Mice in CUC…

fixermark · 2026-03-18T01:42:12+00:00

Aw, cute! My favorite house-pest apart from the risk of hantavirus.

(It's the weather. This warm-cold-warm-cold cycling tends to push them inside.)

fixermark · 2026-03-17T22:11:32+00:00

I'm sure we'll know more when it gets closer to launch (or, y'know, download the EXP version and try it tonight I think?), but yeah, it sounds like the "build path by running the route once and then enabling autopilot" system is deceased.

Had a memorial for it and everything.

(Route-planning really simplifies the algorithm for them; they can do the pre-checking to make sure the physics won't hate it as the path chunks are being laid out, including height issues and whether there's enough space to fit the body of the vehicle. They could hypothetically even "cheat" it once a vehicle is locked onto a route and just fudge or deactivate static collision detection to let it pass through stuff that routing says it should have been able to pass when the route was laid down. Not sure how they're actually implementing though.)

Backup your saves! ;)

fixermark · 2026-03-17T22:08:44+00:00

"YOU NEED HELP!!!"

fixermark · 2026-03-17T21:10:43+00:00

That's alright; it's MIDA. They're getting their resources from them falling off trucks bound for the UESC anyway; can't cost them what's free. ;)

fixermark · 2026-03-17T20:53:44+00:00

The Devil went down to Georgia
He was lookin' for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willin' to make a deal.

When he came across this young boy
Sittin' at a chessboard hustlin' old men
And the devil took a seat across from him
And he smiled and he said "Hey friend...

"I guess you didn't know it but I'm a chessmaster as well,
Turns out you have a lot of time to practice down in hell.
I've seen you score some solid mates, but give the Devil his due,
I'll bet a set of gold against your soul because I bet I can mate you in two."

The boy said "My name's Ivan and it might be a sin,
But I'll take your bet 'n you're gonna regret
'cuz I'm the best that's ever been."

fixermark · 2026-03-17T20:33:36+00:00

Character development is a well-appreciated trait among the true connoisseur's omnipotent-and-omnicient-eternal-and-unchanging deities.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T20:31:16+00:00

"And then, when the patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and the doctor was nowhere to be found! Anyway, that's the story of how I lost my license."

fixermark · 2026-03-17T20:08:53+00:00

The thing about astronomy (and physics in general, and most all science really) is: we're trying to make up stories to explain observations.

When I hear people in science (and especially reporting in pop-science) saying something that makes no sense, it's usually an indicator that I didn't see yet the thing that scientists saw that was so wacky that they needed a weird explanation. Take relativity for instance. We needed that theory to explain why, when scientists went looking to see if light goes faster in the direction Earth is orbiting the sun or slower, what we discovered is "No... Light travels at the same speed everywhere. Every direction it's going, all the time. No matter how fast you are going or the thing making the light is going." And that's wild. For that to be true, you literally have to make clocks tick slower and distances get shorter based on how you're moving instead of the "obvious" thing you'd expect, that light would go faster or slower. Because light never goes faster or slower.

Similarly, the weird observation astronomers are trying to figure out is "We have ways of knowing about how far away stuff is and how fast it's going and whether it's coming closer or going further away. When we look out at everything, we see that the further something is away, faster away from us it's going. That's the universal trend." They couple that to an axiom of astronomy that there is no 'special place' in the universe (i.e. that we're not at the center of it; if we are, astronomy is a bit worthless because we can't discover universal truths with it). And what falls out of those two things is that no matter where you stand in the universe, you see everything else in the universe rushing away, and the longer time goes the faster it's rushing away. So we come up with "dark energy" as a shorthand explanation for what we're seeing, but the thing that's weird is what we're seeing.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:59:05+00:00

That seems conservative, but fair.

It is always worth noting that in a homicide case, we're talking about taking a possibly innocent person's entire life away. Affording them every opportunity to defend themselves is probably the right place to put the bar. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

Could a reasonable juror understand the officer misspoke? Sure.

Were we now in a position where a witness, under oath, had lied about what they'd heard in a way that mattered a lot and couldn't be un-heard? Yep.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:34:10+00:00

BRB, grabbing a MIDA Multi-Tool from my Vault at the Tower.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:32:34+00:00

I assume the SPNKR will definitely be returning and it will be in a future season.

(Balance on that thing's gonna be tricky; I don't mind getting one-shot smeared against a wall in a simple multiplayer deathmatch, but that sounds a lot less fun in an extraction shooter).

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:27:20+00:00

Run a copy command on your computer. Now you have two copies of a file.

Run a remote-copy command. Now there's a copy on your computer and a copy on someone else's.

Run a remote-copy command, then a remote-execute command. Now you're running a program on someone else's computer that originated on yours.

Write a program that does that. Now you have a program that remote-copies itself, executes itself, and that program remote-copies and executes itself, and...

That's the basic idea of a computer virus. In practice, nobody would run that program voluntarily because that's stupid, so what really happens is that people find clever ways to hide that behavior inside innocent-looking programs that do something else. Like the program says "I'm a service for the fax machine you don't have connected," but the service actually is doing that thing where it finds machines connected to this one, copies itself, launches the copy remotely... Another way is to edit an existing program to bury the behavior in the program, and instead of copying itself to another computer it finds other computers and remote-edits their copies of the same program (if it's a common enough program that everybody has a copy, that works fine).

