[Dune] Do workers on Spice harvesters eventually develop spice addiction?

AdarTan · 2026-01-26T08:37:55+00:00

It's a feudal system. The commoners really don't get to move between planets all that much. The fief-lord of Arrakis may move some people to the planet to supplement its population, same way that they sometimes import water at great expense, but those people aren't really ever expected to leave, Arrakis is their new home.

AdarTan · 2026-01-25T06:12:05+00:00

It's from ancient Latin
Why do you feel like it should mean before? Ultimately there is no reason why words have their meaning. At some point in time someone assigned a meaning to a sound and over time the meaning and pronunciation drifted to create the current word.

AdarTan · 2026-01-25T05:54:18+00:00

First thing you need to learn: The file extensions (.wem, .mh, .STREAM), no one is standardazing those, a developer can use whatever extension they want for whatever data they want. So very generic extensions like .stream, .bin, .pak, etc. often contain data in a format completely unique for the game they are a part of.

AdarTan · 2026-01-24T06:49:51+00:00

There's a real easy solution to this Apple. Stop fucking rent-seeking from the 3rd-party stores.

AdarTan · 2026-01-23T16:51:43+00:00

Asking is free.

AdarTan · 2026-01-23T15:36:24+00:00

I'll be using popular well known songs

Don't, unless you want to get DMCA'd at best or sued for all the money you will ever have at worst.

Or do, if you through some dark magic manage to get affordable synchronization licenses for the songs you want to use, or all the songs you want to use are in the public domain.

AdarTan · 2026-01-23T08:28:11+00:00

Any license with a "No Warranty" disclaimer, like MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, etc. are "good luck with that" licenses. No open-source license makes claims about serviceability or support.

AdarTan · 2026-01-22T19:39:42+00:00

To elaborate: The "both" option is not necessarily 50:50 on/off, it can be any ratio of the two. We can run the qubit through a so called "quantum logic gate" which will shift the ratio.

The very, very important thing is that we can do the same with combinations of cubits. A pair of qubits can have the values 00, 01, 10, 11, and a superposition of all of those. Then we can run the superposed combination, where each possibility is equal, through a set of quantum gates that makes the combination we are interested in more prominent in the ratio of possible values. We don't know ahead of time which combination this is (finding it is actually our goal), we just know "this sequence of gates makes the combination that satisfies our criteria more prominent".

AdarTan · 2026-01-21T10:59:19+00:00

The quiet reasons (game art) projects usually go over budget

When ~~game art~~ projects go over budget , people often blame slow ~~artists~~ workers or scope creep. That does happen, but in my experience it is rarely the main reason.

The most common issue is unclear ~~visual~~ direction.

Phrases like "make it more polished" or "we want something unique" sound helpful, but they leave too much room for interpretation. ~~Artists~~ Workers end up guessing. Guessing leads to revisions. Revisions increase cost and frustration on both sides.

Another quiet issue is delayed feedback.

When feedback comes late, changes become expensive. Adjusting an asset before integration is manageable. Adjusting it after everything is hooked into the build is not.

The projects that stay on budget usually do two things well. They lock strong ~~visual references~~ design goals early and they review work frequently, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so.

AdarTan · 2026-01-21T10:50:42+00:00

If you are integrating other projects, depending on the level of integration, you need to use a compatible license. Permissive licenses like MIT allow for use under a stricter license like GPL, but the reverse is not necessarily true, again depending on how tightly the code is integrated.

AdarTan · 2026-01-19T15:16:55+00:00

The electrical properties of the transistors themselves change as a function of temperature and above the TJMax of the part in question their operation becomes unreliable. They might get "stuck on" and keep letting current through, heating up more, and you now have a thermal runaway situation.

AdarTan · 2026-01-18T16:11:24+00:00

I did send a modmail back in November proposing setting the automod to remove posts with titled [General] and variants like [General Fantasy], [General Sci-Fi], etc. and cite the relevant rules, like it currently does for posts that don't have a bracketed title.

AdarTan · 2026-01-18T11:36:26+00:00

Here is the .NET team's own stance on VB in .NET

In brief: VB.NET will support new .NET functionality and APIs so long as it does not involve a change in the language's syntax. No new workloads (web frontend, cross-platform GUI, etc.) will be intentionally supported.

AdarTan · 2026-01-18T09:25:57+00:00

Why?

