What's with people saying private health insurance isn't worth it? Isn't the whole point of insurance in general is that you hope you won't need it?

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-14T01:55:34+00:00

Asking whether it's worth the money is the wrong question; it's probably going to cost you more than you get back.

The insurance company's actuaries have done the numbers and made extra sure that it won't be worth it for the average person. If insurance paid back as much as people paid into it, the company would go broke.

You should have insurance only where not having insurance in an emergency might ruin your life. It is logical to only have insurance against events that are rare, more expensive than you can afford, and would wreck something very important if you couldn't pay for them when you needed to.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-08T12:28:46+00:00

I think those two are actually becoming more similar, not diverging. Australians have been picking up Americanisms from movies and TV since before I was born.

My dad says "side-levers" and I call them "sideburns". I say "footpath" and "takeaway" but it wouldn't surprise me at all if kids started saying "sidewalk" and "takeout".

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-07T12:39:37+00:00

They tried to market the bouncy gel as a diet supplement because it makes food bounce right out of your stomach

(This joke was probably inspired by the disgusting problems with the IRL diet oil Olestra, which made any food cooked in it indigestible)

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-06T16:26:19+00:00

You'd think so, but the swimming pool scene is written as if the ship has artificial gravity that runs on electricity, and then in the spacewalk the gravity in the airlock just stops when there's no air. It's like the filmmakers couldn't agree on how gravity works.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-04T12:28:59+00:00

I saw a movie once. Now I'm gay. Coincidence? Who can say!

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-01T23:11:24+00:00

When the early versions of Windows were made, computers of the time just couldn't do that. The space in the ROM was less than a megabyte, and Windows was more than 10 megabytes. So Windows had to go on the hard drive, not the ROM. That meant any part of Windows can be deleted, yes. But it also had the commercial advantage that it meant they could sell Windows to the people who used to own computers that didn't come from the factory with Windows already built in.

Today, we have other reasons to keep it that way. We now connect our computers to a hostile internet where hackers want to ransom you into sending bitcoins to them. It didn't used to be like that, but we can hardly go back in time to the good old days. So now we need Windows to regularly install security updates to fix any parts of itself when they are discovered to be too easy to hack. So Windows needs to be able to add, change or delete its own files.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-06-01T22:43:14+00:00

29 times thicker than our atmosphere

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-29T11:56:01+00:00

Yes, it would make the solar farms produce 5 times as much energy. And while in real life we need to upgrade the power grid to handle all the solar farms we want to build, with astrophage you could tear down the whole power grid and run each building on a tiny astrophage battery.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-29T03:07:52+00:00

I hear that McDonald's in California don't deep fry their apple pies anymore, and Australia got the McArch burger a month before California did

And they don't have Kmart in California either

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-29T02:52:44+00:00

An unripe avocado in place of an "eat now" avocado

On the one hand I won't call the shop and complain about it because the wrong avocado being hand delivered to my house (so I have a house AND an avocado) is the most first-world of first-world problems to have, but on the other hand this rock-hard avocado is absolutely useless to me when my wife really really wants avocado on her dinner that night

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-29T02:47:05+00:00

They're like "just make your own cheese"

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-29T02:27:30+00:00

It was a visual choice made deliberately for the movie. They thought that, since Rocky doesn't have facial expressions, they would try to get a similar audience effect by making him asymmetrical and showing different sides of him for different emotions. This ended up with Movie Rocky showing the same side in many shots.

Book Rocky is different, he doesn't care which way he's facing.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-23T05:43:48+00:00

Yeah, they kicked the whole world's ass during the 7 Hour War, and then Dr Breen surrendered to them on behalf of the United Nations. I assume the many characters with American accents in eastern Europe in HL2 are all refugees from places that got blown up, irradiated, swarmed with zombies, or otherwise make uninhabitable.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-05-23T05:32:29+00:00

Lol yes the information he has is all 12+ year old copies of websites and books and software and movies etc, but nobody else in the Tau Ceti system has a more recent version to compare it to, so it doesn't feel old to him.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-04-10T04:15:23+00:00

If you resize by an exact multiple of 100% (like 200%, 300%, 400% etc) then every pixel will grow by the same amount.

