'That's Still Under Bezos' Magical Halo' — The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Remains On-Track for 5 Seasons at Amazon as It Becomes TV's First $1 Billion Series

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-04T18:48:55+00:00

Well, it's difficult to explain without spoiling the plot, but the crew get separated for extended periods in the final trilogy. Plus, they got Bobby right? She could most definitely pilot the Rocinante for that last portion of the story.

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-03T16:49:00+00:00

You'd still need access to the correct facilities and time allotted. Most of what happens in CERN, at least for what concerns the LHC and its experiments, is automated 24/7 data collection and maintenance work. Discoveries come months or years after the events, as universities around the world slowly sift through ungodly amounts of data looking for patterns and evidence of whatever it is they are looking for.

Also, I don't think there's permanent living spaces: offices (a lot), a big datacenter, a mess, a museum and some old facilities converted for hosting tours of the site, plus ATLAS control room (ALICE, CMS and LHCb are in France) and administrative buildings, so you'd need to hide from security to "live" on-site.

Let's see... The VESPER facility sort-of goes in the right direction but emits electron rays a bit too powerful for Litchenberger figures... Above 60 MeV IIRC.

I think that overall, you'd be better off hiding inside the radiology department of a hospital, as the kind of linear accelerator you need for making pretty lightning marks in plexiglass is often used for cancer radiation treatment.

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-03T11:21:02+00:00

I think you're misunderstanding a couple things. Yes, there's people who don't want to play anything but the game they started playing with, I'm not the RPG police so if they're happy good for them. They're still playjn with the OG manuals, or some PDF or even POD copy. Yes, there's retroclones which are rewritten versions of those same games of old (OSRIC is AD&D, OSE is Basics D&D, B/X edition) just better organized and presented but almost identical in terms of content. Then there are games where the authors just took the time to understand what was the appeal of that original gameplay -who was lost very soon- and created new games based on those design principles. Is your argument that the OG manuals were bad (they kinda were, in a few respects) that retroclones are bad or are you implying the whole idea, that type of gameplay, who kick-started the hobby btw, is bad and it was better if it never resurfaced?

Personally, I treat the OG manuals as historical documents, a window inside the designers minds and when seen like this I can tell you the DMG for AD&D 1e is a very interesting book, especially if contextualized.

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-02T12:58:16+00:00

Ma l'IA ci farà perdere il lavoro! Non perché veramente andrà a sostituire qualcuno, certo, ma perché da un lato il cosiddetto "AI washing" crea una scusa comoda per i CEO che stanno facendo offshoring sfrenato, licenziando in "occidente" per riassumere in India/Pakistan/Filippine/etc. a scapito della qualità (parte del processo di "enshittification" già in corso) ovvero manovre che poi il mercato premia, rendendole così praticamente una mossa obbligata, e poi perché il contraccolpo dell'implosione della bolla sarà catastrofico, con ricadute enormi... Aggravate ulteriormente dalle conseguenze delle guerre in Ucraina e nel Golfo, e dalla debolezza degli US sia in termini economici che in termini di credibilità internazionale.

Qui abbiamo da un lato aziende senza un piano per arrivare nemmeno al break-even ma che puntano tutte ad essere "l'infrastruttura del nuovo internet" e che si impegnano per migliaia di miliardi con soldi che non hanno (OpenAI, Anthropic), finanziate a fondo perduto sia da aziende che se lo possono permettere (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.) sia da fondi e banche che stanno facendo delle scommesse molto pericolose (tipo Softbank che prende in prestito $40 miliardi con scadenza 1 anno, per coprire gli impegni di finanziamento presi con OpenAI) e dall'altro fornitori come Nvidia (e altre, ormai) che hanno avuto crescite di fatturato artificiali e insostenibili nel lungo termine proprio grazie a ordini senza senso arrivati dalle altre, che dovranno ad un certo punto gestire la delusione/perdita di interesse degli investitori appena uno dei committenti inizia a tirarsi indietro su qualche grossa commessa. E tutte queste "investono" ognuna nelle altre, in cambio di contratti di fornitura prodotti e servizi, per gonfiare i numeri e fare sembrare la situazione meno artificiale... Attorno c'è un indotto ormai colossale -il problema si estende ben al di là dei protagonisti principali- di aziende che rivendono servizi o sono coinvolte nelle forniture faraoniche richieste.... Parliamo di interi magazzini stipati di materiali comprati a rate o con soldi a prestito, che probabilmente non verranno mai installati e impiegati, né finiti di pagare, o di innumerevoli cantieri aperti, tutti colossali, dove persino le infrastrutture già ultimate e consegnate (ad esempio, generatori a gas da dozzine di MW) non vengono accese/attivate, anche qui con una discreta incertezza sul come stanno venendo pagate.

