Adam

Recent Actions

• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I'd have to go back and check, but I thought there was a scene with the girls in Equoid that just squeaks it through, but that's be a pass-by-luck if it even is there....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  That just calls into question the Minimum-Torturable-Sophont. Obviously someone is going to try to uplift pigs/chickens/rabbits/etc. Into a quickly reproducing just-sapient-enough mass sacrifice....
• Commented on Place your bets
  The big killer-app I'd see coming out of these language models is getting wide-band-quality speech through teletype-level bandwidth. The start of the audio-only end of it using some of the same techniques that google uses in their TTS engine can...
• Commented on The Pivot
  In related "media going nuts" fun, Fox and Friends actually said "Meeting between two dictators" with regards to the North Korea summit in Singapore. This is probably nothing other than a huge Freudian slip, but it is amusing in a...
• Commented on Happy 21st Century!
  The three things to look at to understand the low turnout in US elections are: Election day isn't a holiday and labor protections are nearly non-existant. This means that many (especially poor) people simply cannot get to the polls without...
• Commented on Happy 21st Century!
  We really should be reprocessing the waste to get the fuel out of it. There's a reason Yucca Mt. died, and that reason is that waste is still valuable fuel and nobody wants to give it up for free. The...
• Commented on GDPR compliance notice
  The other thing I'm wondering on this whole mess is how it's going to interact with machine learning and other mass-data efforts. Lets say you're an EU citizen who has a gMail account dating back to the old days when...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  IIRC solar PV + electric on-demand water heating is either near break-even or has passed break-even with solar-thermal water heating. Solar thermal is expensive and fragile due to the pumps and tankage coupled with most hot-water use being well removed...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  That's about what I was going to say. Given the specs I've seen on some DARPA sensor RFPs and the error cone estimates for some of the newer space probe missions (which depends on how good an IMU you can...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  There's a whole terrifying pile of ultrasonic and audio comms software being deployed lately for everything from autoconfiguration (Chromecast) to fingerprinting to media identification. As basically no platform has mute-by-default for all apps and web content it won't matter if...
• Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
  Found an article, apparently it's been cracked. https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authentication-system-compromised/...
• Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
  I remember when researching cameras a decade ago that Nikon offered SLR bodies with hardware crypto and traceable signatures for legal purposes as an alternative to polaroid-style cameras. Not sure if these things are still available, and they were expensive...
• Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
  If anyone wants a great example of how "doctored" even normal video looks just needs to watch some IP-camera footage of snow falling. h.264 encoders running on limited hardware trying to hit a moderate-low bitrate have a horrid time dealing...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  The ARMBAND devices aren't really something to reverse engineer. It's a bit of cultured Clan-brain goo and a fancy chip to turn it on. The chip isn't the hard part. The hard part is culturing the brain-goo that makes the...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  Don't think about bringing UNIX or Windows over. But if you have FORTRAN, you can grab LAPACK and BLAS and essentially import a few PhD programmer-centuries of work on making math fast....
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  I want to believe that they're making something like the 6502. Also our world is basically awash in RISC cores I'm sure the tech censor made sure they didn't make the CISC mistake. Even Intel's new stuff is RISC, they...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  With respect to dogfooding, it'd be interesting to know how much accidental cross-contamination came across because "work it out for yourself" doesn't necessarily mean you need to use a slide-rule when there's a pallet of HP-48s in the next room...
• Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
  RoHS has had some of the same problems. The fluxes needed for lead free solders are much more corrosive, and failure rates had a huge spike due to in whiskers and brittle joints. Most of the failure problems have been...
• Commented on Attention Conservation Notice
  For the ebook-readers among us: Kobo has Empire Games without DRM (so you can actually buy it rather than renting). I'm guessing that this one will show up there similarly....
• Commented on The internet of decay
  IEEE754 decimal is just fine for financial calculations. Shame nothing supports it natively anymore. Note that IEEE754 decimal is not IEEE754 binary....
• Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
  Even if all you care about is radioactive pollution, coal plants are dumping tons (literally) of U and Th and other unstable heavy metals into the air daily. The concentration isn't that high, but enough mass is burned that low...
• Commented on Placeholder? Placeholder!
  VX was developed as part of pesticide research. Turns out it's super deadly to large mammals, but the PPE level is about what you'd expect for any other organophosphate that's mostly bad only for bugs....
• Commented on Some notes on the worst-case scenario
  They don't need to lobby the Federal Gov't when it's easier and cheaper to buy up large voting stakes in utilities and use that to push anti-solar and anti-renewable policies. Just look at how many rate restructuring schemes have been...
• Commented on Theme, Fiction, and Empire Games
  Going to pick up my copy in about 15mins... The door to nowhere struck me originally as the same sort of thing as the protected-area backed locations from earlier in the story especially if there's a way to lock out...
• Commented on Things Can Only Get Better! (Part 1)
  Hermetically sealed is not the way you want to go for large stationary installations. If you can handle the restrictions on keeping them upright and keeping them watered (Lead-Acid chemistry always splits water during charging), flooded batteries are much more...
• Commented on Children and War Toys and Violent Video Games and Action Stories
  Not so much offed, but the Metro series is an FPS with neo-nazis and neo-Stalinists and mutant monsters where the character's choices influence the possible outcomes. If you play as a murderous bastard, you'll die in the end, if you...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  There's one thing that hasn't gotten much coverage here or in the media at large is that this is the first US presidential election in 50 years that hasn't had the Voting Rights Act in force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 This act was...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Not to mention what happens to the Peter Principle when incompetence gets your brains eaten....
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  The glowy-eyes bit seems that he's at least somewhat dead. That they're not glowing all the time makes it seem like inhabiting a body you're used to allows him to appear normal (or at least he's got the chops to...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  So, after seeing the Bob have a case of the eye worms, I have to ask. Did he get sacrificed and die in Fuller Memorandum and just happen to posses his own vacated body? Is Bob now some sort of...