TheChurn

The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.

Romney was wrong then and he is wrong now.

The greatest threat is and was China. Russia does not have the means to directly compete with the United States.

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.

A renderer in Python has to be slow AF

The OG Crysis wanted hardware that still doesn’t exist. They built the game and engine under the assumption that clock speeds would keep increasing, and instead we moved to high core counts.

Even today, at 4K and max settings, the original (2007) release can drop below 100 fps on the best possible hardware.

Every billion parameters needs about 2 GB of VRAM - if using bfloat16 representation. 16 bits per parameter, 8 bits per byte -> 2 bytes per parameter.

1 billion parameters ~ 2 Billion bytes ~ 2 GB.

From the name, this model has 72 Billion parameters, so ~144 GB of VRAM

There are similar objects that are icosahedral (d20 - shaped) that do not have holes, but do have the external nubs.

The glove theory is popular, but that style of knitting isn’t known to have been practiced for more than a thousand years after these objects were created. They have never been found with knitting needles, or other thread-related tools.

There’s also a bit of a paradox with record keeping. Very common things were almost never recorded - what would be the point of that after all, everyone already knows about them - and these objects don’t appear in surviving records. However, we haven’t found enough of these for them to have been all that common, and they seem to be confined to Gallo-roman areas, suggesting a sub-cultural difference.

The unsatisfying answer is that we will likely never know.

The border is already closed to illegal travel, that’s why such travel is illegal.

The border is not impenetrable - it is over a thousand miles of mostly difficult terrain - and enforcing entry requirements is difficult for those reasons.

The single most effective way to reduce illegal immigration is to punish businesses for employing illegal immigrants. As with everything else, as long as a market exists then there will be an economic incentive to break the law. This is true for drugs, prostitution, Russian oil, etc.

The federal government essentially enables the employment of migrants because many industries, particularly food harvesting and processing, could not operate without this labor. The consequence of the choice to not punish these companies is more migrants seeking the same economic opportunity.

Fix the problem at that end and illegal border crossings will drop dramatically.

You do not get ‘nitrogen’ at the dentist’s office.

You are given a solution of normal air with a small amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) to relax you. You are never deprived of oxygen, since the dentist isn’t trying to asphyxiate you.

A good mirror reflects more than 99% of incident light, effectively increasing the amount of power the laser needs to destroy the target by a factor of 100.

This isn’t the real concern, however. Fog, dust, clouds, and rain are quite common on the damp and dusty sphere we live on, and they would all strongly attenuate the beam power and greatly reduce the effective range.

Chevron deference means that federal agencies (FDA, SEC, OSHA, etc) can regulate their respective areas without Congress needing to pass a law for each regulation.

This is important because Congress moves incredibly slowly, and there are far far too many specific instances that would need to be legislated - there is literally not enough time spent in session.

Overturning Chevron would make things like lead in gasoline legal once again - it was only ‘banned’ by an EPA rule, congress also didn’t specify what actions to take in the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Respond Act.

The Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air act, and so on would effectively be repealed. These were acts of Congress, but the text of these laws does not spell our allowed levels of various pollutants and punishments for exceeding them, so it would be toothless.

In short, it would be an absolute disaster. Even if you think there are too many regulations, eliminating all of them, across nearly all facets of life, overnight is the worst way to go about this imaginable.

The form of silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing, specific formations of sand, is becoming harder to source from the environment. Silicon the element is incredibly abundant - the vast majority of all rocks on Earth are silicates - so there isn’t a risk that we run out of silicon itself any time soon.

What may happen, in several decades, is an increase in price due to the need to process more abundant rocks to obtain pure silicon.

Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.

Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.

There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.

Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.

Immigration is a football wedge issue that cannot and will not be addressed.

The solution is already known, stricter enforcement of penalties for employers of undocumented workers. But that would actually fuck a sizable portion of the economy, as these workers are vital to a lot of low-wage labor (harvesting and food processing in particular).

Instead the plants and the feds play a game where the authorities give advance notice of ICE raids, and take a couple people and the employers face insignificant penalties.

As with any other mass behavior, adjusting it requires altering the economic incentives. People come here for higher wages, they come here illegally because the legal method is expensive, arbitrary, and time-consuming, and the opportunities open to illegal migrants are still enticing enough. Stopping illegal migrants requires removing those opportunities.

That might make some shareholders a penny less wealthy though, so we can’t have it. We’ll just keep arguing about this for the next 500 years and accomplish nothing, just be sure to vote for US because the other side wants to do the BAD THING on immigration.

it’s not spontaneous

Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.

Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose’s theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it “seems weird” for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

I agree with you, but it doesn’t change the implications of a police officer having a complaint and a sufficient description to follow up on it without a warrant.

It is at their discretion, same as if you called in that your grandma didn’t answer the phone, they could ignore it or bust down the door. Both would be fully legal.

Court is a different matter. A judge could say there wasn’t cause to search after the fact, but that won’t change what the police do in the moment.

With a complaint and a full description of the offense, the officer had cause to force entry.

Same as if someone called in a suspicious package, they wouldn’t need a warrant to gain entry.

Society gives police an incredible amount of leeway.

The problem with the principal refusing to escort the officer is then they are obstructing a police investigation, and that is a crime. It isn’t fair to put this burden on them, the blame lies squarely with the police chain of command.

In fact the root problem of all things police is that once police decide to do something, even if that thing is illegal, interfering is a crime.

This is how we end up with people being charged with resisting arrest, and no other crimes that would warrant an arrest. This is also how we end up with a bunch of people live streaming George Floyd’s execution, because stopping a cop from killing someone is a crime.