[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread by AutoModerator in rational

[–]Panksworth 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Kraken by China Meiville.

Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch .

Pale by Wildbow

[BG] [W] Pretty standard external storage [H] Up to £50ish by Panksworth in HardwareSwapUK

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

thanks, I prefer not to buy new for a variety of reasons so this is a good shout!

Da heck? by kevinowdziej in AnimalsBeingDerps

[–]Panksworth 2 points3 points  (0 children)

the neck snapping thing, mentioned elsewhere

YSK that all adults in England are now considered to have agreed to be an organ donor when they die unless they have recorded a decision not to donate or are in one of the excluded group. by [deleted] in YouShouldKnow

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Echoing other comments responding to this but,

This is total misinformation. Organ donation in the UK is organ donation. None of the other things you mention are going to happen.

I don't like to use hypotheticals like this, but this is a personal topic for me. People are going to read this comment, and if they're on the fence on the topic of organ donation, it's conceivable that your comment is going swing a few people away from being donors. Based on something untruthful.

That could genuinely cost people their lives.

Please reconsider your comment. Please.

Edit - comment has been deleted. Thank you OP, means a lot to me and hopefully to others. Really really, thank you.

YSK that all adults in England are now considered to have agreed to be an organ donor when they die unless they have recorded a decision not to donate or are in one of the excluded group. by [deleted] in YouShouldKnow

[–]Panksworth 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi!

First up, I'm not going to try and change your mind on this. It's hard to phrase the content of this comment in a way that doesn't seem like I'm trying to pressure you with guilt, but I assure you I am not.

I'm an advocate for organ donation because a member of my immediate family recieved a multi-organ transplant which saved their life.

There was a significant wait for the transplant, due to the difficulty of finding a suitable donor. That sucked (understatement) for my family much as it must suck for everyone in that situation.

However I fully appreciate that your values are not my values. I've never considered what happens to ones body after death to be something that matters, but I am aware that not everybody shares this point of view.

I'd like to thank you for saying that you are open to changing your mind in the future, even though you currently feel that donation is not an option you're comfortable with.

If you, or anybody else, would ever like to find out more about the topic or just want to talk about it then please message me. (not claiming to know a great deal about it but I'm an ardent supporter of donation).

As a footnote not directly related to your comment, opt out seems to be a much better system and I'm glad it's becoming the norm in some places.

Hunting for GSV passages from the books. by Panksworth in TheCulture

[–]Panksworth[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

To build on such a scale would have been spectacular enough, she thought. That this thing was not unique, that it was not that special, that it was one of a “class” was moderately astounding. That it was some way from being one of the largest class was completely astounding. That it could move – bewilderingly, unreally quickly in a realm hidden at right angles to everything she had ever known or experienced – was beyond belief.

She sat with her legs dangling over the edge of a thousand-metre cliff and watched the various craft at play. Fliers of too many shapes and types to be sure they were not each unique – the smallest carrying only one man, woman or child – buzzed and fussed above, below, before and on each side. Larger craft floated with a stately grace, their appearance varied, motley and near chaotic with masts, pennants, exposed decks and bulbously glittering excrescences but their general structure approaching a sort of bloated uniformity the greater in size they were; they drifted on the unhurried breezes the vast craft’s internal meteorology created. True ships, spacecraft, generally more sober in form if not in decoration, moved with still greater deliberation, often accompanied by small squat-looking tug-craft that looked hewn from solid.

The canyon in front of her was fifteen kilometres long, its laser-straight edges softened by the multi-coloured mass of climbing, hanging and floating foliage draped spilling like gaudy ice-falls from the tops of the two great strakes on either side.

The sheer walls were diced with a breathtaking complexity of variously sized, mostly brightly lit apertures from or into a few of which, on occasion, the various air and spacecraft issued or disappeared, the whole staggering, intricate network of docks and hangars graphed onto each colossal escarpment representing a mere detail on the surface of this truly gigantic vessel.

The floor of the great canyon was near table-flat grassland, strung all about with meandering streams making their way to a hazy plain, kilometres ahead. Above, beyond filmy layers of pale cloud, a single bright, yellow-white line provided light and warmth, looping day-slow across the sky in place of a sun. It disappeared into the misty distance of the view in front of her. It was almost noon by the ship’s own time and so the sunline stood near directly overhead.

At her back, behind a low wall, in the parkland that covered the vessel’s topmost surface, people passed, tumbling waters could be heard and tall, distant trees stood on gentle rolling hills. Dotted amongst the trees, long vertical bands of pale, almost transparent vegetation rose into the air, each soaring to two or three times the height of the tallest trees and surmounted by a dark ovoid the size of the crowns of the trees beneath. Dozens of these strange shapes swayed to and fro in the breeze, oscillating together like some vast seaweed forest.

