I can always try a bit. Once you kind of break through, meat freaks you out a bit… and I still eat meat!

    Edit: I’ll also add: giving up cheese and eggs would be hard as hell though… I get where that would be more exciting than meat.




  • oh yeah, I didn’t want to be dismissive of the mtx stuff. It’s absolutely predatory and awful, but I don’t think it fully stands in the way of developing good games.

    Which is related to what you’re saying about indies going under even after success. Game development takes time, and you need money to underwrite that time. I just think there’s going to be a split; right now AAA studios are shitifying their games, turning them more into CandyCrush skinner boxes. But the demand for good games hasn’t gone away, there’s just less financial upside than making CandyCrush. My point is, even though it’s less money, there’s still a good amount of money to be had there. Eventually the gaps going to be filled. Microsoft cant fill it because on the balance sheet, things like COD and anything from King are where they should be focused. And it sucks right now because they sucked up a stupid amount of talent and thanos snapped them, but thats not a sustainable practice.

    But yes, it’s going to be painful. It’ll suck seeing really nifty indie stuff have to struggle so hard. Like I said I’m also going to miss the polish that comes with AA stuff. I’m going to miss the hell out of Arkane. Their games weren’t perfect, but they had so much soul. They didn’t deserve to have Redfall be their epitaph.