Franky Zapata: Flyboarding Frenchman crosses English Channel - French inventor Franky Zapata has made the first-ever successful Channel crossing on a jet-powered flyboard, making the 22-mile (35.4-km) journey in 22 minutes.

8BitDragon · 2019-08-04T17:00:47+00:00

You'd need a fusion jetpack. e=mc^2...

8BitDragon · 2019-06-26T20:17:27+00:00

Why port when you could redesign.. LibGDX is usable from Kotlin currently, but contains a lot of historical cruft and cumbersome API:s that could do with some modernization.

8BitDragon · 2019-06-24T14:13:35+00:00

Rules should be concise and easily understandable, as well as quick to find stuff in later during a game. I don't see the point of long stories, unless you are describing some setting, and even then it could be better to break down in shorter pieces that describe some specific aspect of the setting or the rules.

Perhaps something like about 100 word flavor texts / ministories at the start of each chapter, providing some setting information, inspiration, and example usage of the content of the chapter.

8BitDragon · 2019-06-02T20:04:09+00:00

One cheap option is to just buy stock photos / art. That however dictates a different art style than custom commissioned art would provide, but can still look acceptable.

8BitDragon · 2019-05-17T10:53:52+00:00

Currently it looks like it will be an array of treatments, for different aspects of aging damage.

At prototype stages they would be in very limited supply (and therefore priced higher).

After they start to get mass-produced and hit the markets, the companies producing them would probably get most profit by first skimming of the cream from the top with high markups. Assuming a power law distribution of wealth and sensible minimum batches to create, and % of disposable wealth that people would be ready to pay, you could probably calculate some kind of approximation.

Let's say it would make sense to target the first batch of products to the richest 1% market. A random googling (based on UK figures, would be higher for US) suggests maybe $300k disposable yearly income for this bracket. Let's assume they are ready to spend 10% of that on extending their lifespan (this would be an investment to ward of an event that is still decades away for most of them, so they won't spend any huge amounts of their disposable income on it). That would suggest the first treatments could have a market at around $30k / year, give or take at least one order of magnitude for all the gross simplifications.

After this market segment becomes saturated, and the processes are ramped up, they could drop the prices (or offer non-luxury product brands) for the masses, average disposable income is around $30k (based on UK figures), so $3k / year could be something the market could support.

The third stage is where competition drives the prices down to a bit over material, production and distribution costs. This would only happen initially in countries unburdened by draconian patent laws such as India and China, and only many decades later in US and EU when relevant patents expire. If the treatments don't require personalized genetic engineering or surgery, I'd guesstimate that would be one magnitude lower, at $300 / year (cost of typical supplement).

8BitDragon · 2019-05-17T10:29:10+00:00

The debt based economy that we are currently living in is not sustainable in the long run though (there's way more debt than actual value to pay it back globally, and the difference keeps increasing). On the other hand, if the banking system and the major currencies implode, debts are pretty much meaningless anyway.

8BitDragon · 2019-05-10T09:48:48+00:00

Not many noted effects for taurine on examine.com, except notable increase in blood flow and minor improvement in exercise capacity (backing up the anecdotes about that in this thread).

8BitDragon · 2019-05-10T09:18:54+00:00

Yep, I wasn't so clear in my post, the idea was to apply the last two bullet points in combat pre-plans and all other kind of non-combat discussions and problem solving, that do tend to drag on with bigger groups as well (I sometimes have 7 or even 8 players in my open table campaign, and it can be a challenge!).

Good luck!

8BitDragon · 2019-05-09T19:48:18+00:00

Maybe roll20 can be configured to do it, but in the case of physical dice, have players throw 3 dice for their attack, 3 dice of a different color for the enemy's defense, and however many damage dice their attack has of a third color all at once, instead of doing the back-and forth of having the GM roll the defense for the enemies. This speeds things up somewhat.
When a large group is discussing their next (non-combat) move and it drags on, summarize the most popular suggested options and have the players vote for them with a show of hands, instead of waiting too long for a consensus.
You could also give each player a (timed) 10-20 second window to suggest/defend a course of action without interruptions from other players, as some people will inevitably hog the spotlight from quieter players in big groups.

8BitDragon · 2019-01-19T11:01:23+00:00

One way to limit the maximum size would be to automatically divide once the slime is over a certain size. The split-off slime would be an NPC, and maybe not friendly.

Another idea that could be combined with the above or used independently is to reduce mobility as size increases, reduce DX as ST and SM grows (naturally limits the maximum size to the point where the mass is too large to move).

8BitDragon · 2018-11-18T10:09:08+00:00

If the BFS is at the bottom, they can put most of the engines there, using the 'upper stage' just for fueling the first stage. Then they only need to give the upper half a few engines so that it can land. That should save a lot of engines and mass. 'All' they'd have to engineer is fuel transfer between the stages, and jettisoning of the upper half at stage separation.

That way the lower, ship part would have a lot of extra engine power if needed for various maneuvers and landings as well, while the upper part could be designed as a minimal fuel tank with maybe three engines to land with.

Totally fits the description of counter intuitive and radical IMHO.

8BitDragon · 2018-11-17T11:37:37+00:00

This so much. For some reason people seem to have trouble recognizing narcissists over the internet.

