TwinIon

!!!! I knew it was a difficult trip, but I didn't realize it was that long. I can't even imagine doing a dive like that. I've never done decompression diving or cave diving, but even a short dive through a system like that would be stressful as hell. Doing it under those circumstances for so long feels impossible. Godspeed to these guys; I hope it continues to go well.

I don't really have strong feelings about straws, but I did enjoy this piece in the Atlantic about the history of the straw.

It's pretty funny that after Netflix was chasing HBO that with this acquisition it's now HBO that will be chasing Netflix. They mention heavier investment, but I somehow doubt they're willing to invest in the same way that Netflix does, given that they want to make more profit. Look at this chart of spending last year. This year, Netflix is expected to spend close to $8B on content. That's not just more than the $2B that HBO spends, that's more than all of Time Warner spends on non-sports content. HBO has been doing very well for themselves, and making lots of money doing it. Chasing after some kind of more tech startup level growth in a stable and profitable operation like HBO is a bad idea, and one that I don't think AT&T will be willing to fund. The worst case scenario is if they decide that they want to try and chase after Netflix levels of new content without spending Netflix levels of money. If they do, I think it will be the beginning of the end of HBO because it's impossible to imagine them keeping the quality level up. All of this also leaves out amazon, who will probably be spending $6B this year, and then we have Apple and Facebook that will be ramping up their original content machines as well.

If there's an argument to be made for games simply getting better and better over time, I'd say it's tied directly to camera and controls. Games are fundamentally an interactive medium, and if you can't readily see what you need to see or adequately control what you're supposed to control, the rest of the experience is dramatically lessened by either of those failures. They're precisely why I never really liked the RE games or the early MGS entries. I hated the controls and the static cameras and no amount of excellence in other parts of the game could overcome those issues. It's also why I think so many of the early games, from Tetris to Mario and Metroid, have held up so well. The 2D plane virtually eliminated issues with the camera and the controls were more than capable for what those games required. Similar things could be said about many first person games, at least either on the PC or with dual stick consoles. Once we hit a point where the controls and camera were pretty much always good enough, the focus changes quickly to the actual content of the game and away from the mere fundamentals.

I think @Wild has a good point. Right now, for a movie like this, I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to "this movie gets made with Scarlett Johansson or it doesn't get made at all." Same for Transparent and Jeffrey Tambor, etc. I think we'll see more trans actors in whatever roles in the future, but the reality of making movies, especially small ones, is that a marketable actor like Johansson changes the calculus for what gets made and what doesn't. It's not all that different than movies like Skyscraper or Rampage are far more likely to get made if they can get the Rock. Yes trans people are underrepresented on screen, and yes it would be better if trans people can represent themselves on screen, but I also don't have an inherent problem with cis people playing trans or whatever else.

They haven't yet solved any of the rather intractable issues surrounding Brexit yet, have they? Assuming this government falls apart, who is more likely to pick up seats?

I wonder how much of Pompeo's failure was basically the North Korean's deciding he wasn't as easily manipulable as Trump is.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say the number of parallel actors sidesteps the issue of consequences.

This isn't quite the same thing, but it's been kinda funny to watch. After Rian Johnson tweeted that out, thousands of people started following Chis McQuarrie (who had nothing to do with TLK or Star Wars) and they've been bringing him into fights about TLJ and doing a lot of arguing about their right to yell at content creators. You can see a bunch of it in his feed, and it's almost entertaining, but also quite sad.

That's very cool. That's a bit more like a test script for the whole game than the kind of machine learning that Deepmind is doing, but it's a good example of what I was thinking about.

I honestly have no gauge for how long this kind of thing can go on. Bush's steel tariffs lasted 21 months, but those were comparatively limited and had a specific goal in mind. When you have a completely irrational actor starting all this foolishness, with no clear goals in mind, across a broad swath of industries, applying to a whole host of countries, it's impossible to predict where this could all end up.

Despite using Q3 as the basis, they don't actually have guns. They can only tag opponents to get them to steal the flag. They were mostly interested in how multiple AI agents would work together in a team exercise. The Deepmind site has a better look at the game they played.

