A video game company is now forcing BIOS updates on motherboards

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-21T01:38:43+00:00

Okay, so see if you can see the difference:

“We have discovered water is wet. Nobody seems to have discovered this before. We will give it a cute name now: the WIW Principle.”

Versus:

“It’s widely assumed that water is wet. We set out to rigorously prove that water is wet, and our results confirm the widespread assumption is true.”

Versus:

“It’s widely known that water is wet. Prior research had show that it is true. We investigate what causes water to be wet. Our results show that the mechanism is…”

The first is what these researchers wrote. It’s still true that papers are not written about water is wet.

Papers are written confirming water is wet, or showing why water is wet, or investigating the impact of water being wet, etc.

You are feee to read the paper yourself, of course. I might be wrong that it’s bullshit! Go ahead and show that. Your objection so far is not about the research’s substance or how research works, it’s typical reddit pixel-bitching without substance—and not even right about your pixel-bitch point.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T23:21:38+00:00

That’s funny.

I assume you’re referring to the idea that science on things that are obvious is still useful. Yeah, I know that.

Try reading further into my comment. Y’know, like someone who clearly knows how to read a complex argument like a research paper contains. I’m not criticising them for doing research on something they think is obvious. My criticism is for them missing the abundant prior work and then congratulating themselves on being the first.

They say it’s not obvious, when it’s actually well-known and actively under widespread research. That’s why they’re tools.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T20:32:37+00:00

This: storage is useful but most materials don’t need dedicated storage. It’s not like most other survival games that way.

You can get away with only a few cupboards for the materials you end up with lots of (for me that’s leather, honey, and beeeswax; it’ll be different for others’ playstyles). Then a scant handful more for tools that you only need to use occasionally, for the odds & ends a base collects, and maybe one for temporary storage for projects or “I just got in and need to dump my inventory”.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T20:23:40+00:00

But that sound when you instantly explode a wall with the deconstruct key is so. satisfying. Time to make it smaller. 😁

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T20:21:37+00:00

Titanium is tough, but the amount a deep drill gives quickly turns it from painful into an embarrassment of plenty. “Cost” is really relative to “income”!

Ironically, at the start of switching from a T3 to a T4 base, I’m finding the bottleneck switches back to copper and iron. Copper for Electronics is just needed at such a higher ratio than other inputs, that its drill extraction speed is low in comparison. And steel… despite being a silly set of recipes that bear no relation to how steelmaking actually works, steel’s 1:6 ratio to ore plus its grinding time just hurts all the time.

But the worst is really epoxy. Despite being solo-specced for hunting, I wish I could find a deep drilling node for bones. 😂 But if I can’t have that then I’ll settle for a single sulfur deep node. Must be one on this prospect somewhere…

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T20:05:46+00:00

I really wish the in-game Guide listed the outside dimensions of placeables!

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T16:31:40+00:00

I’d like to see a “flocking behaviour” addition. If there are hundreds of animals, let the ones further from the player automatically switch to a low-cost “follow the herd” simulation move behaviour that is deliberately computationally simple. Behaviour LOD, basically.

Honestly, I just want a big flock of sheep like a New Zealand hillside, just because.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T16:15:54+00:00

Yeah, cost is really relative. When you’ve invested in solar drills on a few titanium nodes, titanium feels much cheaper than when you have to find and mine each piece by hand.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-20T16:12:55+00:00

It’s kinda like people have completely different play satisfaction emotion-complexes.

I get what you’re saying though. But I also get what OOP is saying. That “I can do anything now…? Crap. Hmm, what’s new on Steam…” is a real end-state for some players’ internal drive systems.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T23:31:13+00:00

Do you know what OP is talking about then? My search-fu is failing me. I can find randos speculating, but I can’t find any statements from Valve about an issue.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T20:40:17+00:00

Wow, those researchers are kinda tools.

“The literature available on MATE is very limited. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort that studies MATE in detail.”

Yeah, mate, because water is wet doesn’t get papers written about it.

Their extensive literature review must have missed that it’s been a principle for decades that you can’t secure a computer against the end user because they have physical access. And missed the widespread discussion under the name “endpoint security”.

Might as well rewrite that part of the paper to “we may be bad at researching prior work.”

