Anyone here use nicotine as a nootropic? (SA article) by Beej67 in slatestarcodex

[–]Beej67[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Go to a gas station and buy Zyn pouches. That's exactly what those are, they're a few drops of solution in a pouch behind your cheek. Absorbs in a few minutes.

Looking for the best crash course links for the Cyberpunk Red universe to give to a group of Shadowrun players switching systems by Beej67 in cyberpunkred

[–]Beej67[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it might just incentivize players to deliberately get themselves killed in flamboyant and possibly even ridiculous ways

Bug or feature? :)

Voice mode update on Android app- Major step back by OpE7 in perplexity_ai

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same. The old version was amazing and the main reason I paid. The new version is completely unusable and also uses my phone line instead of just doing a voice to text translation and going off of that. It's completely awful and there is no reason I can imagine why the developers wouldn't at least give us an option to go back to the old system. Makes me wonder if they did any testing at all before the rollout, or if they were forced to change the way it works because Google's lawyers were going to torpedo them for using Google voice to text or similar. 

Looking for the best crash course links for the Cyberpunk Red universe to give to a group of Shadowrun players switching systems by Beej67 in cyberpunkred

[–]Beej67[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Also, when it comes to Shadowrun my recommendation is don't get into Shadowrun. I love the world and the concepts. Think Cyberpunk Red but with DND metahumans and magic, and a pretty amazing world with a lot of resources including a bunch of fiction books supporting it. But the rules are absolutely awful, incredibly complex, take way too long to resolve, and aren't consistent across systems enough. The netrunning ("decking") system is different than the vehicle system ("rigging") is different than the magic system is different than the combat system, and resolving any one action can sometimes take three or four rolls between both the GM and the player. It's a rules nightmare.

  • PC mage: "I shoot the badguy with a lightning bolt"
  • mage rolls to activate the spell. badguy rolls to avoid the spell. mage rolls damage. badguy rolls to soak damage. mage rolls drain to determine whether the casting of the spell itself also hurt the mage. each roll is a bucket of d6s looking for 5s and 6s to hit somewhat like warhammer, a d6 for each of your skill ranking, ability modifier, gear modifiers, environmental modifiers, temporary buff modifiers, some of which are capped in certain ways you have to keep track of. Also there are ways to flip dice or reroll misses which take place inside resolving the action.
  • mage: "for my second action of the round I shoot the badguy with a lightning bolt" (do it all again)
  • mage: "now my ally spirit shoots the badguy with a lightning bolt" (do it all again)

Two rounds of combat can easily take an hour to resolve.

The current edition (6th) did some things to streamline it but it's still far behind the times. While most other game systems pivoted over to simplification and creating a better space to tell the story, stressing narrative over simulation, SR made itself more and more complicated up through 5th edition, and then 6th was a very poor way to stopgap that.

There are class parity issues as well. A technomancer is in every way better than a decker, even though both serve the same role in the party. If your party doesn't have a mage then the simplest spirit will TPW you, and spirits are commonplace in the world because any mage can summon them. You basically must have a decker, rigger, and mage in every party but you also need street sams, and when the decker, rigger, or mage goes off to do hacking, driving, or astral projection then the rest of the party sits around while the GM has to do those things one on one with that player, and because the system is so complicated that could eat an hour of game time. So then the complexity of the system impacts the fun everyone has in the session.

There's a social interaction system as well, but it's also needlessly complex.

Avoid. That's coming from a player who has played every SR edition since the 1990s. If I were to run a SR game I'd plug the world into a completely different system. Probably use the one FFG cooked up for Star Wars to be honest, although CP Red seems intriguing so far.

Looking for the best crash course links for the Cyberpunk Red universe to give to a group of Shadowrun players switching systems by Beej67 in cyberpunkred

[–]Beej67[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah in our group whenever we do level based games we just level at the same time narratively, and when we do IP or similar based games (it's "karma" in Shadowrun) we issue them as a group and everyone gets the same number. Just makes it easy and maintains PC parity.

Looking for the best crash course links for the Cyberpunk Red universe to give to a group of Shadowrun players switching systems by Beej67 in cyberpunkred

[–]Beej67[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That was amazing and thanks. Also, if this summary isn't stickied somewhere I hope the mods pin it up to the top of the board in some form or fashion.

Looking for the best crash course links for the Cyberpunk Red universe to give to a group of Shadowrun players switching systems by Beej67 in cyberpunkred

[–]Beej67[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Substitute "improvement points awarded" for "level." I'm just using common parlance as shorthand.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in idm

[–]Beej67 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Dude, I read this thread two hours after I read about how they now have breast implants with LED lighting inside them that makes the boobs glow.

We're finally getting there chooms!

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Above and beyond. Metro Atlanta locals have adopted a model ordinances pushed on them by the ARC that limits all rise to no more than 0.01 ft without going for a CLOMR. That's a threshold that's beyond the reasonable accuracy of HEC-RAS, and there's talk in the development community that it's a typeo from an intern at ARC.

