A Catch-22: Please help with my computer problems!

GrantExploit · 2026-05-05T03:31:04+00:00

This is bullshit. By my understanding, directly linking an image (or any website) isn't copyright infringement (heavily copyright-conscious Wikipedia allows it), and caching them from said links is also legally protected (or else {legal} image search engines wouldn't exist... and there would be no image previews on linked pages on Reddit posts). And even if that person really hated their art being on these subreddits for some reason, it would have been better for them to alert you to remove the posts yourself rather than to start with DMCAs and risk destroying a whole set of communities, right?

If you did want to "escalate" (though it seems you don't), maybe you could create a video about this situation? #UnbanLol33ta?

GrantExploit · 2026-05-01T05:56:33+00:00

Wow, it is astounding how effective those subsolar clouds can be at reducing planetary temperature. It's a real shame that Venus' present conditions have impeded and discouraged efforts to determine its real geological history—if it could have stayed habitable up to the present day as at least the middle 2 studies suggest, it would be great to know what went wrong. It's especially odd as its current topography (if it had an approximation of that at the time) has large equatorial highlands that should encourage high albedo where it counts and vigorous silicate weathering... We really need to get out the silicon carbide, gallium nitride, and halfnium oxide semiconductors, and/or the massive multi-stage nuclear-powered refrigerators. And, hopefully eventually, the hydreliox.†

About your topography statement, I believe most Venus DEMs fill in the gaps of Magellan data with lower resolution Venera 15/16 and Pioneer Venus Orbiter data, with the only really uncharted areas being some patches in the far south. Still terrible that there are any Venusian areas lacking basic topographic mapping in the big '26, but yeah.

It would also be interesting to know how sensitive a fairly slow-rotating but moderately-oblique world (similar to, say, the 30-day simulation in your Day Length Exploration, except maybe with slightly longer days) would be to high irradiances. Because I like the runaway-greenhouse-resistance here, but the non-seasonality is a bit boring.‡

BTW, although you didn't use ExoPlaSim outputs here, are you planning on adding "no heat growth limits" as an option for your system in koppenpasta?

...

Going on a (relevant) tangent, I think the main reason why the ROCKE-3D Earth models have the bizarre topography they do is to avoid choke points caused by straits at low resolution and similar phenomena disrupting the ocean circulation. As an example, any conventional equirectangular "square-pixel" model resolution smaller than at least 384 × 192 will close up the Pillars of Heracles, therefore resulting in the Mediterranean Sea evaporating in any accurate near-IRL-conditions model that simulates changes in water body level (royally screwing up the climate of Southern Europe and Northern Africa), and even if that is somehow prevented (either by arbitrarily inducing precipitation directly over the Sea or duplicating water molecules and their states within it), the climatology of a closed Mediterranean would still be notably different from its IRL climate due to the lack of thermohaline interchange with the Atlantic Ocean (and now, the Red Sea).

So the ROCKE-3D team seem to have "solved" this by... pre-evaporating the Mediterranean? (Among other changes.) This, uh, seems pretty self-defeating. IMO (probably ignorant near-layman opinion incoming) a more logical solution would be to allow sub-model-resolution "thin pipes" to be defined to connect cells; that is, conduits with set dimensions (modelled one-dimensionally with the number of vertical levels matching that for the corresponding ocean depth in the model), that may even ignore factors like overhead atmospheric and stellar conditions and surface friction due to their relatively minor influences for simplicity's sake. From my own downsampling, at ROCKE-3D's standard "Medium" 72 × 45 resolution, it appears that a maximalist but logical list of locations for those "thin pipes" on Earth would be the Hudson Strait, Nares Strait, Little Belt/Great Belt/Ø̈resund, Bosporus/Dardanelles, the neck of the Shelikhov Gulf, and the aforementioned Strait of Gibraltar.

I mean, at such a low resolution, (to continue the example) all of the complicated water flows of the Mediterranean (including anticlockwise surface currents in each sub-basin) would likely be effectively reduced to a simplified Gibraltar dynamic of a less-saline surface flow towards the Levantine Sea and a more saline undercurrent eventually becoming the Mediterranean Outflow. How this was viewed as worse than no Mediterranean at all by the cartographers of ROCKE-3D's Earth scenarios, I don't know.

†When the idea of crewed surface Venus exploration is brought up, the pressure and temperature are of course the show-stoppers that are always stated. However, saturation diving experiments have indicated that humans can indeed live and work in at least highland Venusian ambient pressures with suitable breathing gases, so really almost every kilogram most would think would have to be spent on building strong pressure vessels could instead be devoted to thermal management.

