No, Mars lost 99.999% of all of it’s water. The part that remained is stored frozen inside. As soon as you take it out, it will be gone forever.

You can try and use and recycle it as much as you can, but once you lose it, it’s lost.

My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.

The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don’t see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn’t static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn’t move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn’t as I imagined, at those speeds it’s more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.

So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.

The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it’s more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it’s pretty much a bus.

Depends what you mean by “use”.

The Americans are the only ones to have used them in terms of destroying enemy assets (and sadly in that case it was used against civilians). But as a deterrent it’s been used by a LOT of countries all around the world and is still being used for that purpose right now.

An argument could be made the Cold War could have been an all out world war if it weren’t for nukes, with the short peace after WW2 be considered just a break and not the end.

I hope nukes won’t be used, but Ukraine is in trouble and if they are backed into a corner and facing destruction who knows what they will do. Same could apply to Iran before long, if they have the ability to get nukes somehow, it might be their only hope. Just please let it be as a deterrent and not actual nuclear war.

Nah you can just emula…

Fuck Nintendo is at my door, I’m afraid I’ll run out of ammo before they will, when I get to hell I’ll shout Ya-hoo

People will probably just post a Powershell script on Github to make it update directly from the official servers without paying the extra fee. It’s funny how the most popular activation scripts are on Github, even though Microsoft owns Github and could easily just delete them.

Most people who are fed up with Microsofts crap simply don’t buy a new computer anymore. They just do everything on an iPad (maybe pro) or similar without Windows. Gamers switch over to consoles, with Nintendo and Steam deck being preferred. Those things may run Linux like the Steam deck or another non Windows OS, but the user won’t notice or care since they don’t interact with it.

The time of the desktop and to a lesser extent the laptop has come and gone. It’s only for enthusiasts and people at work. At work people probably just use the same couple of apps or even just a browser with a webapp and never really interact with the OS. If it’s even a full computer and not a thin client connecting to a virtual desktop environment. People don’t know or care about OSes. Maybe they’ll bitch about Windows at times, but they bitch about a lot of things at work and they have no influence over any of it.

That would depend heavily on how accessible the computer is and how fat your fingers are. And I can tell you, mine are pretty fat.

Back when token ring was designed normally networks would use coaxial cables for communication. No matter if it ran ethernet, token ring or something else, everybody would share basically a single cable. The cable would have T connectors inserted to connect a computer and the end of the cable needed something to terminate it. It didn’t need to be a single line, you could have splits and even a star like design, although there were limitations.

And you are right, any disruption anywhere on the line meant the network would go do. That might be someone removing the termination cap on the end, or simply the line being broken somewhere. However because computers were usually connected using T splitters, it didn’t really matter if the computer was connected or not. But the connection not being terminated properly could be an issue. Especially if there was another cable connected to the T before being connected to the computer.

Normally in a room the cable would be laid out like a ring although it usually wouldn’t be a closed ring, but instead terminated on one end. This meant each computer would be connected to its direct neighbors, but this wouldn’t be an active thing. It wasn’t like the computer could only transmit to its neighbors and then they needed to pass it on. It was like a shared line, where everyone could transmit and every computer would receive everything transmitted.

When everything switched over to the regular twisted pair cables we know today, it didn’t really change from a communications point of view. Every computer wasn’t connected to their neighbors but instead to a hub, but just like before anything anyone transmitted could be received by anyone on the network. It wasn’t until much later when things like switches became commonplace and not everyone got all the traffic.

Well there’s the stuff I personally dislike. Like the Elon cringe skits she does, or the super weird uncanny valley face filter.

But the biggest issue is she didn’t stay in her realm of expertise. She might know a lot about certain things, but then also talks about other stuff with the same level of authority. No caveats, no this is my opinion, she present it as fact. But the fact is she is really really wrong about a lot of shit. And just mixing and matching shit you know and shit you don’t know is a big no-no in science communication.

One of the most egregious thins she did was make a video about trans folk and talked about it like it’s a fad or even a disorder. She was not only factually wrong, she was spouting anti-trans propaganda. When called out she kept the video up and didn’t do anything like a follow up, correction or apology. She has some really boomer views about a lot of things and then presents it like it’s fact. Another panned video was the one about neurodivergence (autism) and there are more like that. There are multiple hour+ video essays about how she is wrong in these cases and they are worth a watch imho.