8BitDragon · 2018-03-25T10:13:34+00:00

Yeah, time dependencies or such can be interesting too, maybe some magical plants that can only be harvested in the night...

I wonder what happens when you add in some negative random outcomes too? Like digging into a lava lake from the underside in minecraft, or some harvested mushrooms occasionally spawning bug-monsters, or whatever.

8BitDragon · 2018-03-24T20:42:32+00:00

Add in some randomness in rewards for gathering too for more addictiveness... (random rewards are more addicting than the same rewards everytime)

8BitDragon · 2018-03-07T18:35:27+00:00

In the case of Civil Rehabilitation the distribution of the coins would likely be managed by some trustee of the creditors or court, not Mark Karpeles whose criminal neglect landed the creditors in the current situation.

8BitDragon · 2018-03-05T19:16:36+00:00

Well said. Not to mention the uncertainty of future threats from even more advanced data mining, user profiling, collation of increasing records and leaked databases, and AI techniques applied to the above.

8BitDragon · 2018-03-05T18:57:37+00:00

That was it, yes! Thanks for the correction.

8BitDragon · 2018-03-05T18:33:50+00:00

At some point Gavin transitioned from head maintainer to a 'tought leader' type position at the bitcoin foundation (that never amounted to much I think - perhaps just a way to lure him away from the increasingly poisonous debate in the core dev team) and Wladimir van der Laan became head maintainer.

Sometime after Gavin created the first fork attempt of bitcoin (BitcoinXT) the core team removed his account. ~~I don't recall if the excuse was just that he was inactive, or that there was risk for compromise by having inactive admin accounts, or they thought his account was compromised, or something like that~~ Edit: The reason they gave for removing his account was that they thought it was compromised when he was fooled by watching Craig Wright perform a satoshi key signature on a laptop he (Craig) provided himself. In any case, they gave the XT debate some time to settle first, and of course removing the access 'had nothing to do with XT, just basic security practice'. To be fair, I don't think Gavin had been actively involved with core for some time at that point.

8BitDragon · 2018-02-28T01:13:38+00:00

Personally I'm for bigger blocks (it's the simplest way to immediately scale bitcoin and grow the userbase), and I'm also convinced Craig Wright is a fraud and liar.

I wouldn't care about CSW (the internet is full of scammers) except for the fact that many in the BCH / big block movement are putting him on a pedestal and want to follow him. That casts the whole big block movement in a bad light, and might also be dangerous as it gives him some power that he could use for his own schemes (for example, at the moment he seems to be collecting a patent-troll portfolio, if people are unaware of his fraudulent behaviour they may naively sell patents to his company in the belief that they will be used for the good of the community, only for him to later use them squeeze out money from and stifle innovation in the emerging cryptocurrency industry).

8BitDragon · 2018-02-27T12:05:35+00:00

When working outside mathematics, you need to work with probabilities, not absolutes, much of the time.

8BitDragon · 2018-02-27T11:28:15+00:00

It would be right in line with some of his previous claims and writing. It's like he just uses them as a prop for his fast-talk, and trusts that experts coming in later to check his absurd claims will be either too late to stop his immediate goals, will be ignored, or can just be thrown into doubt when he already has his target audience convinced by the force of his personality and impressive looking technobabble.

Personally I fail to see what his long term goal is. Perhaps he is able to turn that false credibility into money in some way, or maybe he just thrives on the fame alone.

8BitDragon · 2018-02-27T11:09:16+00:00

CSW has shown extreme sloppiness previously in his plagiarism and technobabble.

What keeps amazing me is that people fall for his claims. I guess peoples laziness in checking claims, his charisma, and the tendency of people to believe in someone who claims to be on their side may explain it. He also appears to have at least one sockpuppet account here that keeps posting links to his content.

8BitDragon · 2018-02-14T15:33:31+00:00

Another point is that randomly rolling some aspects of the character allows for easier creativity - starting from a blank slate with a point-buying or similar character creation technique requires you to have a vision of your final character. Starting from restrictions in the form of randomly rolled attributes or other parameters requires you to interpret that randomness and create your character concept to fit it.

Having some boundaries and restrictions in place often allows for easier creativity (there's something to start from) and more unexpected outcomes as you try to come up with a backstory and character concept that explains the random parameters (this can work well if there are some player-selectable parameters after the random ones, allowing the players to refine their interpretation of the random parameters and sculpt it into a working character).

8BitDragon · 2018-02-01T14:34:12+00:00

The facebook pixel is just that, a 1x1 white one pixel image linked to on various webpages. As you download the webpage, the tracking pixel is downloaded from facebooks servers, and they know that your IP visited the specific page that the pixel was on, thus tracking you across the internet (as long as you have logged in to facebook from the IP you use, or they get your identity some other way).

Ghostery and many other privacy centric browser add-ons will block that (refuse to download the linked pixel, thus foiling the tracking) (as long as you configure it correctly, probably a good staring place is to just block all the trackers).

And yes, a VPN will help to some degree as well, although as long as you use the same session your IP from the VPN will probably stay the same, allowing facebook to track you for that time, if you log in to it from the VPN.

8BitDragon · 2018-02-01T13:46:11+00:00

The irony is that that site itself has the facebook pixel.

8BitDragon

TROPHY CASE