If you’re curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com

Back in 1999 a lot of websites would consist of a full-page Adobe Flash program (something that no longer works in modern browsers) a bit like how a lot of websites now are basically JavaScript apps. Because the speed of internet connections was so low back then it could take a long time for those flash apps to load all their content, so while you were waiting they might play a little animation or something that served as an “intro”.

Zombo com was a parody of those websites. There was no actual content, it just played a really really long intro that consistented of colorful blinking circles and audio of a guy saying variations of “welcome to zombo com, you can do anything here, anything at all” over and over again.

Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn’t have as much global warming denialism.

Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn’t come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

But I think you’re right though. I’ve given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it’s clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it’s better to use an electric car if they’re not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it’s better to be vaccinated if they’re not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they’re unwilling to understand what federation even is?

The first STALKER game. Near the beginning when I had hardly any ammo.

I saw a pack of feral dogs in the distance and while they didn’t sound friendly I didn’t know whether they would be hostile or how close I could get before they would aggro. Since I had so little ammo I resolved to not take any shots unless they got close.

Well, one of them did start running towards me, but before it got that close it cut off and ran away at a 90° angle. Then another, and another did the same thing. “Maybe they’re not hostile?” I thought to myself, “Do they just run around randomly?”.

Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.

Someone doesn’t like windows because they put ads in their start menu: aww you’re sweet

Someone doesn’t like Ubuntu because they put ads in their start menu: hello, human resources?

There were a lot of crazy ideas during the 50s and 60s. In the same vein as this there was some investigation into the use of gaseous core nuclear thermal rockets and power reactors:

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

https://atomic-skies.blogspot.com/2016/07/burning-gas.html?m=1

Extremely toxic, extremely radioactive, extremely oxidizing (CIF3 can set concrete on fire!), extremely hot, and under extremely high pressure (2500+ PSI!). What’s not to love?

It could be related to this video.

Go to his channel and sort by oldest. You’ll see that he started out making the absolute worst type of vacuous clickbait slop.

You know how they say “the people most likely to seek and gain power are the ones most ill suited to having it”? That applies to celebrities as well.

You remember that article about how almost every second of Mr Beast’s waking life was devoted to content creation? That’s what happens when you select for the top 0.001% of the population that want to be famous the most.

That makes me imagine penguins writing Java code.

The tires are a really terrible idea that makes it much harder to ram the rammed earth. That increases the labor demands of something that’s already extremely labor intensive (not to mention what trying to swing a sledgehammer at an angle into the wall of a tire you’re standing over probably does to your back).

They also can only really be used in the desert.

But the way the various parts of the earth ship support each other’s functions is pretty good. We really ought to make our city’s systems work like that though, instead of building isolated self-contained houses.

Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

“Prepare derivative works” means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. “Entertainment” or “because I like the series and these characters” are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

This is not how “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work” part of fair use works.

A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn’t matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word “potential” in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said “no”. Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it’s completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it’s not taken down it’s either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can’t be bothered to deal with it.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let’s plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn’t been extensively argued in court because most game companies don’t want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let’s plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn’t stop Nintendo from using YouTube’s copyright system to claim videos of their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

There’s a video about this that explains it pretty in depth.

One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it’s own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.

That wouldn’t help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.

Windows 7 is as old now as Windows 3.5 was when Windows 7 released.

Amazing how similar movie production is to game development these days.

Delays, whole projects being scrapped and rebuilt multiple times, and fixes being applied over a series of months after release.

I would add Project Gutenberg and Open Street Map to your list.

I’m going to sound a little pissy here but I think most of what’s happening is that console hardware was so limited for such a long time that PC gamers got used to being able to max out their settings and still get 300 FPS.

Now that consoles have caught up and cranking the settings actually lowers your FPS like it used to people are shitting themselves.

If you don’t believe me then look at these benchmarks from 2013:

https://pcper.com/2013/02/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review-and-frame-rating-update/3/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/review-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-6gb-185/

Look at how spikey the frame time graph was for Battlefield 3. Look at how, even with triple SLI Titans, you couldn’t hit a consistent 60 FPS in maxed Hitman Absolution.

And yeah, I know high end graphics cards are even more expensive now than the Titan was in 2013 (due to the ongoing parade of BS that’s been keeping GPU prices high), but the systems in those reviews are close to the highest end hardware you could get back then. Even if you were a billionaire you weren’t going to be running Hitman much faster (you could put one more Titan in SLI, which had massively diminishing returns, and you could overclock everything maybe).

If you want to prioritize high and consistent framerate over visual fidelity / the latest rendering tech / giant map sizes then that’s fine, but don’t act like everything was great until a bunch of idiots got together and built UE5.

EDIT: the shader compilation stuff is an exception. Games should not be compiling shaders during gameplay. But that problem isn’t limited to UE5.

This is a symptom of the absolutely insane way digital payments work.

You give a company your card details and they’re able to charge whatever they want, whenever they want, by default. That’s like paying at a restaurant by handing the waiter your entire wallet and telling them to take out the cost of the meal.

A lot of crazy “supernatural mystery” stuff consists of listing a bunch of things that are more-or-less true, but omitting one or two really important facts in an attempt to make the other details seem odd.

It’s not ai generated for what it’s worth, it’s a really old meme screencap that’s been badly ai upscaled for some reason.