The N64 will always have been the definitive console for me. It hit a number of sweet spots. Perhaps most important, it came during a time in my life where I started thinking more about the games I was playing and not just playing them. I think the jump from 2D to 3D really did that for me. During the NES and SNES eras I liked games, but young as I was I didn't think too much about it. The N64 made me start to consider the technology and the businesses behind gaming. It had a lot of great single player games that would define my memories of the era, but it also was the system that I spent the most time playing with 3 or 4 local players. My youngest brother was just getting to the point he would play with me and my other brother, and we even were able to rope in my mom or my sister or a friend to play with us. Endless hours of Mario Kart (battle, never racing), Goldeneye, Smash, and Bomberman. In second place is the Xbox. The Dreamcast could have been that, and it meant a lot to me, but it didn't last. The Xbox really changed a lot for me, and Halo in particular. I was in a fortunate enough position that I was able to host more than a few Halo LAN parties with 12 players going. The Xbox 360 kept me busy in college, but WoW dominated my gaming life at that point.

Complain about wind farms?

Interesting that they used procedurally generated maps. I can only imagine the strategies that would develop if you allowed an AI like this to play 500k games on a standard map. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that will become a standard way to find map glitches or loopholes while still in development. Let an AI play a few hundred thousand games and see if it figures out anything interesting.

I don't know if she needed to be fired, but I don't really have a problem with her being fired for that. I think it's also wildly impractical to try and do branching dialog and character choices to any meaningful degree in an MMORPG. Maybe you could do something super basic, but I imagine the complexity involved would quickly become overwhelming.

I was also really hoping this game would have a lengthy single player. Glad I didn't preorder it.

I hope that all those investigations of Pruitt keep going. Make him pay the price for all his abuses of power. It is bizarre to me how long he was allowed to stay in. It can't be that hard to find someone that will just do whatever Trump tells him and otherwise just does the worst thing for the environment all the time. Was Pruitt somehow notable for his shamelessness in perusing that agenda?

I think it's also reductionist to blame this all on "crazy people," as if these kinds of issues arise only from some tiny population of clinically insane people. I would guess that most of it comes from otherwise "normal" people. I think the problems are the result of people basing their identity on media properties. When someone makes a bad movie (or even a good one that makes choices you disagree with), it feels like a personal attack on these people because they've decided that these media properties define them. Some companies work hard to make people feel that way, but somehow as a culture we need to be better at preventing that. The other part of it is an unnecessary and destructive differentiation in empathy when using different modes of communication. No one should feel comfortable harassing or threatening people just because it's done over the phone or the mail or the internet. I'm sure that there's a plethora of reasons that these kinds of interactions are so different than "normal" conversations, but I think we need to do better at bringing more civility into our online discourse. It shouldn't be any more acceptable to berate someone on twitter or facebook or in freaking twitch chat than it would be to do it in person. As so much more of our everyday conversations migrate to these public platforms, we need to do better at framing all those conversations as normal and have similar expectations of what conduct is acceptable.

I bought it for VR, and it is really amazing in VR, but the game is also really difficult to understand. I had no idea what to do, and when I figured out something to do, I had no idea how to do it. I spent 20 minutes googling and watching videos to figure out how to dock the freaking ship. I'm convinced there is an amazing experience hidden in that game (especially in VR), but I just didn't have the patience to find it.

I honestly don't know enough about the NBA to say if this would work, but what if you greatly increased or completely got rid of max player contracts, but kept the team salary cap? If players like Durant and Lebron were getting paid closer to their actual value, teams just wouldn't be able to afford to put together all-star rosters. Right now a player like Durant taking a small pay cut to play for the Warriors means he misses out on something like what, $5M-$10M, for a nearly guaranteed title. Without the max contract limit, the money difference between what the Warriors could pay vs a team without multiple superstars should be enormous.

Then you've been pardoned by the US government of that crime and the state shouldn't be able to try you for it. My understanding of pardons is that you've effectively been "convicted" of the crime in so much as that you've admitted guilt (which would end the trial) and the pardon is releasing you from the consequences of the crime. So in either case, if you're actually convicted or you're pardoned, as far as the US government is concerned, the issue of you having committed the crime is over. My issue with this (or the specific scenario that @CitizenVectron mentions) isn't a question of double Jeopardy, but one of the President's pardon power. The situation with Trump is obviously unique and it certainly seems like he and his cronies will probably get off because of it, but that doesn't mean that double jeopardy between the States and the Federal government is a good idea. The guy in this specific case was convicted of a crime by the state and sent to prison for it. Then the federal government convicted him again of the same crime and sent him back to prison. That not only seems obviously wrong and blatantly unconstitutional, but it's also an incredibly stupid and inefficient way for a criminal justice system to work.

That Rey foreshadowing Kylo gif is amazing. Somehow I imagine there is still so much more like that I haven't noticed.

Setting all Trump nonsense aside, it kinda seems like this should be the case. I understand there is a real distinction between the State and Federal governments, but you probably shouldn't be able to be tied for the same crime twice, especially if you're convicted by the feds in the first place.

Good and easy to win.