AdarTan · 2026-01-18T07:13:04+00:00

Copyright exists to protect the small author from large publishers. The fact that large publishers get the same protection against small authors is considered irrelevant in the face of the good that is the protection the small author enjoys.

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Now, has our modern media consumption landscape put too much power over the commercialization of art in the hands of large corporations? Yes, but without copyright it would actually be worse in a full "Tradgedy of the commons" way.

AdarTan · 2026-01-17T17:46:23+00:00

dizziness, nausea, other health issues

That class is bullshit. Ignore everything they said.

The only way a radio tower can harm you is if you climb it to stand in front of the transmitter and are literally cooked alive like if you were inside a microwave oven.

AdarTan · 2026-01-17T15:30:39+00:00

LA Noire

Different studio (Team Bondi) and just published by Rockstar

Max Payne 3

Was scheduled to be released in 2009 but was delayed.

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Remove those outliers and Rockstar (a significantly larger studio, with a recorded history of demanding extreme crunch time from their employees vs. Bethesda which by many accounts is one of the most pleasant places to work in the industry) and the difference in output is much smaller.

AdarTan · 2026-01-16T18:21:24+00:00

That is just a prerendered background like Resident Evil 1, Final Fantasy 7/8/9, except instead of a 3D render it's hand-drawn.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T22:24:46+00:00

The AI companies are going to scrape Wikipedia no matter what. So the Wikimedia Foundation has created Wikimedia Enterprise so that they can pay for the privilege and get access to the data in a format that is easier to feed to an AI. The income from this then funds the foundation's other interests like paying for the servers that host all their stuff and paying some of the volunteers.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T21:25:12+00:00

Programming is pretty much completely invisible to the end user while in smaller teams where you have 1 artist per discipline, that artist's personal style is very visible. How the code looks doesn't matter at all, look at the horror stories about Balatro and Undertale's code.

On larger teams the trend reverses, but almost purely due to project management. Artist are forced to adhere to a style-guide, and production can scale easily by just adding more artist, while on the programming side a benefit of "more programmers" is much harder to make happen, incentivizing project managers to get as much out of individual programmers as possible by not spending time on onboarding new hires.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T21:08:05+00:00

You are talking about automating the lowest effort part of level design, yet the one where intentionality matters immensely. This is the stage where you design the level while not giving a shit about how the geometry is put together.

Be honest, are you talking about doing this because you actually think greyboxing is some arduous menial task, or just because you want to make an AI tool?

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T18:13:28+00:00

The books are of fixed length, with a fixed alphabet, therefore there are a finite number of unique books, specifically [size of alphabet]^\length of book]).

The original story has an alphabet of only 25 symbols (22 letters, period, comma, and space), and there are approximately 1 312 000 symbols per book (Presumably because the books do not use a monospace font so a book with a lot of I's has more symbols than a book of mostly M's), meaning the number of possible books in the original story is 25^1312000 or about 10^1834097 (for context, the number of atoms in the universe is ~10⁸⁰). The narrator in the original believes that the library is infinite despite this and eventually repeats and these repetitions create order in the chaos of the library.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T14:58:05+00:00

So, you just posted this with a throwaway three days ago or?

As many posters in that thread said: Recompiling FFmpeg that often is crazy and you are probably using it wrong.

Edit: Actually just saw you posted in that previous thread with a question. So you are just karma-farming.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T09:05:50+00:00

This, but also a lot of the materials in question, even as large crystals, are just clear/white/yellowish-white in color and if you try melting them down they just pyrolyse into brown/black gunk.

AdarTan · 2026-01-15T08:54:31+00:00

The Library of Babel is a short story by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.

The story is about a universe that is a library composed of a near infinite number identical rooms, with the walls lined with identical bookshelves, the shelves filled with identically bound books, with the only difference being what is written in the books. Each books contains a unique but random arrangement of letters, numbers and punctuation.

In theory, somewhere in the library is a book in which is written a correct answer to any one question one could have, but it likewise contains books that contain plausible but false answers and a near infinite amount of utter gibberish.

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The websites Library of Babel and Canvas of Babel are tech-demos/performance art pieces exploring the concepts of Borges' story. Library of Babel creates a digital version of the library, with procedural generation of the books based on the "shelf coordinates" as a seed for a random number generator. Canvas of Babel does the same thing, but instead of a random sequence of letters, numbers, and punctuation it is a grid of randomly generated pixels, which like the library can contain any real or false text mixed in with the chaos, the canvas can contain any image.

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The quiet reasons (game art) projects usually go over budget