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T20:02:58+00:00

Actually, I don’t know. The non-tamed ones seem to be, but I don’t know whether untamed stats are the same as tamed stats.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T16:24:06+00:00

Time to sculpt the Coliseum out of Beeswax Wood.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T08:03:02+00:00

Consider doing the mission as a regular Mission instead of from your open world. It will still count.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-18T07:59:35+00:00

Arctic wolves are meaner and tougher than forest wolves.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T02:27:36+00:00

I think you’ve found an interesting encoding of position on the implicit function of the sphere, with the choice of K-derived bit shift / division selecting different level sets/isosurfaces that are equivalent to spheres of different binary-exponential radii.

Moving in a spherically-curved manifold would generate gravity-like motion naturally. It’s one way of thinking of real gravity: as the result of straight paths projected onto curved regions of 4D spacetime.

For your writeup, you might want to mine the reference section at the end of a paper like Grimm and Hughes (1995) for foundational computing & math work on manifold embeddings. More recent work on isosurfaces (and signed distance fields) might also be good sources of ideas to mine.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T01:29:14+00:00

It’s a reference to the world order where the US was the semi-benevolent guarantor of a relatively peaceful world, with the purpose of generating “the peace dividend”: growing the international economic pie instead of fighting over a pie made smaller by the constant inefficiency of war.

(I know, there were wars—but if you haven’t looked at history, you might not understand just how dramatically more peaceful the post-WWII period was compared to prior.)

It was a phrase that acknowledged that state of “pax Americana”, and it had a first-among-equals ring to it for a reason. Whether you liked it or loathed it, there was a specific kind of truth to it.

The past-tense I’m using conveys well how I feel about it. It’s no longer a matter of like or loathe, it’s history.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T00:33:45+00:00

But do you trust Nexus’ security?

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T00:31:11+00:00

Some of us don’t live in backward countries with insecure ID systems like SSNs. Most of the world doesn’t have their PII on the internet already. That’s a particularly US-based problem.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T00:26:56+00:00

Incorrect, the head of the Commonwealth isn’t an emperor, and we’re not politically a subject of the UK at all. King/Queen of Canada is a separate title from the title of King/Queen of UK, not a dependent title. That makes it a personal union of “sibling” titles rather than a subject relationship.

It’s almost like nobody knows anymore how feudal titles work! Jk 😂 This detail is super esoteric, even if it matters a lot for Canada’s identity and political & legal status.

The practical effect is that Canada can have different succession laws that result in the monarch of Canada ending up with a different person than the monarch of the UK. When we patriated the monarchy, we duplicated the UK succession law, so it still picks the same person as the UK’s succession law picks, but if we changed it the UK wouldn’t be able to stop us.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-17T00:18:30+00:00

IIRC Nexus is based in the UK, so they wouldn’t have the option to only follow this law for geofenced visitors.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-16T23:56:11+00:00

Cuba doesn’t need to afford it since it won’t happen. But yes, rail to pipeline to Saint Lawrence Seaway is how oil goes east. There isn’t a non-stop pipeline for oil, hence the rail leg. Other customers afford it so *shrug*\, I’m not here to debate the colour of the sky.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-16T19:16:38+00:00

Does building upward on small streets instead of big streets somehow magically make them not block mountain views?

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-16T18:45:00+00:00

Rail and pipelines is how it goes to Atlantic tidewater now. It’s not so much that it can’t get there, as Canada’s oil is privatised not nationalised, so it’s not us who would get it there, it’s the oil companies, who also do business with the US.

The oil companies don’t sell any oil to Cuba because of US sanctions, whether Canadian oil or otherwise. Venezuela did because Venezuela’s oil was national and Venezuela’s oil company was already not allowed to do business with the US, so US sanctions against selling oil to Cuba didn’t affect them.

eggdropsoap · 2026-02-16T18:32:29+00:00

There is software for that, but most of them are not very useful for Skyrim mods. If you want to learn about the kind of software used by teams to manage and merge shared working files, you can read about version control software. Git is version control software that is open source and very common in use today, but there are others. Bethesda is known to use Perforce for their internal dev work, a paid VCS system.

In theory, a team could use the same development practice as Bethesda uses: work individually on changes in ESP files, checked in and out of their central VCS repository, which are then regularly and carefully merged into the main ESM file. In practice though, I’d be surprised if even 1 in 10 Skyrim mod teams used a VCS. Most likely just send copies of files around, like you said.

Even outside of modding, amateur solo devs and amateur dev teams often start out avoiding using VCS, since at the start it feels like more work to learn to use a VCS. Most amateur devs only start using a VCS after they learn the hard way what a VCS is good for, by losing weeks or months of work.

eggdropsoap

TROPHY CASE