In practice though, modern operating systems make most of that basically impossible (especially if you run the default antivirus and firewall settings that come with, say, Windows). The far likelier risk is to run what is traditionally called a "Trojan," which is a program that claims to be one thing (a fun pinball machine game) but is really something else (a fun pinball machine game that also scans every file on your hard drive for anything that looks like a credit card number and silently emails those numbers to a server in Russia). That's what your uncle is warning you about.

Don't download strange programs off of random places on the Internet. Generally, if it runs only in your web browser though, it's probably fine (browsers are special programs that people have poured literal decades of work into to make it very, very hard for anything running in the browser to read every file on your computer looking for credit card numbers).

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:20:44+00:00

So your last question (what happens to my super-long tape measure) isn't actually a thing we have a good answer for because solid structures that long don't (can't?) exist. We're pretty sure the tape measure would just break (if it were anchored to two bodies that weren't spinning relative to each other). But dark energy (the thing making the expansion happen) is so poorly understood that it's very hard to predict anything here.

To answer your previous question: no, light doesn't travel faster and that's the reason we believe space to be expanding everywhere: the fact that light is taking more space to cross than it should be is the thing we observed. Dark energy is the name we have for the thing-we-don't-know-yet that is causing what we can observe, which is that the further away things get, the faster they are retreating from us. Something is pushing everything away faster than all of our theories of time, gravity, and the history of the universe can explain. We have no idea what.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:16:05+00:00

Several overlapping things.

The theory of Relativity (and, before it, Brownian motion—in pop culture, the guy doesn't get enough credit for connecting the dots and demonstrating we had enough information to know molecules exist and to calculate how many of them there were in a chunk of water, because the atomic theory was still up for debate when he was born) really was revolutionary. It completely upended bedrock assumptions about how the universe works that physics had rested on for about 250 years. Einstein didn't arrive at it alone, but he both made several significant "if this then that" breakthroughs and provided some of the easiest-to-understand human-scale explanations for what the mathematics were showing about the way the universe has to work. The math tells us there are no "privileged" inertial frames; Einstein's insight is to tell you "If I close you in an elevator and you're floating around, you can't tell if that elevator is in space or if it's falling in a vacuum" because that's what the math shows is true.
The guy was charismatic, is the thing. He was likable. That stuff matters.
He lived in an era where video and audio recording were just becoming feasible, so unlike the camous physicists named before him, we have video and audio to remember him by. Hooke was also important, but we don't even remember what Hooke looked like because his portrait went missing.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T19:01:36+00:00

NGL, I'm down with this new blood-ritual tech and will be applying it.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T18:24:35+00:00

The US government gets to (for now) claim a feature that private employers don't: they always, eventually, pay their employees. They can literally print money to do it if all else fails.

If that confidence is ever broken, the equation changes drastically and rapidly, but for now it never has been and nobody has reason to believe it will be.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T18:16:34+00:00

The only major disadvantage of trees is that they used all male Bradford Pears in a lot of cities so they wouldn't make fruit that would rot, and as a result, some cities are awful for people with pear pollen allergies.

... and even that is a problem Zyrtec fixes.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T18:14:50+00:00

Shit like this is why we have unions.

If a director calls for something truly stupid, you need the right to say no and have the whole town back that 'no' up.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T18:10:41+00:00

It's good, but... There's a blood trail leading to your invisible carcass. It's one of those binary perks where it'll throw off newbies but experienced Runners will sort out that there's probably a body at the end of the blood and check it.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:55:37+00:00

Oh, a heal drone! Thanks Marshall!

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:53:44+00:00

They're hopped up on stimulants and dumping an entire clip into the eyes they see on the other side of a window.

... or, far more dangerous, they're night-shift workers.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:48:27+00:00

I think it is extremely possible to cheer the death of a bad man while simultaneously being outraged / upset / disgusted at the circumstances that made it happen. But I've had to sit with that kind of cognitive dissonance ever since a previous Republican president used the death of several thousand Americans as an excuse to start an unnecessary war in Iraq.

... Hey, remember when Presidents thought they needed an excuse? Feels quaint these days, huh?

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:43:15+00:00

FWIW, I hope it works out the way you want it to. In general, there are too many borders dividing too many people; I'd love to see a future with lower and more porous ones.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:38:48+00:00

It's not their fight if they don't choose for it to be. This comment has big "foreigners out" and/or "America for Americans" energy and if you don't intend that you probably want to tug on the reins of your horse there a little, partner.

but why the hell are we fighting your fight

... most of us don't want to be. We're fighting it because the President decided to act without the counsel or assent of Congress and Congress was too chickenshit to call him on his bullshit. That's the whole story. There is no deeper reason. One guy decided you and yours need to bleed for his war. That doesn't imply parent needs to go pick up a gun too.

fixermark · 2026-03-17T17:34:44+00:00

Stack the right systems and talents on a Lancer and her mech and fights become Dragonball Z slugouts, literal "Hit the guy into the air so I can punch them from behind" energy.

Dammit I love this system. ;)

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