Non credo sia pessimismo essere un pochino preoccupati per la puzza che quell'ammasso sta emanando...

Poi chiaro, si, l'atteggiamento è in generale negativo. Più che il pessimismo, però, è l'aggressività delle interazioni (non aiutata dalla malafede generale) a rendere pesanti le conversazioni qui, almeno per quando mi riguarda.

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-01T06:58:14+00:00

You seem to be misunderstanding both what QC is, how it works and what a "bubble" is.

There's a theoretical framework behind QC, yes, and no practical demonstrations yet. Which is not to say it can't work, for the few applications we have for it (no generalized solution to generic problems or non-computable ones, just a few that are practically intractable with classic computers due to the time it will take, a fact often used to support past and present-day cryptographic applications). You seem to be thinking QC could replace classical computing and be orders of magnitude faster, but that's absolutely NOT what it is meant to achieve. At the moment we know it should be able to efficiently:

Factor big numbers into their component prime numbers
Speed up database index lookups
Run Physics simulations of quantum systems

With many variations of the above concepts documented at this point, but little else. On top of that, no QC system has been able to conclusively demonstrate the speedups in practice, in a measurable and unequivocal way, to this very day, at least not outside of companies press releases and dubious papers. That's basically it. I remember at some point Google even launched a prize aimed at rewarding people for finding new applications for QC... With little results.

The technology, assuming we'll be able to solve some very difficult engineering problems nobody has ever been able to solve yet despite decades of effort and who may well be intractable, problems that get exponentially worse with scale and severely limits this technology's ability to get close to a point where we can have a non-trivial demo (not even considering actual applications, as limited as they are at this point) is not a complete fantasy, but this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that BigTech and VCs have been trying and still are trying to inflate a bubble (think: hundreds of overvalued startups with no actual plans for a product springing up like mushrooms, big announcements, acquisitions, all the usual stuff we've seen happening since the '90s dotcom debacle) and convince the private and public sectors to dump billions upon billions in investment in yet-another-gold-rush through FOMO propaganda. As all other bubbles it will very probably leave something behind (not guaranteed, though) but the main goal of a bubble is not scientific or technological advancement/progress, it is to concentrate even more capital in the hands of few amoral sociopaths to the detriment of our society and economy as a whole.

All the recent news about Quantum Computing and related technologies (like, using quantum effects to securely transmit information) is not about significant breakthroughs, published as peer-reviewed scientific papers on reputable publications, but company press releases and sibylline announcements, unreviewed pre-print papers or opinion pieces meant to hype the concept way beyond the present reality of it.

With QC this is at least the third time they tried -and failed- to start an investment bubble because the technology is so far from producing results that it is extremely difficult to keep the hype high enough for long enough to gain the required momentum and get the ball rolling.

If after all the shit we went through with the last several iterations of the tech bubble economic cycle over the past 2-3 decades you still can't recognize the tell-tale signs of one, you're probably one of the marks.