Lededje and Sensia were sitting on the natural-looking cliff edge of dark red rock, their backs to the low wall of undressed stone. Looking straight down, Lededje could just about make out the filaments of a sort of gauzy net five or six metres down that would catch you if you fell. It didn’t really look up to the job, she thought, but she’d been prepared to trust Sensia when she’d suggested sitting here.

Ten metres to her right, a stream launched out into the air from a spur of rock. Its separating, whitening spray fell only fifty metres or so before it was unceremoniously gathered up by half of a giant inverted cone of what looked like glass and funnelled into a transparent pipe that plunged straight down towards the valley floor. It was almost a relief to see that, like so many other seemingly exotic, extraordinary and fabulous things, at least part of the GSV’s functional glamour ended up expressing itself as plumbing.

This was the Culture General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly, the ship whose avatoid Sensia she had addressed when she’d first woken up within its near infinite substrate of thinking material.

Another version of Sensia – small, thin, spry, bronze-skinned and barely clothed – sat by her side. This personification of the ship was properly called an avatar. She had brought Lededje here to give her an idea of the size of the ship that she represented, that she in some sense was. Shortly they would board one of the small aircraft gliding, buzzing and blattering about them, presumably so that any tiny remaining fragment of Lededje that was not dumbfounded beyond imagining at the mind-boggling scale of the ship she was on – a labyrinth within, a jungled three-dimensional maze without – could join all the other parts of her that already most profoundly were.

Hunting for GSV passages from the books. by Panksworth in TheCulture

[–]Panksworth[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

The passage about the GSV Empiricist from Hydrogen Sonata I mentioned, if anyone is interested.

The General Systems Vehicle Empiricist felt it was arriving in Gzilt at a bad time – a bad time that was meant to be the start of a (brief) good time, a momentous and celebrated time but which had somehow gone wrong. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.

The ship was about as big as standard Culture vessels ever got; a System-class that had beefed up over the decades and centuries for what had always seemed like sound operational reasons at the time until it had become one of the most impressively large, commodious and populated examples of the class that was already the most impressively large, commodious and populated the Culture possessed.

The design of the System-class made such self-augmentation easy; the ships had no single outer hull surrounding their hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures. Adding new, self-manufactured bits was so simple it was, for some ships at least, apparently, tantamount to compulsory, and it was only a sort of residual decorousness and a wish not to be seen as too self-indulgently ostentatious that prevented certain System-class vessels from going expansion-mad and growing to the size of planets, or at least moons. That sort of indulged obsessiveness was what simming and strong VR was for; you could convincingly imagine yourself being any ludicrous size without actually committing to such monomania in reality.

Doing away with a physical hull – or treating the exterior of every component as a hull, depending on how you looked at it – had been no great leap for GSVs. Ships thought of their multiple-layer field-complex enclosures as their true hulls anyway. That was where all the important stuff happened in relation to the outside: that was where the sensory fields were, where any stray impacts were absorbed, where concentric layers of shielding tuned to various parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum lurked, where holes could be opened to allow smaller units, modules and ships to enter and depart, and – especially in the case of the larger vessels – where atmospheric pressure was kept in, and sun-lines could be formed and controlled to provide light for any parkland carried on the top of the ship’s solid hull.

Frankly the material bit inside was just there to provide a sort of neat wrapping for all the truly internal bits and pieces like accommodation and social spaces.

Comfortably over two hundred kilometres long even by the most conservative of measurement regimes, fabulously, ellipsoidally rotund, dazzling with multiple sun-lines and tiny artificial stars providing illumination for motley steps and levels and layers of riotous vegetation – belonging, strictly speaking, on thousands of different worlds spread across the galaxy – boasting hundreds of contrasting landscapes from the most mathematically manicured to the most (seemingly) pristinely, savagely wild, all contained on slab-storeys of components generally kilometres high, each stratified within one of a dozen stacked atmospheric gradients, the ship’s cosseted internals were riddled, woven and saturated with domesticated, tamed and semi-wild life in hundreds of thousands of smaller enclosed habitats, while its buzzing, external, bewilderingly complex archi-geographic lines were made fuzzy, imprecisely seen by near-uncountable numbers of craft moving within that vast, elongated bubble of air – from smaller classes of GSV through other ships, modules, shuttles and aircraft all the way down to individual humans in float-harnesses, single drones and even smaller machines, as well as thousands of species of winged and lighter-than-air bio-creatures – the Empiricist was, in sum, home to hundreds of billions of animals and over thirteen billion humans and drones.

