tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 days ago:
I have a very, very tiny knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that. No glass punch, though.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 days ago:
investigates
Hmm. Apparently some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.
reads further
It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.
info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-win…
You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 days ago:
Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.
That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.
- Comment on I did not want to hear anything from these people, please get out of my life 6 days ago:
If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.
The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.
- Comment on After the Triumph of Tetris, an Unsolved Puzzle 1 week ago:
Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.
He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.
It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.
- Comment on CouLSDon gets cancelled by Facebook’s algorithm police 1 week ago:
Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria
Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]
- Comment on Washer estimated "1 minute left", took 13 minutes to finish 1 week ago:
I know that modern driers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it’s maybe hard to project that.
But I don’t know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.
kagis
Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it’ll do that.
old.reddit.com/…/my_clothes_washer_has_had_one_mi…
My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)
Funny… Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:
This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.
The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should’ve taken a minute or two, took 15.
A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don’t even know they have one, much less how to clean it.
In MOST modern washers, it’s behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter…
The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that’s collected on it.
Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.
- Comment on my idiot friend printed parts of my 3d printed gun experiment with pla instead of abs 1 week ago:
You test fired a 3D printed gun you had no hand in making
I mean, I think that that’s reasonable. But that seems like a “get behind something protective and pull the trigger with a string” territory.
- Comment on Nine in ten honey samples from UK retailers fail authenticity test 1 week ago:
Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”
The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.
A fun bit of perspective that I like to mention in discussions about this. Roll back a bit over a century:
[Scientific American, November 2, 1907](www.scientificamerican.com/…/artificial-honey/]
Artificial Honey
Prof. Herzfeld, of Germany, recently brought out some interesting points regarding the manufacture of artificial honey in Europe. It is noticed that when we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it ran be easily redissolved by heating. Owing to the increased production of artificial honey, the bee cultivators have been agitating the question so as to protect themselves, and it is proposed to secure legislation to this effect, one point being to oblige the manufacturers to add some kind of product which will indicate the artificial product. On the other hand, it is found that the addition of inverted sugar to natural honey tends to improve its quality and especially to render it more easiIy digested. Seeing that sugar is about the only alimentary matter which is produced in an absolutely pure state, its addition to honey cannot be strictly considered as an adulteration. Bees often take products from flowers which have a bad taste; and the chemist Keller found that honey coming from the chestnut tree sometimes has a disagreeable flavor. From wheat flowers we find a honey which has a taste resembling bitter almonds, and honey from asparagus flowers is most unpalatable. Honey taken from the colza plant is of an oily nature, an.d that taken from onions has the taste of the latter. In such cases, the honey is much improved by the addition of inverted sugar. Prof. Herzfeld gives a practical method for preparing this form of sugar. We take 1 kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of high-quality refined sugar in a clean enamelware vessel, and add 300 cubic centimeters (10 fluid ounces) of water and 1.1 grammes (17 grains) tartaric acid. This is heated at 110 deg. C. over an open fire, stirring all the while, and is kept at this heat until the liquid takes on a fine golden yellow color, such operation lasting for about three quarters of an hour. By this very simpIe process we can easily produce artificial honey. Numerous extracts are now on the market for giving the aroma of honey, but none of them will replace the natural honey. However, if we take the artificial product made as above and add to it a natural honey having a strong aroma, such as that which is produced from heath, we can obtain an excellent semi-honey.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
A 401k isn’t mandatory. If you’ve got an issue with having a 401k, you don’t need to do so. I suspect, however, that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a route that will provide long-term returns as solid as regularly dropping funds into an index fund in a 401k.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
My brother or sister, invest in index funds, not the stock market.
I mean, while I get what you’re saying and don’t disagree, I’d phrase it as “hold an index fund rather than stock in individual companies”. ETFs themselves are traded on the stock market.
- Comment on Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux 3 weeks ago:
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
- Comment on DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him 3 weeks ago:
Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?
- Comment on Castlevania to get official stage adaptation by Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue 3 weeks ago:
And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.
- Comment on I know election day is just around the corner, but this is ridiculous. 4 weeks ago:
Top Gun
kagis
Apparently this is at least his second election doing this.
I’m a little suspicious that the goal is to promote his business more than running for office.
