drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 13 hours ago:
The person that came up with that phrase is in charge of a game series with dialogue that makes your skull physically reform into a fedora.
- Comment on Health Secretary Kennedy says there's 'not sufficient' proof to show Tylenol causes autism 4 days ago:
Evidence linking Tylenol and autism not definitive “but very suggestive”, says health secretary Kennedy.
- Comment on Nintendo's Creature Capture Patent Dealt Blow Amid Palworld Lawsuit 4 days ago:
Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?
I’ve played gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
- Comment on plump pumkins 1 week ago:
Suppose the pumpkin plant could be bred or genetically engineered to retain its desirable taste even at very large sizes.
Would this even improve the caloric yield per acre? Or would the bottleneck be the available energy from photosynthesis? In other words do giant pumpkins take a proportionally larger amount of leaf surface area, such that you’re not actually getting any more pumpkin mass per acre than with many smaller pumpkins?
As I understand it normal pumpkins are already pretty high up there in terms of caloric yield, so perhaps there’s not much more room to push it.
- Comment on Secondsies 1 week ago:
I see this sort of thing all the time and it genuinely baffles me how people won’t cover up the entirety of the text they’re trying to censor. I’ve even seen people go over text with multiple passes of a transparent brush (which you can almost see through by squinting, let alone if you pulled it into a photo editor). Like, why?
- Comment on Smöl 3 weeks ago:
I think I understand your main point pretty well, that point being “takes bong rip bro, just think about how small an atom is bro, like bro, just think about how many atoms are in your hand bro, dude woah”.
Up until my last comment I was trying to have a meaningful conversation with you about things like organization in biological systems, but you’ve done nothing but talk past me while jerking yourself off over how much more “aware” you are than everyone else, even while you admit you don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about about cellular biology.
And by the way, I’m not attacking you for “explaining things in simple terms”, I’m attacking you because you said a bunch of stuff that’s factually wrong while acting like an ass.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 3 weeks ago:
8 billion now.
- Comment on Smöl 3 weeks ago:
Definitely wrong, although I do not have a collegiate off-hand understanding of biology to really fully decribe it.
Well, from reading this its pretty clear to me that you don’t know much about biology. And yet you have really strong opinions on something you have no education in.
But it comes down to what does a “cell” mean in biology? Even your case in point specifies an object with many cells in it.
What are you even trying to say here?
Cell membranes don’t use simple diffusion to transport chemicals across.
The word “diffusion” is pretty commonly used to refer to both active and passive transport, and the ratio of cytoplasm volume to cell membrane area is relevant regardless.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_diffusion
By the way, you didn’t need to write an entire paragraph about homeostasis or try to define what a cell is.
I really have to ask… Why do you think humans aren’t so big on the scale of life? Your perspective really come across as human-centric. Not “bad” by itself, but still wholly incompatible with reality.
Your perspective really comes across like you’re high on something. You also didn’t understand what my comment was even about.
- Comment on Smöl 3 weeks ago:
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC cell size is mostly determined by the necessary rate of diffusion across the membrane.
So, while their are some extreme outliers with more exotic cell biology, organisms having similar cellular metabolisms (e.g. both being in the animal kingdom) will generally have similarly sized cells. Or in other words, an elephant is much larger than an ant because it has many more cells, not because its cells are much larger.
An exception to this of course being neural cells, which can be very very long, or very wide and branched (like Purkinje cells). But even within the brain this still kinda holds true. I actually know much more about brain anatomy than general biology, and I remember from the book Principles of Brain Evolution that elephant brains are much larger than ours, and actually have a much larger number of neurons, and that strangely intelligence seems to correlate more with the ratio between brain and body size than with absolute brain size. A possible explanation is that it may simply take a larger number of neurons to control a larger number of muscle cells.
- Comment on Smöl 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, but its not made out of undifferentiated proteins, its made out of cells.
A human red blood cell is about 6.2 μ wide, so if we assume this little guy is 1.5 cm long that’s only 2420 human red blood cells from tip to tail.
IMO that’s pretty amazing and you should be amazed.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 5 weeks ago:
Can it even be said that it was perfected when later we switched from carbon filament to tungsten, and from there to halogen-surrounded tungsten.
And on the other side, Edison’s lamp wasn’t even the first one to be mass produced and commercially sold.
There’s a certain style of education that really wants to draw a hard line between “before the thing” and “after the thing”, and credit its invention to a single guy. But in really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 1 month ago:
I didn’t know DMT came in vape form. What a time to be alive.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 1 month ago:
I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.
Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).
- Comment on Anon has a problem with Bioshock 1 month ago:
They all started killing each other because plasmid use makes you psychotic, unless you can afford to keep taking more and more.
They all started taking plasmids because they needed to compete in the workplace (then later, in the war) or end up homeless / dead.
Plasmids were legal in the first place because Randism, being based 100% on individual responsibility, doesn’t believe that things like feedback loops or cumulative effects can happen at a socital level, and so doesn’t believe in regulations.
Plasmids are a pretty clear metaphor for dehumanizing yourself to serve the market, especially because the Randian superman is a psychopath that is only self interested.