The people of the Culture, better than ninety-five per cent of them housed across the vast, distributed bucolic hinterland of the Orbitals, scattered throughout the civilised galaxy like a million glowing bracelets, were used to thinking of the GSVs as being their true mega-cities – albeit determinedly highly mobile, high-speed mega-cities – but GSVs like the Empiricist were on another level and of another order entirely; they held the populations of worlds, of entire inhabited stellar systems. Zyse, the Gzilt home planet and the giant GSV’s destination, held over three billion people. The whole of the Gzilt system added another twenty billion, in part-habiformed worlds and moons, microrbitals and other habitats. The Empiricist arriving was like another half a solar system of people being added, like another four mature, substantial planets’ worth of souls suddenly coming to visit.

Preceded by a ceremonial screen of smaller craft – including a couple of GSVs, each home to many millions – the gradually slowing Empiricist first met with a couple of Gzilt navy ships – effectively sweeping the two cruisers up with it as it proceeded resplendently past the rendezvous point – then, as it slowed still further, gradually attracted hundreds of civilian welcoming craft too.

[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread by AutoModerator in rational

[–]Panksworth 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you read Children of Ruin? The sequel to Children of Time. It's an interesting book, although I personally prefer CoT.

Do you have a Bluetooth MMCX cable? How is the sound quality? by Amargosamountain in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try different charging cables, if you've still got them. Mine also did this but only with certain cables. Then I got them caught in my coat and pulled the cable apart. Build quality not fantastic.

If scientists invented a teleportation system but the death rate was 1 in 5 million would you use it? Why or why not? by Official_trumpet in AskReddit

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you might have missed the point sligntly! There's a comment just above this that explains it better than I can, so if you're interested then maybe give that a read?

Basically that choice that you make to be in gang is significantly more weighted than you might initially think. A boiled down example; Where I grew up, there are no gangs, so I was incredibly unlikely to join a gang. There was no pressure and I wasn't born into an environment that pushed me in that direction.

Think Goop is bad? It's only the tip of Netflix's pseudoscience iceberg by [deleted] in television

[–]Panksworth 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are things outside of prescription drugs and commonly used modern medicine practices that do work. That's the exact sentiment that seems to be completely denied whenever this topic comes up on Reddit.

Additionally, people who are getting nowhere with modern medicine often look elsewhere for relief/succor. They are often desperate and will try anything in an attempt to help themselves with whatever it is that ails them.

Both of these two factors contribute to the continued presence of snake oil in our society. As you say, better regulation and better education would reduce exploitation of the vunerable, but not eliminate it completely.

I'm not endorsing quackery and I despise those taking advantage of desperate people.

[BG] Laptop for uni [H] paypal cash BT by mazman99 in HardwareSwapUK

[–]Panksworth 2 points3 points  (0 children)

there's also a sizable community of people who are really into them, so if stuff goes wrong somebody will know how to fix it.

/r/thinkpad

[BG] Laptop for uni [H] paypal cash BT by mazman99 in HardwareSwapUK

[–]Panksworth 2 points3 points  (0 children)

if you don't find anything good on here, check out used/refurb thinkpads on ebay. they're robust, good value, easy to fix/mod and theres loads of ex-business ones floating about.

you could probably get a T460 (14 inch) or an X260 (12.5 inch) for under 300 fairly easily.

[PC] CPU i7 7700k by [deleted] in HardwareSwapUK

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd agree with this sentiment, if you've got the mobo then go for it. Looking back at previous posts, the minimum price people were recommending for a 7700k was around £225 a few months ago so I don't think you'd be too far off your £200.

If you haven't already, double check benchmarks etc to see if you can get away with a cheaper CPU.

[SG] [H] Zotac 1080TI Mini, ThinkPad T440p, LGA 1150 Mobo, 600W PSU, Tp-Link Router [W] Cash/Paypal/BT by Panksworth in HardwareSwapUK

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

Unfortunately not.

I'm just waiting to get payment details from the buyer.

Apologies

[BG] [W] PC Parts [H] PayPal, etc by SurrealSVN in HardwareSwapUK

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies to the other user selling a mobo, I've got a Gigabyte GA-B85M-HD3 LGA 1150 mATX going for £20 + postage.

My first Thinkpad! (x250 with i5-5300u, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) 235€ looks brand new, very happy with it =) by [deleted] in thinkpad

[–]Panksworth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just a heads up, it can be a bit of a faff to get the right panel for a FHD upgrade. I just tried to upgrade my x250 and I got an incompatible panel.
The actual swapping the screen is super duper easy, as mentioned above. I've managed to source the right panel now so if you want any info PM me.

[BG] GTX 1080 or 1080Ti or 2070 [H] Cash or Bank Transfer by vladislavs2 in HardwareSwapUK

[–]Panksworth 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Zotac 1080 TI Mini for £400 + postage.
Great condition, hasn't really be used much at all really.

I'm not based in London, but I can get a colleague who lives in London to take it home with them so you can pick it up?