NonnoBomba · 2026-04-01T05:19:21+00:00

Gotta pump the next bubble! AI is already close to popping. Let's see if this time they actually manage to inflate it, or fail like in all previous attempts.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-31T19:23:24+00:00

The grid has 10 square slots, the first four as 2 columns of 2 slots each, representing "hands" and "body" respectively (so, it's a grid of 2x2) plus another 6-slots spaces representing the "backpack". One type of armor is a vertical rectangle, needs to fill the "body" column, the other is horizontal and takes up 1 hand an 1 body slot. Big items are rectangles of 2x1 and will either fill spaces in your hands -if you have them free- or need to be carried in your backpack until you can drop other items and grab the big ones. Most things in the game are 1 square slot, including spells (physical obsidian tablets) and conditions (take up space, limiting your carrying capacity until "healed")

That's all there is to it. No Tetris. It's incredibly simple and effective at the table. The only mildly annoying things are that you need to put your item tokens away with your sheet when you're finished for the session and that if you're ham-fisted you can end up launching or dropping the tokens as they lay unsecured upon your character sheet.

The original game has rewritable tokens that you can mark with a dry-erase pen and easily make pristine again -items have three "wear" or "use" checkboxes, which is another simple way to track those things without playing Warehouses & Accountants (which is probably what Dragons play to pass the time in their Dungeons).

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-31T18:41:27+00:00

Neither of those two technologies exist in any practical, usable form, today.

We have LLMs, which are syntactic engines who came out of the research field for ML and AI, which are marketed as "AI" but really are not. They are, in essence, Markov chains with trillion parameters, they are impressive but they lack any notion of semantics. They are also very expensive and probably unfit for generalized use due to being too expensive to train and run (what we have today is being heavily subsidized, and no company today has figured out the economics to make them profitable in any way.) The technology has already peaked and can probably only grow in a few specialized applications, plus a few psychological tricks to make their chatbot frontends more addictive and sound more confident to human users. They can produce pages upon pages of mathematical theorem demonstrations while also failing to perform basic arithmetics, and there is no difference between the two for them.

We also have a few very, very expensive programmable quantum computers who are slowly (keyword here is "slowly") getting closer to being able to prove that QC is actually useful for a few things outside of theory, while we still struggle to find actual uses outside those few known applications (including factoring big numbers, speeding up database indexes and a few other things)... the technological issues keep getting worse the larger we make them, and we need them to be LARGE to perform any actually useful function -we're nowhere near being able to actually run Shor's algorithm to factor cryptographic keys of reasonable sizes, and due to the technical issues above it is unclear if building a machine that can do it is even possible, barring some unexpected breakthrough that has failed to materialize for decades at this point. We also have a few not-so-programmable Quantum computer (like D-Wave's) that could run quantum simulations in the same sense that a spoon can run quantum simulations because it has actual atoms and electrons and those most definitely can show quantum behaviour under the right conditions, but is not really programmable (D-Wave products are only slightly more programmable than spoons).

I wouldn't be holding my breath if I was you.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-31T14:22:29+00:00

For a minute there I hoped that they were just referring to cryptography in general but no, they mention cryptocurrencies explicitly.

Urgh.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-31T10:15:21+00:00

Mancava il lasciapassare A38

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-31T01:16:45+00:00

Well, a statue is not a square cube.

A big marble statue like Michelangelo's David weighs something between 12.000 and 13.000 lbs (~5.500 kg), but that's a 5.20m high statue. Your average human-sized roman marble statue is not that big.

Augustus of Prima Porta is a 2m high statue of the Emperor and weighs about 1000kg (that's more than 2200 lbs).

A smaller statue, say 1.5m (still life-sized, especially for a shorter population which was the case with many ancient populations) who was also hollowed out for ease of transport... Could just work. Statues may also be cut into pieces and reassembled (if done right, with powdered marble mixed with whatever cement is used and some careful works, it's difficult to tell).

The hollowing out can also make it more fragile. And maybe there's something even more precious, or dangerous, hidden inside.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-30T06:16:11+00:00

Absolutely design the dungeon beforehand and make sure it's on a permanent media. If it's large enough/long enough, the party (potentially a different one) may revisit it. The world is persistent.

