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In Frostpunk 2's post-post-apocalypse 'it's not nature that's your worst enemy, it's human nature,' and nothing proves that like my doomed attempt at turbo-communism
  • Eventually, but from the first second of the game, sending in engineers to the mines and maximizing the first circle (if you cheese it you can get everyone housed on the lowest tier on day one) are critical to a no death run.

    Also never hitting the overtime button is a requirement for no death, so you really have to work the engineers early on to prevent that one story death.

  • Major breakthrough
  • 200bit numbers only require like 10 registers. X86-64 has 16 general purpose registers so doing operations with 200 digit numbers should hypothetically only require 20 loads and 10 multiplies. So a well written bit of code could do it in under 100 ops (probably under 50). So assuming this LLM implementation is running on a big server, it's probably doing the same calculation, less accurately, with some exponentially larger amount of operations.

  • Major breakthrough
  • More likely that some generated code will end up in some library that handles timing operations for rail switching and it will cause an accident and America will ban trains as a result

  • My dad passed away
  • It's more a whirlwind or cyclone of grief. Another extenuating factor is where you are in your life, like if you already have personal stressors or you have to immediately start taking administrative action because of the death your brain will just ignore the sadness for a while. Then it will slowly start creeping in in waves for months or years.

  • My dad passed away
  • I've lost my little brother and my father both suddenly (drug overdose and suicide). I know exactly the feeling you're talking about. With my father I had an immediate breakdown because I found out during a time I was just trying to contact him and someone else answered saying he shot himself. Then 2 months of nothing and even 8 years later I still occasionally just feel like the floor drops out from under me.

    With my brother I was on the phone with police who had been called to his house for a welfare check, they couldn't find him so I got a bunch of people to start calling around and trying to find him in jails, hospitals or friends houses. Then I just get a call saying they found his body in a closet on the porch.

    Again immediate breakdown, then nothing, then laughter and anger for days, morbid jokes. Had to drive halfway across the country to get his affairs in order. The whole time it was just business and trying to figure out what happened. Now 8 months out, it just comes seemingly at random. I'll be driving and see something I think he would find funny and get that immediate reaction to call him then it hits.

    The human brain is really good at compartmentalizing grief, but it's always there and will manifest in weird ways.

  • Where Did Fallout 3's Bombs Actually Hit?
  • That's actually not the point of the video, he actually talks about the fringes of the illusion and how you can tell that the designers put care into it while also finding that exact point where the illusion breaks down.

    Like the Skyrim one where he follows all the streams to their source and finds tons of believable well placed lakes and mountain streams then finally hits the edge where there's a magical outflow that goes down two paths (to give the player 2 upstream paths to get to that location)

  • What have you learned recently? Serious answer or not.
  • Appalachia is good too, Asheville/Brevard are right in the mountains and like 10 minutes from Pisgah Forest, DuPont Forest, the AT, the Mountain to Sea, and Art Loeb.

    All those trails are more forest heavy and the traversal isn't that bad. I know people who will just go out for a week and come back.

  • I don't really like that the feminist stance on cis marriage is that women should keep their own surname rather than taking the man's
  • Oh no, I believe you. I know how that bourgeois feminist wave in the 20s started as a reaction to more revolutionary feminist movements coming out of the socialist nations. I also see how United Fruit could have utilized the advertising wave started by Freud's brother (in Nazi Germany then America) to bolster support for the silent genocide on grounds of making American women's lives easier or something.

    Would love to read the essay if you can find it.

  • I don't really like that the feminist stance on cis marriage is that women should keep their own surname rather than taking the man's
  • There's a whole essay in here somewhere about how bourgeois feminism was co-opted by capitalism from its very outset, how women became a target demographic for smoking, the colour green, why you have to add eggs into box cake mix, and the Guatemalan coup of Jacobo Arbenz and the Cuban revolution. Oh and Nazis and Sigmund Freud too, of course.

    I want this as a tagline just for the immediate transition from putting eggs in cake mix to the Guatemalan coup. I got whiplash lol

  • China isn't dumping dollars. They're dumping banks, and setting up a new financial system.
  • That's definitely the start, seeing it with Afghanistan and Russia made it clear that it could happen, then the decision to finally pull out of Western banks was likely decided because they see the escalation of tensions with them actually leading to something.

  • China isn't dumping dollars. They're dumping banks, and setting up a new financial system.
  • Agree there, not there is some validity to the idea of China using USD reserves to take over IMF debt. Using cash reserves to buy out debt in Africa and South America then renegotiating those loans on better terms with payment in local currency or Yuan.

  • China isn't dumping dollars. They're dumping banks, and setting up a new financial system.
  • Definitely, it's ironic that dollarization basically starts with massive adoption of the dollar.

