Yeah, at release cops would spawn in on top of you. One of the first patches changed that - now they spawn in far enough away that you don’t see it happening. They’re stronger now too. It used to be the case that an optimized character could win a stand up fight against MaxTac (the highest level cops sent after you when you max out your wanted level). Not so much anymore. You can still win a running attritional battle against them, but you can’t just stand there and gun them all down before they end you.

Shutting down the Inflation Reduction Act smells like lobbying from the fracking industry. Everyone but natural gas merchants benefits. Taxpayers lower their energy bills. The Federal government becomes more energy secure. Electric utilities see their profit margins increase as the delta between Summer and Winter seasonal loads normalizes, allowing for enhanced optimization of real estate holdings related to having spare capacity on hand to cover load spikes (the extra capacity is a source of constant expense, but only occasionally runs & generates revenue).

Even if the electricity used to run the heat pump comes from a gas burning generator, it will still use less gas compared to burning it in a furnace in someone’s home. Heat pumps don’t create heat, they just move it to and from the outdoors, so they’re able to reach efficiencies over 500%. They’re still over 100% efficiency even after accounting for the -40% hit taken at the electrical utility’s gas generator and the -5% hit taken over the electrical transmission lines. Comparatively, the best furnaces are only 95% efficient.

I don’t recall what all was advertised. Which features are you curious about?

The Axis Unseen is about hunting (while being hunted by) cryptids from a large variety of mythologies.

What’s Tatars precious?

Yeah, performance was pretty bad at first, especially on hardware that just barely met the minimum requirements - low frame rate and lots of crashes. The gameplay balance wasn’t great either - there was one melee build that was particularly OP. The game is a lot more polished now than it was then.

One of the best games ever made IMO. I bought it at release and still regularly get sucked back into it.

I wonder if its a result of the topography of spacetime? Like, if we were to assume the universe is toroidial, and then superimpose a coordinate system over the torus where each point on the grid is one Plank-legnth from its neighbors, I wonder if the distance between grid squares would look bigger at the outside edge of the torus than in the central funnel? If Earth were near the center, then when we look outward/backward we’d observe objects apparent acceleration outward even though from the perspective of those objects themselves they are jumping from grid square to grid square at a constant rate.

relatable

Currency is an adequate incentive.

The data we create is valuable. Privacy is leverage to use against those who want your data - its an incentive to offer currency in exchange for the data you generate.

For example, I wouldn’t ordinarily volunteer to let a corporation track me. However, my car insurance company pays me hundreds of dollars annually for the privilege of having a tacking app installed on my phone.

Say you suspect that some type of fungus might cure cancer, so you spend $50 billion checking each of the 144,000 known fungal species. And say you actually find one that works. Too bad! The fungus already existed, so that’s a “discovery”, not an “invention”. You might be able to patent some extract or something, but if you’re charging $100,000 per cure, people will find ways around the patent. Better not to spend that $50 billion in the first place.

This is a critique of for-profit medicine. Its an example of how capitalism stymies innovation.

when “do your own research” meant “read a book” because Google didn’t exist yet

And then put that autoexec.bat on a bootable floppy disk you needed to research how to make yourself, fucking around with EMS and XMS settings to have enough memory to play.

Figuring out how to get games to play as a teenager is what launched my career in IT.

prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists

which is a flawed premise itself. the supply of currency needs to expand at the same rate as productivity increases or else you get deflation which has its own set of problems

I feel like its an advantage to know the analog way to do things in addition to the current norms. For example, navigating by paper map and direction of the sun, like some kind of land pirate.

R

And what’s worse is that its unblockable spam apparently because its being posted with an admin account which seems to bypass user’s blacklists.

@admin@science.social perhaps consider using a different account for posting articles, and only using the admin account for doing admin stuff

I would say just put the content in the body of the post, but it looks like you’re trying to make money off it so that might be counterproductive for your intentions.

Maybe generate a summary that includes links to peer-reviewed sources, and use that as the post body. It needs to be a sales pitch - get readers interested and invested in the story enough to follow through with clicking the link to your blog.

Just posing headlines and a link to a blog is, at a glace, indistinguishable from someone journaling their pipe dreams.

Not freeware, but currently $2.39 on GOG:
Master of Magic

Its like Civilization with wizards and dragons.

Why does this still show up in my feed when I’ve got OP blocked? Is it because it was posted by an instance admin account?

No offense OP, I’m just not interested in reading your blog.

unpopular(?) opinion: RDR2 is a boring graphic novel deceptively advertised as an open world FPS. The pacing is slow, the gunplay is garbage, and the core ‘gameplay’ loop is just a chain of unskippable CGI. I bought it based on the reviews, played for about an hour while experiencing an increasing sensation of buyers remorse. Never again. It’s the last game I bought without pirating it first to see if its any good.