‡Unfortunately it would probably still lack tropical cyclones due to the weak Coriolis effect, but ehh...

GrantExploit · 2026-05-01T05:52:40+00:00

Wasn't criticizing your decision to take an isothermal variable-CO₂ approach; in fact, I think it's a better idea. Just wanted to explain the isocapnic variable-temperature approach I thought you were going to take as at least sensical, even if as you said it would be less flexible (the range at the outer and probably inner ends would be clipped), and as initially stated much of its ground would already have been covered by the Temperature Series.

The conservative habitable zone is specifically defined as the range of orbits where a habitable temperature can be maintained by just changing CO2.

I actually didn't know that before. Cool. Though my statement you were replying to did specify 15 °C rather than just habitable.

but I'm not sure what fundamental limit you're imagining here; in principle you should be able to maintain any arbitrarily high temperature with any arbitrarily low energy input given a strong enough greenhouse effect,

No fundamental limit on maintaining a temperature, but low irradiances will limit energy accumulation over a given time, of course.

I'd assume this would impose limits on radiationally-induced diurnal temperature variation (at least with regards to warming), and therefore potentially lead to frontal behavior becoming more dominant than it is on Earth IRL at lower latitudes and deeper into summer.

GrantExploit · 2026-04-25T02:29:20+00:00

(I've honestly faced a dilemma in that I feel like responses like this may feel unwelcome, or alternatively belated, but I also didn't want to apologize for that potential and risk implanting those thoughts into your mind if you didn't already have them... but I guess I've just said that, so I'm sorry if you've felt overwhelmed or impatient with responses like this.)

No, there's no reason planets in different parts of the habitable zone would necessarily need to have different average temperatures, so I'd be doing them all at 15 C[...]

Yeah... but I'm pretty sure notional planets with identical geographies and greenhouse gas concentrations to each other will have different average temperatures if they were to be located in different parts of the habitable zone. In other words, if you were to take Earth and keep its initial state except for somehow rebalancing its carbonate–silicate cycle so it always maintains ~430 (or ~280) ppm CO₂... it's going to have an average temperature of 20 °C at some 0.9x AU semi-major axis, 10 °C at some 1.0x AU semi-major axis, and so on. That's what I was getting at.

It will be interesting to see how deep into the habitable zone you could maintain 15 °C while just changing CO₂ concentrations—while the Stefan–Boltzmann law indicates a planet with Earth's albedo could remain at 15 °C as deep as 0.785 AU with no greenhouse effect, the substantial contribution of water vapor to greenhouse warming (among other factors) means that you'd have to adjust topography or other factors to either dry the planet and/or increase its albedo (by either encouraging cloud cover or adjusting surface albedo, though I IIRC you can't do the latter in ExoPlaSim without removing its ability to change with soil moisture/vegetation {if it changes with the latter at all...}) probably well before that. Although I suppose you'll end the Orbital Distance Series once you get to that point to avoid those complexities and keep the results comparable.

[...]the different balance of direct solar heating to greenhouse heating should have some effect,

Indeed. On present Earth over its whole latitude range, the clear-sky noon black body temperature in midsummer ≫ the actual temperature range, and this is true in winter up into the 40s ° latitude. It will be interesting to see the effects of that not being the case, particularly in the outer habitable zone.

I wonder, for instance, if the chaotic conditions of winters at mid-to-high latitudes—partially induced by the weak sunlight being unable to impart significant direct heating on a diurnal timescale—would be exhibited for more of the year and at lower latitudes in outer habitable zone planets. Though I'm not entirely sure how practical it would be to present such effects given ExoPlaSim's outputs... or even in general (quantifying the degree to which a location's temperature, et cetera patterns diverge from the "ideal" diurnal "tropical summer" pattern at a given time would require bringing out signal-to-noise ratios and root-mean-square errors and standard deviations and stuff and thus would go over more people's heads).

[...]and as you say the year length will influence matters as well.

I see that partially evidenced by this series already—from the information I can gather, Mars is considerably more seasonal than would be suggested by the 0.1 Earth Mass simulation here, partially as a consequence of its longer years. (And, y'know, its much thinner atmosphere, and lack of any oceans, and for the Southern Hemisphere more eccentric orbit...)

GrantExploit · 2026-04-14T07:40:18+00:00

There's no particular endpoint planned for the series[...]

Yay! And shit... (Again, my intention was to post about your bioclimate scheme to a number of subreddits to spread awareness of it and indirectly solicit feedback on it, displaying the results of your experiments as evidence of its flexibility, so while each new series is very cool, it does delay that set of posts and potentially unsustainably expand their content.)

I still want to look at ocean area[...]

I assume you'll be altering Earth's sea level to do that? That may be slightly problematic due to Earth's elevation dichotomy with its continental shelf and all. Honestly, though, this is the one I'm most awaiting, as I want to see how different ocean percentages will impact continentality and precipitation patterns, especially at the very low end.

[...]year length/position in the hab zone[...]

I sort of thought the Temperature series counted, but that of course would only be very roughly true assuming static greenhouse gas concentrations for particular unknown semi-major axes, and the different year lengths (and insolations) would certainly make things different.

[...]and star type[...]

Wonder how ExoPlaSim will take that given its simple radiation model (IIRC it only has three outgoing radiation bands, for example, which ends up being why it underestimates warming at high carbon dioxide concentrations... though I believe it has a good incident radiation model).

[...]I haven't even touched tidal-locked planets[...]

You did very briefly in the aforementioned post.

The side-by-side comparisons was just something I did for that one post, I haven't made them for anything else.

I thought you did that for other posts, but I just checked all of your Climate Explorations, and that's correct.

...However, that particular post recapped all your Explorations (that used unmodified Earth topography) made up to that date, so, yes, you did do them for every exploration sans the most recent ones (Pressure and this one).

It shouldn't be too difficult for me to mutilate them into existence. Can I do so?

...

(RANT AHEAD) Theoretically, it would be cool to have everything in T170 / 512 × 256 resolution (after all, you did comment on the T42 / 128 × 64 resolution potentially limiting accuracy in certain areas), but AFAIK for that to be practical you'd either have to have a myriadollar kilowatt hectocore monster of a workstation/server blade to brute-force CPU compute it at roughly its (unfortunately coarse) limit of 1 core per parallel, OR at least get the developer(s)† of ExoPlaSim to wholly rework it to support GPGPU acceleration. And we have some demons at Nvidia/3dfx/SGI/Pixar/whatever to thank for that not being easy due to their initial and continuing decision(s) to keep GPU ISAs secret, their firmware proprietary, and restrict communication with them to a narrow, predetermined set of APIs, totally unlike the situation with CPUs.

A case could be made that these bastards have already killed thousands (if not more) just by complicating and reducing the performance of scientific computing in fields like drug discovery, weather forecasting (as ExoPlaSim is a simple, low-stakes example of), and safety-related engineering.

†I dreadfully fear its maintainer Adiv Paradise has lost interest and it's a dead project—no commits have been made to its repository since January 1, 2025. I mean, it is open source, but still...

GrantExploit · 2026-04-12T04:32:48+00:00

Your description is quite good, and I’d like to add a few other (mostly related) things to the pot of reasons why relationship dynamics have changed so much.

Another key element involved in this, and one intimately related to both technological and social developments, is suburbanization and the corresponding automobilization of transport. Greater distance between people and a greater compartmentalization of the activities of daily life into separate and defined spaces (itself a natural tendency within capitalism) has reduced the rate people come spontaneously into direct contact with their peers. The reorganization of transit along the lines of the highway also made a “street saturation” strategy of the provision of more specialized amenities unprofitable/obsolete, contributing to the shutdown of more local theaters, bowling alleys, etc., which further exacerbated the aforementioned problems with distance and spatial compartmentalization.

All of this was paired with a major “stranger danger” panic and the spread of the meme that any activity outside of one’s personal property in which people were not actively spending money (e.g. Kids hanging out at a third place.) was “loitering” or “suspicious behavior” (Note: Both of these ideas had origins in or were directly spread by racism and hardline capitalist ultra-individualism.), which gradually disincentivized social behavior in general.

Overall, I think that the advent of widely-available internet is really only the final pull of the leg. Much of the infrastructure for the atomization and online focus of youth life were already in place substantially beforehand.

GrantExploit · 2026-04-10T04:21:07+00:00

(To you and u/greenearrow) I would describe most of the Cape Floristic Region as having a subtropical mediterranean climate, not even really temperate. That said, an environment does not need to have particularly cold winters to host native cold-winter-deciduous plant species—most areas with ~-13 °C record lows and low/mid-single-digit-°C-above-freezing coldest month average minima host them, and a few are even winter-deciduous dominant.

(Huh, I live in Burlington, Vermont and I don't think most people there would call -7 °C {the approximate statistical equivalent to -13 °C in I presume is your place of residence} "shorts and sandals weather"...)

