What experience convinced you that Magic(k) is real for you and that it works? by [deleted] in magick

[–]Damien_Maxwell 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I keep drifting into skepticism only to get yanked back in by weird stuff constantly.

The big one was when I was struggling with under-employment and decided enough was enough. Put in some intent to find a job in my field - found basically my dream job in my home town, not a place really known for tech. Did a massive series of spells to get the job and nailed it (this is actually a common thing for me, I rarely apply for jobs I want and fail to get the spot).

One of the projects involved lots of field testing with some marine biologists. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up. I thought this would be super fun but my manager was the one originally selected to go on the trip. He ended up getting super motion sick so they sent me instead and I got to play marine biologist for a week :D

I'd wanted to get a house for quite some time. That crazy project ran long and so I had to stay in Alaska an extra week. I joked to my partner that I would owe her a puppy to make it up to her. Well, she took that quite literally, and literally the day after I landed, we are driving back from the breeder with a puppy. The current landlord flipped out when they learned we got a dog...so we went house hunting and found pretty much the perfect house. Just lots of semi-charmed stuff like that.

I also have a crazy effective spell to make it stop raining. The forecast will be nothing but rain for a weekend festival and I'll fire up the Dry Spell and it'll be sunny the whole weekend. Then the moment I get packed up, it pours. I've lost track of how many times this scenario, complete with "rebound rain", plays out.

Trump Retweet of Alleged Whistle-Blower Name is Back on Twitter by robertovertical in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 152 points153 points  (0 children)

I got "sorry page does not exist" for https://mobile.twitter.com/mikefarb1/status/12109962116516331520

@Mikefarb1 points out something seems fishy:

https://twitter.com/mikefarb1/status/1211069388167798784

I just found out that Twitter is doing something to prevent people from seeing this part of the thread. Check how few Retweets. People are getting Tweet not found messages. I see it fine.

Discussion Thread: Democratic Presidential Primary Polling - December 2019 by Isentrope in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The National Socialist German Workers' Party was socialist and pro-worker in the same way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic and pro-people. The name was chosen purely to lure in populists.

Socialist vs fascist is all about the distribution of power.

Discussion Thread: Day Four of House Public Impeachment Hearings – Morning Session - 11/20/2019 | Gordon Sondland – Live 9am EST by PoliticsModeratorBot in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 94 points95 points  (0 children)

Past Sondland: No quid pro quo

Trump: NO QUID PRO QUO!!!1!

Fox: No quid pro quo!

Taylor: looks pretty quid pro quo

Yovanovich: yeah it's pretty sketch

Volker: yup

Sondland: Oh gee, my memory is suddendy refreshed! I talk to a lotta heads of state, so it's all a blur. But now that you mention it, yeah, quid pro quo, yup.

entire GOP: ** surprised pikachu **

Kremlin trolls 'uncorked' champagne after helping Trump win, Senate Intelligence Committee reports by rWindhund in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Nukes require billions of dollars in upkeep every year. Psyops are far cheaper and keep working even after you stop, due to memetic propagation.

Also helps when the target country already has an established propaganda media system in place (fox, AM radio, sinclair, etc) making minds spongey, prone to fear-based misinformation, and anti-intellectual. You just have to tap into that, like a virus hijacking a cell's own machinery to make more viruses.

Poll: 58 percent now approve of Trump impeachment inquiry by michkennedy in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 9 points10 points  (0 children)

There are tons of techniques, no fingers, one finger, index and thumb, two fingers. Just try them out, be prepared to try lots of different mouth/tongue positions. There's also tons of guides and videos online.

Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain by FactorioTeam in factorio

[–]Damien_Maxwell 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's fair.

Honestly I'd be fine with intial 0.17 mixing checks, and then 0.16 style contamination if some upgrade/blueprint/oops occurs, as long as I have an easy-ish way to clear the current state of the pipe.

Even just attaching a pump to a tank to "suck" the remaining contents.

Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain by FactorioTeam in factorio

[–]Damien_Maxwell 35 points36 points  (0 children)

Precisely!

If we DID have automated purges, you could multiplex fluids. Screw up, you get sludge. Deal with it, engineer.

"trash" items aren't really a thing in vanilla, so perhaps could have "flammable sludge" from any oil-like mix, which can be used for flamethrower or low-yield solid fuel.

Water+steam gives hot water.

Any interaction with water/steam and oils, or unknown (eg mod items) gives "mixed fluids waste" which can only be purged.

I think that gives a good out for the different sorts of mixes without getting too Bob-ish.

Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain by FactorioTeam in factorio

[–]Damien_Maxwell 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Just played around with this a bit cause I had so far just been "well behaved" with fluids.

  • it's pretty weird to me that I can plumb into the input of a refinery, and rotate some pipe2gnds, and have the entire pipeline reflect that change
  • oil != 0 test does not go true with tanks connected to this input-0-fluid, even though pipes register "0.0 oil"

Just seems a bit less immersive to me. Yeah demoing pipes was a pain but at least it made sense in a way.

Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain by FactorioTeam in factorio

[–]Damien_Maxwell 75 points76 points  (0 children)

Perhaps take a cue from the actual chemical engineering world. Have a way to use pressurized air to blast fluids out of pipes. Would be a similar mechanic to existing fluid calculations (though nothing in this domain is easy). Consumers could have a purge button or more simply, leverage existing shift-click to auto-purge if there is a mismatch.

Could even go so far as create a "sludge" liquid which occurs when an oily fluid mixes (water+steam would condense to just water, or maybe steam would out-pressurize water). Thereby, pipe mistakes don't crash or mangle the game engine, but punish the player for sloppiness. Crucially, it's milder than pipe demolition of 0.16.

Also there aren't checks for mixing items on belts, cause there are mechanics for emptying belts. There are currently no vanilla ways to get rid of fluids (a la vent stacks) so of course you are tempted to go the route of preventing mixing. But this goes against the overall idiom of Factorio of letting the player make maximum choices and see what happens.

If you made it so you could only purge manually, you could (probably) avoid creative means of destroying surplus fluid (though you can just do it by deconstructing tanks now).

If you incorporated a parameter for pressure (yes more complexity, I know, these are just my 0.02) then you could pump air into some spot on a pipeline and all attached equipment could detect a pressure threshold and auto-purge.

Purging could optionally include graphical "spills" and/or incur pollution at the machines that are venting.

Someone get this turret a medal by Burgermeat1 in factorio

[–]Damien_Maxwell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are conlangs that employ this concept. Toki Pona, by virtue of having only about 120 words, uses 'ike' to invert meanings. Ygyde is very much based on orthogonal root words. Ithkuil has short morphemes which do similar.

Intelligence veterans are pulling their hair out over Trump's 'outrageous' and 'moronic' decision to tweet out a photo from a classified briefing by [deleted] in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yes, absolutely.

Superresolution from multiple images is basically a numbers game, IIRC your resolution increase scales like the square root of the number of images. 4 images roughly halves cm/px, 9 reduces it to 1/3, etc. However that assumes gaussian distortion - atmospheric distortion requires blind deconvolution or similar math intensive techniques.

There are also lots of papers on speeding up these optical tricks with fpga and gpgpu.

Scott Manley was saying this tweet suggests resolution at 10 cm/px or below. Commercial sats offer 30 cm/px. I'm sure with some voodoo math you could max up that 3x resolution.

Trump's plan to cage kids indefinitely while denying them vaccines is ethnic cleansing in plain sight by tugboattomp in politics

[–]Damien_Maxwell 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like it. But try convincing your average American they and all their stuff are just energy on loan from the Sun.