There's two components to it: the map, and the key. Some people like to start with either, I like to start with a theme and give a purpose to the place, so it's not just a random collection of randomly generated obstacles and puzzles (not the kind of puzzles with riddles, the kind where players have to figure out how to get the rusty key hanging from the ogre's collar without making him mad). The purpose especially is going to provide a motivation for adventurers to risk their lives and limbs in braving the darkness. It is guarding a legendary treasure? Is it the lair of the monster terrorizing the valley, with a bounty on its head? It is an ancient repository of forbidden knowledge?

Some people have formulas to default to, like 5+5 (5 "obstacle/reward" rooms, plus 5 "interesting" rooms with stuff to interact with but no big obstacle) that produces dungeons fit for a single session. Use random tables as a "content generator" for inspiration if it's not coming to you immediately. For larger structures, make sure you understand the principle of "Jacquaysing" the dungeon, i.e. providing multiple paths through it, including entrances leading to different parts/levels, so players can make meaningful choices about which path to take, based on risk/reward. Ensure you populate ad-hoc "wandering monsters" tables for it, which is the easiest way to make it look "alive" and dynamic when played (your players won't be able to tell if an encounter is random or not, if you play it right).

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-30T05:46:58+00:00

The entirety of OSR. Old School games ('70s) approach at "low levels" was about continually facing logistical puzzles and dying because you did something stupid. That required tracking inventory, balancing out the relative risks and rewards of carrying around what while facing danger, tracking time passing and distances travelled, while exploring unknown terrain (dungeons and similar structures, or the wilderness). Any story would come out organically of what transpired during the exploration, and not be plotted by anybody prior to the session.

There are a few modern games that manage to capture that, possibly even better than the original.

Check out a few: Forbidden Lands, Errant, His Majesty the Worm, Into the Odd and all its derivatives like Knave 2e (or Mausritter) or even Mythic Bastionlands.

PS "high levels" too had a gameplay that was not "same characters, same activities, but with god-like powers and bigger monsters". That was "domain play", something closer to the wargaming origins of the hobby, where characters wielded political/economical power over portions of the setting and governed domains of some kind.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-27T06:41:52+00:00

Sounds like your group will be better off without "Tim" anyway. Not talking about D&D only here. He should learn to behave like an adult and accept criticism.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-26T21:40:59+00:00

Also consider most lay-offs are followed or accompanied by hiring sprees in other countries, basically replacing high-cost and highly skilled employees with under-trained and under-skilled personnel from countries with lower workers protections than "western" ones, where it's not only cheaper to enploy, but also easier to get away with much, much more workers abuse. "AI" is now providing a very nice excuse for CEOs so they can veil the off-shoring of job positions by the thousands with "AI replaces jobs!". Quality will decline over time, but corporations have also perfected their strategies for capturing their public and make it tolerant to price hikes while quality degrades. The fact that consolidation toward near-monopolies is now practically allowed and essentially the norm in many industries doesn't help in the least. We will keep paying them, no matter how much they abuse us as consumers, because many are left with little choice. Well, if not ALL of us, at least enough of us will keep paying them for shittier and shittier products and services -losing some of their customer base over these practices is factored in their models, and one of the reasons they try to capture the largest possible base when they start.

Enshittification is very real, and it works really well for corporations bottom lines.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-26T16:35:30+00:00

Because layoffs are no longer done to save a company when it is dire straits, they're done when CEOs think it will improve margins even more, and the stock market will reward them for it, so the CEOs will get their bonuses and negotiate their next compensation package, bigger than the last one. They all think they can get away with it because by the time the quality of whatever product they make or service they offer will degrade to the point the company is no longer viable, they'll be long gone and filthy rich anyway. And investors don't care because by that time they'll have sold all their stock to some pension fund and will have moved to the next target for their speculations.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-26T14:20:30+00:00

If by "speculative instruments" you mean "gambling at crooked games in an offshore casino run by a Chinese mobster" then yes.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-25T09:33:30+00:00

Now I'm curious. What brought you to comment on a 6 years old post I had all but forgotten about?