But even without plasmids the fact that the worlds elite were brought down to Rapture, but (to quote an audio log) “we couldn’t all be captains of industry, someone had to scrub the toilets” bred a huge amount of resentment from people who felt scammed and now trapped down there. Just like in the real world the markets in BioShock rely completely on low level workers to be able to function, and yet punish them for being in that position.
- Comment on The sheer amount of websites that are completely unusable without JavaScript 2 months ago:
I agree with you then, you can’t make a good webpage if your boss tells you to fill it with garbage.
- Comment on The sheer amount of websites that are completely unusable without JavaScript 2 months ago:
If your motivation is to see old html pages, with minimal style, well it’s impossible to do them reliably.
Not only should your site be legible without JS, it should be legible without CSS, and infact without rendering the effects of the HTML tags (plain text after striping the tags).
At one point in time this was the standard, that each layer was an enhancement on top of the one below it. Its seems that web devs now cannot even imagine writing a news article or a blog post like, something that has the entirety of its content contained within its text. A plain .txt file renders “reliably” on anything. You are the one adding extra complexity in there and then complaining that you’re forced to add even more to deal with the consequences of your actions.
- Comment on FFmpeg 8 can subtitle your videos on the fly with Whisper 2 months ago:
It’s not AI, it’s neural network models
These used to be called AI before people decided that only LLMs and Diffusion models were AI. Both of which are types of neural networks.
- Comment on anons brother has some strong opinions 2 months ago:
Thanks
- Comment on anons brother has some strong opinions 2 months ago:
Since you have expertise in this maybe you can answer this question for me.
Do brick or stone roads last longer than asphalt or concrete roads?
It seems to me like they should, given the higher hardness of the material and the presumably greater resistance to freeze/thaw cycles. I have also seen a few brick roads near me that I can only imagine have gone a very long time with no maintaince (as I think the government here would rather cover it in asphalt than try to work with the bricks). The ground underneath the bricks has shifted over time forming depressions in the path that car tires take, but it is still fine to drive over at low speeds, as the slopes are smooth unlike the holes that form in asphalt.
I’ve tried googling this before but haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer as to how long a road like that can go between rounds of maintenance.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
So did they take the firefighter out afterwards and shoot him as part of the staging?
- Comment on Alexa, how do I remove cooties? 2 months ago:
I actually wonder how long it would take to notice if all your mRNA stopped working.
I don’t think neuron action potentials rely directly on mRNA, so I think you’d be able to keep thinking for a bit, and probably moving your muscles too. The closest comparable thing is people that received massive radiation doses (can’t make new RNA out of shredded DNA) and in those cases it takes a bit before you start melting.
- Comment on Black Holes 2 months ago:
I mean, the gravitational gradient is much higher. To me this kind of sounds like saying “there’s nothing that special about a 10 watt laser, an LED lightbulb puts out the same amount of light”, but a 10 watt laser is enough to instantly and permanently blind you.
Its true that there’s nothing that special about orbiting a black hole, but I think its not really logically inconsistent to say “even if superman could survive dipping into a sun he probably wouldn’t be too happy if he stuck his arm into an event horizon”.
- Comment on Anon witnesses excellent security 3 months ago:
So they essentially hired you for no reason and then had to come up with something for you to do?
- Comment on Anon witnesses excellent security 3 months ago:
Companies and individuals play by different rules.
When a big company purchases software a team of people from both parties (whose entire job and career are based on doing this) negotiate with each other to decide exactly who is liable for what and to what degree.
When you purchase software you agree to let the company fuck you over at their leisure because you literally do not have enough hours in the day to even read everything you agree to, let alone understand it, let alone argue with it. And even if you did you don’t have enough bargaining power to make a large company care.
- Comment on Splitgate 2 is ‘unlaunching’ as developer 1047 Games cuts staff | VGC 3 months ago:
Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
I mean, if we’re making up a story about a kind of demon it probably shouldn’t be a healthy relationship.
A succubus sucks your soul out through your crotch, which feels great until it doesn’t. That’s why its supposed to be a scary monster.
The post says, “until you die of natural causes”, but for a counterpart to a succubus I think it would much more appropriate if it was able supernaturally influence you to reduce your worries and make you more and more dependent on it (just as a succubus can supernaturally charm its victims). Gradually you care about less and less as you lose all motivation, and at the end you don’t even bother to struggle as your soul is ripped from your body.
- Comment on RimWorld - Odyssey expansion and update 1.6 out now! 3 months ago:
This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.
It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.
To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy.
- Comment on we are creators 3 months ago:
This is the case for a lot of inventions.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 4 months ago:
I used to think the same thing, but the thing is we don’t care about the amount of energy that goes into the sunscreen, we care about the remaining percent that goes into the skin. If you go from a sunscreen that absorbs 98% of the sun’s energy to one that absorbs 99% you are halving the amount of energy your skin is exposed to.
If you’re still getting burned with 98% absorption, then increasing that number by 1% would actually make a huge difference. And that’s without even considering things like having a safety margin for improper application.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 4 months ago:
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse: