drosophila

@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026, and we still might not get to play its singleplayer campaign next year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that

  If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay affecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted by morons. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.

  Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.

  At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gotta Catch 'Em All⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From the wording at the top it sounds like this was just for fun and probably ungraded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I promise, no one can tell that you're high at work, trust me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Out of curiosity what do you think your thought process would be in a McDonald’s?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of

  Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of “ether”.

  The term “ethyl”, as in ethyl alcohol or ethanol, similarly traces its origins back to “ether”.

  At the time these various “light” flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be “pure”, and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the “perfect” predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word “quintessential”, which literally means “fifth essence”, to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It’s also where we get the word “ethereal” to mean “otherworldly”, “light”, “ghostly”, etc.

  It’s for similar reasons that we use the word “spirit” to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something’s essence is it’s spirit.

  Of course what they called “spirits” or “essences” were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that’s what they thought was going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The show I was watching went from "Free" to "Paid" *while I was watching it*⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The really crazy thing to me is when a game is updated to remove copywritten songs they lost a license for.

  That was apparently never a problem back in the days of CDs, but now they have to do that or else the poor music companies will go bankrupt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SPhotonix 5D memory crystal: cold storage lasts 14B years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000

  That’s not bad at all. It’s something that basically every library could have. Imagine that level of distributed redundancy for hundreds of terrabytes worth of information, in a medium that essentially lasts forever.

  Assuming it really is coming out at that price of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloaca time!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re a turtle or a sea cucumber maybe.

  IIRC during covid they did experiment with liquid oxygen exchange through the intestinal wall for patients whose lungs were so wrecked normal ventilators weren’t sufficient. So you could maybe engage in some anal breathing if you were to get a super-oxygenated fluid enema, but its not something the unassisted human body can do. Or tries to do, for that matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What did I forget?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I like Kazakhstan’s flag because I think its a nice combination of colors:

  Image

  Its not very low entropy though, at least not compared to ones like Germany’s or Ukraine’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It is a silly place.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It appears that this quote is from this clickhole article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨apparently, the T button dosent exist for some people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In my opinion a single weird person doesn’t warrant an entire complaint post with 100+ comments of discussion (which, yes, I know I am adding to).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The Neverhood literally consists of photographs, it is as photorealistic as it is possible to be, and yet it has a very strong art direction. More modern titles like The Midnight Walk, Keeper, and Felt That Boxing are similar, though they are actually rendered rather than consisting of photographs and video. On the other side of the coin there are some visual effects that are quite stylized but also very GPU intensive, showing that just because an image doesn’t look like a photo doesn’t mean that its necessarily easy to render (note, that video is a human authored algorithm, not AI, though they do compare it to AI video generation and it does have a mode where you can make your own paint strokes for an example scene and it tries to set its parameters to mimic yours).

  I used to have the same opinion that you express, but I think this was only ever really true in practice during the brown era, and not before or after. In fact some games like Thief 1&2, Half Life 1&2, and the Chronicles of Riddick were trying to be as photorealistic as possible at the time of their release, but are now pretty commonly praised for their “stylization” today. For example, the deep blacks and stark contrast of stencil shadows vs what you get with more modern lighting. I am reminded of a Brian Eno quote:

  Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

  We are even seeing some nostalgia now for the pissfilter era, though that’s not an enthusiasm that I share. I suspect that we will eventually see TAA ghosting and ray tracing artifacts, that are currently much hated, be recreated in a controlled way as a stylistic choice. In particular I think that Control will eventually be praised for the way that it basically incorporated ray tracing artifacts into its art style, by using shimmery walls and a dreamlike atmosphere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO the combat mechanics shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the developers were terrified of making a player-character that wasn’t a demigod that can slaughter an entire army.

  I still think Dishonored 1 & 2 are both really good games, but its like they made Portal but just let you break the walls of the test chambers and walk right through if you felt like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨fight club⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t like the notion that if “being yourself” means people don’t like you, you must be acting like an asshole.

  A lot of autistic people, for example, have to put on a mask just to function at all in society. Which is something that can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When someone like that hears “just be yourself” it can be really frustrating, and the conflation of social skill with mortality I think causes a lot of harm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  8 billion now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smöl⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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.