    This is like the nation state version of Microsoft's the E's

    Embrace the dollar

    Extend it's usage in global trade through your own financial instruments

    Extinguish the original dollar

  • China isn't dumping dollars. They're dumping banks, and setting up a new financial system.
  • The idea that they're forming an alternative USD market also makes sense. A majority of the world holds debt in USD and if they control enough of the supply through their own banks, it's harder for the US to force a nations hand by forcing them to trade when they can go to China for the same USD loan on better terms.

    It also gives them the option of loaning out USD and requesting payment in another currency (either theirs or the domestic currency of the loan holder)

  • China isn't dumping dollars. They're dumping banks, and setting up a new financial system.
  • Pulling out so much bond investment at a loss is kinda spooky. The Chinese have much more reliable Intel about what the US government is planning than just about anyone else, and a massive move like that means their confidence doesn't even extend out 5 years before a conflict big enough that the Fed would wipe out any global trust in the USD.

  • Pacific Drive

    Just got this game, and it's actually really awesome. Stalker mixed with SCP mixed with Car Mechanic Simulator.

    You have a possessed car that you maintain and customize and use to navigate around a Stalker style zone avoiding anomalies and looting all the while picking up weird radio transmissions and following a storyline with 3 other characters on the radio.

    The zones aren't randomly generated, only the anomaly placement, so as you navigate a zone multiple times you start to get more comfortable with the roads and shortcuts meaning you can start navigating further out and getting more resources to upgrade your car and base with.

    So far I absolutely love it, basically FTL but with the loops being a part of the storyline (your car will always keep you alive even if you lose all your loot and it gets totally fucked). So like if you die or get caught in an anomaly storm, your car will just zap you back to the garage, usually in a state so fucked that it barely drives, e.g. no wheels, no engine, and no headlights just barelling metal on pavement into the back wall.

    You can also pick up "quirks" which are a fun sort of puzzle. Basically any action in the car or any state of the car can become randomly linked to another action. So like opening the back left door could turn your radio on, or flipped on your wipers could slam on the gas. So as you're out there surviving, you'll also have to be paying attention to what you did to make the trunk open, then diagnose the issue and repair it.

    But yeah, if you're interested in rouge type games this one is top tier. Especially on PS5 because the haptic feedback is really dialed in on this one. You can tell how fucked your car is just by the feedback on the triggers (brake gets stuck, gas kicks back and rumbles aggressively).

    12
    Just saw Nick Cave live and it was awesome

    If any of you are on his American tour route, definitely go see him. We were his first show and he took a seated show and turned it into chaos then threw out the setlist and just asked what people wanted to hear.

    Plus he's got the bassist from Radiohead with him.

    7
    Anyone know anything about Phenibut?

    My little brother just died. They found him dead on his back porch. Doesn't look like any foul play was involved, but there was a ton of Unisom and Phenibut in his apartment.

    I'd never heard of it before today.

    0
    Update on the USDA loan question I had the other day

    So I did a bit more research, it seems that there are tons of loan programs under the USDA umbrella. Lots having to do with farming, but also lots having to do with "rural development".

    These loans fall under something called the SFH Direct Loan Program (for nonfarm tracts). Which you can read more about here and see the forms here.

    There are multiple tiers of these loans and they are all dependent on income and ability to pay. They work almost inverse of a typical mortgage loan where the only thing that matters is your history with on time payments and having at least an average credit score. They start at 3.25% interest for "Low Income" individuals and families (determined by a chart that's bucketed by county). Seems to be between $45k and $65k on average for "Low Income" and the "Very Low Income" group is anyone below the $20k poverty line.

    All these income buckets are determined by number of applicants with deductions disabled or child dependants (about $10k taken off your net income per dependent). You can also deduct medical expenses. So the name of the game is trying to figure out how to structure who in your family will be on the loan to get the lowest mortgage rate (1% with the grants for very low income applicants, but these need to be repaid if the house is ever sold).

    All these loans are given out directly by the government meaning you don't owe a mortgage to a bank, but to the USDA itself. You have no down payment if you are accepted and are allowed to purchase any "quality" home that's at or below the loan limit for your area (seems to be around $300k plus or minus in most places).

    So if you're really desperate and live outside a major metropolitan area, this might actually be an option to break out of the rental hellscape or if you have a bad mortgage and think you'd qualify this might be a way to refinance directly through the federal government.

    I'm by no means offering you any financial advice, and an definitely not a financial advisor, but this program seems to genuinely have some merit and honestly I think it could work as a greatly expanded solution to the housing crisis, directly government issued mortgages with downwardly adjustable rates, long terms, and income based grants.

    0
    Anyone here have experience with USDA loans?

    We're being booted from our rental because the landlord wants to let his daughter move in and we can't find anything else around here for even remotely the same price. Even rotted out single wide mobile homes are going for $1800/month.

    I was turned onto USDA loans by someone and it seems like as long as we make under $65k/year we can qualify for like $336,000 in loans with 0% down.

    Is there any catch? The rates seem to start at 3.5% of you're under the $65,000 income limit which would put our monthly payments like $300 below renting.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)IN
    invalidusernamelol [he/him] @hexbear.net
    Posts 12
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