He apparently bought a furniture store and converted the whole thing into a massive gun store with a bunch of amenities with "the largest showroom and indoor shooting range in the Midwest. "
- Comment on need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask 4 weeks ago:
!buildapc@lemmy.ca for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I think that “best” is open to various interpretations.
The most-emotionally-impactful in the context of the game?
The most-graphically-impressive?
The best-integrated with the game?
I often don’t try and play the latest-and-greatest games, and while I’m sure that I’ve played games with thunderstorms in them, I can’t immediately recall any recent first-person 3D games…and I’ve kind of shifted way from FPSes in recent years. Probably the newest 3D game that I can immediately recall playing that I distinctly recall having thunderstorms – though I think that they were rain is modded Fallout 4; I was using one of the weather mods.
I think it was one of:
There are radstorms that impact gameplay by dosing the player with radiation, and I suppose could be considered to a different form of thunderstorm. These are separate from normal storms. Fallout 76 also has radstorms, but they are less-frequent and far-less-damaging than in (modded, don’t recall base game) Fallout 4.
I guess that that’d probably be the most-graphically-impressive that I personally can recall off-the-cuff. I’m sure that there must be some newer, fancier thunderstorms out there.
For impact…I can’t recall for certain whether-or-not there was actual thunder and lighting other than in cutscenes, though there’s certainly rain… But The Saboteur is an Assassin’s Creed-style game (I understand; I’ve never played more than a very small amount of those games) set in World War II Paris. The areas that are occupied by Nazi forces are mostly black and white, with a small amount of color, mostly red, and at least some of the time, it’s raining. The areas where forces have been pushed back look kind of like spring. I think that it added to the game’s atmosphere a lot.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
goes to find a table of Category 5 storms
www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
This has the number of hurricane strikes on the US in each strength category, binned by decade.
- Comment on New Windows gamepad keyboard will soon make typing on Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally more like the Steam Deck 5 weeks ago:
There are probably some games that this would work well for, but I’m not sure that it’d be a great replacement the way a physical thumb keyboard is for texting or the like.
Most present-day games that I can think of that I play use the keyboard as a grid of buttons. They expect to have your hand over the thing – often the left hand, with the right on the mouse – to let you be able to push multiple buttons quickly.
I’m not usually doing much text entry, which is what I’d expect a thumb keyboard to work well with.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Not for vegetarians or Muslims!
- Comment on Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes 5 weeks ago:
s. I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
- Comment on So now I have to PAY you to NOT store files on my device that I don't want? 1 month ago:
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Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just delete them from that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can, then some bad actor will. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.
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Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.
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They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.
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- Comment on BBC Weather app bug forecasts hurricane force winds in UK 1 month ago:
…nasa.gov/…/hubble-shows-winds-in-jupiters-great-…
The massive storm’s crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour – and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself. The red spot is legendary in part because humans have observed it for more than 150 years.
This is like Mach 18.
- Comment on 'No evidence' Ian Hislop black cab in Soho was struck by gunshot, say police 1 month ago:
“Initial indications suggest a mechanical fault might have caused the window to shatter. We await further tests.”
This is a thing with tempered glass.
- Comment on What happened to the turn based RPG and RTS genres? 1 month ago:
Turn-based RPGs I can understand, but “RTS” is “real-time strategy” – it’s intrinsically not turn-based.
You can get turn-based strategy games, but they aren’t RTSes.
It depends on what you’re looking for. There are more hard-warsim oriented games at Matrix Games, though a number of those are also available on Steam these days. Steam has a “Turn-based Strategy” tag:
- Comment on PS5 Homescreen Now Replaces Unique Video Game Art With Annoying Ads You Can’t Turn Off 1 month ago:
Yeah, same. If I were going to get a handheld console, it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want, but…I really don’t need another portable computing device.
- Comment on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage First Look Accolade Trailer 1 month ago:
Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.
Thanks!
- Comment on Looking for a Tales-like RPG without active combat 1 month ago:
Tales-like
I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?
- Comment on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage First Look Accolade Trailer 1 month ago:
&
OP, you might want to manually clean that up.
I wish that the Lemmy Web UI “suggest title” code would do one of:
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Translate HTML entities to their Unicode equivalent, which is what the Web UI actually wants in that field
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Change the Lemmy Web UI’s title field to support HTML entities.
I have to manually clean up titles myself.
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- Comment on OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out 1 month ago:
I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid dangers for humanity. They run one company. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.