The annoying thing is, I don’t really know what she actually does know. Because she mixes everything and doesn’t stay within her knowledge base, now everything is suspect. So even the videos about physics where I think she does know what she’s talking about, I can’t trust. And even in physics it seems like she’s very hit or miss, I spoke to somebody at a party once that did his PhD on one of the physics topics she covered in a video. He said she was like 10 years behind the times and was wrong about several key facts. Some of these were just wrong because of simplification, which might be excused given the format, but others were plain wrong. Now I don’t know enough about the subject to make a judgement, but the dude I spoke to seemed to know what he was talking about.

Science communication is really really hard and it’s a skill not a lot of people have. Look at how big the teams of researchers at for example Kurzgesagt are and even they mess up once in a while. But when they get called out, they go back and delete the video or better yet post a follow up or recently even a replacement video. And they qualify things with sources and caveats, mentioning which parts are fact, consensus, speculation and opinion. They also make it very clear at the beginning of the video what a viewer can expect. That way we can qualify the information and know what in what light to put the information presented. Now I realize Kurzgesagt may be one of the best channels when it comes to short form YouTube video science communication out there and it isn’t fair to hold everyone to that standard. But there needs to be at least some level of due diligence involved imho.

I’m sure I left out some other stuff, there is a lot to find if you look for honest critique. I’m sure there’s also a lot of unwarranted hate out there, but also a lot of stuff that’s warranted.

Sabine Hossenfelder can fuck ALL the way off. She sucks man.

This game is super cool, I love the idea, the concept, the vibe etc. However it is also hard as balls. Be prepared to die often and not really know what to do in order to not die. I’ve started it a couple of times, but even with longer play sessions didn’t get very far.

What do you mean? We just migrated that software to a Windows XP VM running on Windows 7! That was just 15 years ago, it’ll be good for another 15 for sure.

Yeah I’ve had that one happen. Big team, more than a year of work, thousands of hours, over 1500 of my own hours. Internal presentation to the team at the customer end, they loved it and couldn’t wait for actual launch day. We were all so proud and everyone was happy.

Alas that day never came, the customer went bankrupt due to one of the investors pulling out. Nothing to do with us, just some bean counter did the math and decided they were better off letting the company fold.

I spoke to one of the people at the customer we had worked with throughout the project. She was devastated it was all for nothing and she lost her job as a result. By the time a new investor came around to pick up the pieces, she had found a new job. Spoke to the former ceo of the customer, he had a new job for a couple of days a week at the company that bought up the remainders. He fought to get the project going again, but the new company is very non IT focused, oldskool. So they vetoed it. I later found out one of the project leads was consulted and he had pretty much killed any chance. I always disliked that dude, but he got a pretty good deal out of it or so I’m told.

That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Wow you didn’t like Planet Zoldath? I loved that game. It reminded me a lot of similar games I’ve played in the 80s. Walking around a lot, puzzling, no focus on speed or combat, just trying to explore an alien ecosphere. I absolutely loved that game, especially the variety in the different (randomly generated) maps and strategies you need to use to solve them. Especially the inclusion of aliens that give hints and trade stuff is really cool I feel.

Sure the walking is slow and the two slot inventory is annoying, but I feel just like with Barbuta, that was kind of the point of it. The walking speed isn’t that slow and the map is very small. And there are strategies you can use to prevent a lot of the backtracking. The game does have the flaw of it being randomly generated, it can give you terrible (or impossible) maps. But I went and got the cherry for this game, I loved it.

How do you know not all glass is cheese flavored?

Yeah not sure what they mean by “online” in the early 80s. That was even too early for BBS to really be a big thing. Like there were people out there messing with that stuff. I had a modem for my MSX in 80s, where you put the horn on the modem to interface. But besides from dialing my one friend who also had one and being amazed at the tech, it had no real use. The graph makes it seem like an actual percentage of people were not only online, but meeting their future partners on there? That makes me doubt the validity of this graph.

It can’t hurt to give it more cooling capacity. But it probably doesn’t matter much. It will run a a bit warmer with the sticker, but still be well within what the hardware can handle. Since it normally isn’t a performance critical component, it won’t run too hot and cooling it more gives no benefit.

All the same, I kinda hate it when they put a big heatsink on something and then cover it up with stickers. But the size of the heatsink is usually part of the marketing and not an actual design requirement.

Just waiting for the moment Nvidia is like yeah we won’t be making any GPU chips any more, just AI chips from now on.

In the future due to climate change we need to time our launches into space in between hurricanes. Oh wait no that’s the present.

It’s copypasta…