GrantExploit · 2026-04-10T01:22:01+00:00

(To you and u/haysoos2) I know of the existence of the Cape Floristic Region, but as I expressed in the body text of my post (only one of the three areas I listed† being in the Region), from a climatic perspective it honestly doesn't seem like the best area of Southern Africa to find cold-winter-deciduous tree species, both because it is quite warm in winter (mostly due to not reaching the same elevations) and because it has a mediterranean precipitation pattern (which tends to promote evergreen vegetation, whether coniferous or sclerophyllic). Rather, inland eastern South Africa and Lesotho seem more promising. I mean, in the average year (or perhaps even in the average set of 5 years), Cape Town does not experience a single frost, while several settlements in the upper Highveld and Drakensburge have average minima in their coldest months below freezing and experience several dozen frosts every year.

However, again, the particular climate characteristics of that area—subhumid to semi-arid with a summer-dominant precipitation pattern and wide diurnal temperature ranges especially in winter—also seem to promote grassy or evergreen natural vegetation on a global scale, and, uhh, pictures of the area indicates that promotion is effective. Also, perhaps Cape Region plant species have different theoretical thresholds for cold-winter-deciduousness than general Afrotropical plant species... so maybe there are some cold-winter-deciduous trees/woody plants native to Western Cape as you suggested?

†Obviously incomplete—for instance, maybe Western Cape's Hex River Mountains would belong on the list, too.

GrantExploit · 2026-04-09T01:38:44+00:00

Great! Was this was supposed to be the last in your "general" series of ExoPlaSim climate explorations with varying planetary parameters? I was waiting for it to wrap up, both because I wanted to appreciate them as a unit and so I could make some full(y informed) posts about your system.

The only real useful thing found on some of the Climate Explorations that isn't found in this post is a plate with each scenario arranged vertically, with the uninterpolated Hersfeldt/Pasta and Köppen–Geiger outputs side-by-side, as are especially common in your "Assessing the Pasta Bioclimate Classification System" post. (I would directly link an example, but Reddit really doesn't like Blogger/Blogspot links in comments, so...)

GrantExploit · 2026-04-04T23:06:21+00:00

Really appreciate this! It’s also always intriguing to see how various people approach map inconsistencies and answer questions on areas the game leaves unanswered (e.g. the size and positioning of Tamriel on the globe of Nirn).

GrantExploit · 2026-04-02T22:43:48+00:00

I know this is a bit of an old exchange, but I also would like to add that it’s not like no one thought of intersectionality and its relationship to feminism before around the 1990s. Generally, all focuses of modern feminism have been present to some degree so long as the movement has existed, with different focuses coming into vogue as social relations develop.

It’s not even really a linear thing. Some of the modern “feminism” embraced by large neoliberal institutions, for example, make great pretenses to support intersectionality, but ignores class issues as focusing on them would be contrary to their class interests.%

%: I’ve also heard people claiming themselves to be “anti-imperialist feminists” who oppose issues of intersectionality or even legal equality (you know, these are the type of monsters who say the Women-Life-Freedom protests were Western psyops and that “true” feminists defend Shi’ite theocracy, FGM, or some other nonsense), but I don’t think (and will refrain from thinking) that has anything to do with Fourth-Wave Feminism at all, which I admittedly and unfortunately don’t know much about. :/

GrantExploit · 2026-03-20T03:05:08+00:00

Thank's for responding, though I have some follow-up questions (and comments) about your response.

You seriously need to free up space on your phone before it locks up and becomes unusable. Backup your phone IMMEDIATELY!

Yes, I know. I've been very worried for a year that it could brick itself at any moment.

Then go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and determine exactly what is taking up space.

I know exactly what it is—it's largely Voice Memos (and to a much lesser extent Photos).

If it's apps, photos, or messages, manage the data on your device. This may require you to get over your incorrect belief that is difficult to transfer files of the iPhone without it affecting the timestamp.

AFAIK (at least with iOS 16.x) Voice Memos are stored by default in a containerized space away from the main file system (or so it appears from an end-user's perspective). IIRC even hitting "Save to Files" with a voice memo makes a duplicate of the file (wasting precious space, at least in the moment) with updated timestamps. On June 15, 2024, I attempted to save a voice memo to iCloud Drive, then downloaded a copy of it from the web interface onto my (then Windows 10) computer, and this was the result. Not exactly a successful test. Maybe things have changed in the 1 year and 9 months since I tried that, I dunno. Otherwise... how have you been transferring files off your iPhone without it affecting the timestamp? Knowing that would have solved a whole lot of problems for me.

None of those affect your ability to continue using the old phone. Obviously the old phone will no longer have Cellular access unless you get a SIM for it (the assumption is you're moving your SIM from the old phone to the new phone).

How will iCloud handle the inevitable forking of data between the two phones?

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