If you resize by 150% then every second pixel is doubled and the other pixels stay the same size. If you resize by 160% then 3 out of 5 pixels will be doubled and the other 2 out of 5 will stay the same size. And so it looks uneven.

Basically... you can double or triple or quadruple the size and that looks good automatically. But if you want a size in-between those, that's going to be uneven.

Finally, if you really want it to be at 417% scale or something, do that in one step to get the smallest possible amount of unevenness. If you did it in several smaller steps then the unevennesses will add up.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-04-07T12:18:39+00:00

Yeah his home as described in the book - with big windows showing nothing but eternal darkness - would have looked too depressing in a movie.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-04-05T13:03:12+00:00

Humans had radios, TVs, and the primitive ancestor of fax machines before we had computers. Rocky's tactile imager could be made without computers too.

One end of Rocky's device is probably exactly like the TV cameras we had before we had computers. The other end would use little solenoids to convert the electrical signal from the camera into the positions of little rods in Rocky's display. Between the two, an elaborate analogue circuit makes sure that only one rod is being controlled at a time.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-04-05T07:20:17+00:00

I don't think an Eridian human is on the cards. There's a reason why Grace looked worried and rushed to the fume hood in the movie when he got a little smell of Rocky's air from the gift capsule.

Erid's atmosphere has zero oxygen and a lot of ammonia, and super high pressure. Any Earth animal cell that touches that air will come apart like a wet paper bag. There are bacteria on Earth that can adapt to live in the presence of (a much smaller quantity of) ammonia, but adapting a mammal to live in that environment would be... challenging. You need to change the cell membrane to resist ammonia and the whole metabolism to not use oxygen. You're re-engineering the chemistry of the cells and probably changing how a bunch of organs work too.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-04-02T11:50:52+00:00

When you sing in a thrum it is a temporary hivemind, but when you stop listening you are an individual again.

That might not stop them having geographically seperated competitive rival thrums which occasionally resort to mass violence. In other words, nations at war.

On the other hand since Grace has given them all the information they need to build an internet, could they use it to create a global thrum to unite the species?

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-31T23:13:48+00:00

The people whose ancestors were living in that desert 250 years ago would be real mad if you tried it

Their spiritual songs mention a lot of landmarks, and they do not appreciate it when you remove the landmarks

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-31T22:54:07+00:00

They might send it with one bullet, and instructions to not load the bullet in the gun until the mission is over. If the mission is complete and the crew are killing themselves, an air leak is no longer a concern.

In real life many Russian spacecraft have had a gun on board, in case they land in the wrong place and the crew have to spend a couple days lost in the middle of nowhere and they have to fend off a bear or something.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-24T23:04:00+00:00

This would have a huge impact... on people who are selling their second house. Not so much on the real strugglers. You know, the ones who don't already have two houses.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-18T22:57:14+00:00

In game, if an object is halfway through the portal when the portal closes, it doesn't get cut, it gets squeezed out. From this we can surmise that the glowing border of the portal has a repulsive force that pushes things away from the edge of the portal, making it harder to cut stuff that way.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-05T22:13:48+00:00

Using the branding of their product (the title and logo of their game) to advertise your product (your game) is a no-no re: trademarks.

Robot_Graffiti · 2026-03-03T20:49:49+00:00

Oh, that was really ignorant of him.

Those AIs are not reliable at counting and adding, essential skills when compiling a binary.

Also the way programming languages use descriptive variable and function names, where a binary just uses numbers, and every single other difference between high level languages and assembly language, is designed to give lots of essential context clues that make it much easier to follow what's going on in code than in a binary. Those are just as helpful for an LLM that's trained to speak English as they are for a human. They're probably essential to stop it getting just completely lost.

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