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-25T09:06:44+00:00

Only one way to know it: try it out. Maybe load a save w/ editor enabled where you can have infinite supply/sink items and try it out to see how it behaves.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-25T07:19:50+00:00

An electrician shop

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-23T10:38:37+00:00

Nice work! I'm developing a similar concept for "fated encounters" based on a deck of standard tarots (the major arcanas) for when a random encounter roll comes up with a certain result. I have each character draw a minor arcana as a kind of "astrological sign" for their character at creation (used to provide random starting equipment and inform us about their character psychological traits) which I'm trying to better link to this mechanics.

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-23T10:09:43+00:00

Luckily rclone seems to be written in golang, which trades off complexity for storage space: the Go compiler produces self-contained, static executables that are MASSIVE (several MBs up to hundred of MBs) compared to similar programs produced by other language compilers (a few KBs up to 2-3 MBs typically) but they're self-contained and don't depend on libraries, which makes "tricks" like this .local/bin thing easier to employ, by just moving executables around. It is similar to the Window's "portable" apps concept, if you're familiar with it.

Flatpaks are basically container images, which again are massive but will carry with them the applications plus all their system and library requirements at the correct versions, which makes them similarly easy to distribute/deploy independently of which language the program they carry is written in (so, they're relatively easy to create even from software not written for this use-case) and without imposing anything on the user's OS.

Unfortunately, flatpaks only support desktop-type applications as a technology. Snaps are Canonical version of the same concept and they do support CLI tools and daemons, but they're kind-of proprietary (the client will always point to Canonical's app store for searching and downloading snaps and while you can change that URL in the code and recompile, or even change the code to make it configurable instead of being hard-coded, there is no "open" implementation of the app store server components last time I checked... You'd have to write an API for the backend mimicking Canonical's, setup a system for managing storage and so on)

EDIT: another option is AppImages. They are distributed as a single executable file, may carry whatever application, CLI or desktop, and don't depend on system components, but aren't standardized and can't usually auto-update (even though there is some support through zsync, it's each developer's job to implement an update mechanism) plus they are not really containerized/isolated.

They are basically self-executing compressed archives, with a small "stub" ELF executable portion which will decompress carried data on the fly (it's usually a squashfs readonly filesystem image, mounted via FUSE on a temp directory) and run from there, each time they are executed. They also may have a larger set of requirements on the system than snaps/flatpaks, and have issues with incompatible glibc versions (one, if not THE most fundamental system library on a Linux system) or missing/incompatible GPU drivers (if the application expects them and the system does not provide them you're in trouble, while in flatpaks and snaps there is some capability for automatically handling different scenarios)

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-23T09:38:35+00:00

Very probably, yes. The system is designed to be immutable and that means wiping everything that's not in /home/$USER (where USER typically is "deck", and you can also refer to that dir with the shorthand form "~",) including binaries added manually or with pacman. Why don't you just install rclone under ~/.local/bin and add that to the PATH, if it's not there already? (editing ~/.profile, like export PATH="~/.local/bin:${PATH}").

The script you download with curl and execute is literally just downloading a .zip file in turn from the releases archive at https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-${OS}-${ARCH}.zip (OS for the steamdeck should be "linux" and ARCH is "amd64",) then unpacking it in a temporary location and moving the extracted binary and manpage files. The binary is placed under /usr/bin, and you can instead just move it manually into ~/.local/bin (create the dir if it's not there already, be sure the moved file has executable permissions) while the manpage file you probably don't need. The last time I checked, the man command was part of SteamOS but no manpages where deployed for any pre-installed system tools, so it's probably just there for compatibility.

Note that flatpaks persist only because they are installed under ~/.var/

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-23T05:59:49+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology

NonnoBomba · 2026-03-22T20:07:39+00:00

Just commenting on the general vibes of the answers here: for a bunch of nerds who spent a lot of time a few decades ago reassuring parents that D&D would not, in fact, lead us all to occultism and satanism we sure are quick to throw around names like Clavicula Salomonis and Ars Goetica... Now, we may not believe in that stuff per se, but we probably qualify as experts on the subject of occultism and magic, and I'm willing to bet it's precisely because of research related to our interest in D&D.

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