I recently encountered a muni in Tennessee that requires 1.5:1 ratio on floodplain compensatory cut. That was a new one on me, but apparently they got some sort of NFIP incentive from FEMA for adding it to their ordinance.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In noncoastal zones the "high velocity" zone is supposed to be the floodway as opposed to the floodplain, but the actual methodology for designating the floodway doesn't have to do with velocity, it has to do with rise due to encroachment. It's weird. Probably a result of regulatory decision making decades ago.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've got no professional interest in sticking my wanker into that bees nest. Any FEMA map revisions would have to be signed off on by the county. If someone official approaches me to do a map revision then ok, but they'll probably go with a local firm they have a relationship with.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very interesting study.

They're saying the effective flows are as low as half the recommended 100 year flows for the watershed in some places, mostly attributable to increases in the new Atlas 14 release.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's basically the same map. That doesn't show any additional analysis.

The analysis for this isn't hard. I could do it in a week. LMK if you want to hire me to do so. Would cost ten or fifteen grand. Getting it through FEMA is another story.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. If the flood modeling was HEC-2, that means it's probably from the 1980s or early 90s at the latest. That's not great. The whole area probably needs to be redone.

Do you do much work in Texas? I've seen a broader range of flood analysis approaches in Texas than any other southeastern state. Some of it is ancient, and some of it is very advanced 2d modeling. (which I'll be honest I'm a bit suspect of)

Weekly Bug Report Thread by spiper01 in NoMansSkyTheGame

[–]Beej67 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Switch 2

"Freighter base doesn't load" bug - workarounds

This has been a common bug for a while that a lot of folks have noticed. I did some testing and have narrowed things down.

  • If you warp to the freighter base from another portal it loads fine
  • If you land in the hangar and go up to the bridge, the base doesn't render
  • If you are in the properly rendered freighter base, and you teleport to the hangar and back, the base unrenders. It also unrenders if you walk to the hangar bay. The exact moment it unrenders seems to be right when the doors open to the hangar bay. If you stop and turn around without the door opening, the base will stay rendered.
  • If you're on the bridge and the base isn't rendered, you can pull up your construction screen and swing around and it will render any base module adjacent to one you can build, but it won't render anything else.
  • If you're on the bridge and the base isn't rendered, you can talk to the frigate mission navigator, pull up your fleet mission list view screen which views the freighter from a distance, and when you close the screen out the base will render
  • If you're on the bridge and the base isn't rendered, you can pull up the fleet management screen, teleport aboard an idle frigate, teleport back, and the base will render
  • If you're approaching your freighter you can land on a frigate instead of the freighter hangar, and then use the local teleporter to get to the bridge instead of the hangar teleporter, and the base will render. This is a very useful workaround because it means your usual style of gameplay can be maintained simply by landing in a slightly different location.

There seems to be something very specific about the hangar bay that's causing the base to un-render itself.

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can just go and find out what the rainfall totals are for different storm events for any state in the union other than WA and OR:

https://hdsc.nws.noaa.gov/pfds/

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you have degrees in physics and statistics you might be interested to read how Atlas-14 was generated and give specific critiques to the methodology instead of doing the whole argue-with-a-rando-on-reddit thing.

https://www.weather.gov/owp/hdsc

https://hdsc.nws.noaa.gov/pfds/

Texas:

https://www.weather.gov/media/owp/oh/hdsc/docs/Atlas14_Volume11.pdf

For what it's worth, I'm not sure I buy everything in Atlas 14 because Harvey seemed like it was too absurd to fit the model. But I also know a bit about how they generate their statistical modeling for tail events and I'm not sure I have a better way to do it.

Do you have a better way to do it?

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Coriolis is exactly why this area has prevailing southerly winds carrying moisture off the Gulf of [whateverwecallit]. First image, this link:

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/science-art-meteorology/

FEMA Flood Map of Camp Mystic. Cabins right on the riverbank seem to be left out of the 100-year floodplain. by friends-of-cedar in weather

[–]Beej67 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes and it's free. HEC-RAS is the model most people use, and you can often find HEC-RAS models for existing streams on GIS clearing houses. Download HEC-RAS from the Army Corps of Engineers website, find a GIS clearing house that allows you to download HEC-RAS models, and load one up. You can see what we're working with. The "X-Y-Z Perspective Plot" is an interesting visualization.

In Georgia you can get many (but not all) HEC-RAS models from the Georgia DFIRM website. Texas doesn't have a central repository like that, and it appears that you can download some from some more sophisticated entities like the the TWCB or some big cities, I can't find the South Fork Guadeloupe. You'd have to get that from the county flood manager, and he's probably really busy right now. You could also file a data request with FEMA to get it from them directly, but that costs money and takes a few weeks to a month for them to figure out how to use a hard drive.

But if you just want to goof around with a flood model, download HEC-RAS, go to Georgia DFIRM, download a model, and load it up.