Man I wish we had better terminology for this type of game. Roguelike and roguelite give the same energy as “Doom-clone” for every fps in the 90s. Later we called them FPS games. That genre has since been refined into tactical shooters, arcade shooters, milsim, etc. Meanwhile, we’re still stuck calling all games that have randomized runs “rogue-likes”. Being pedantic about the definition doesn’t make this situation better.

TBF, most land predators can’t even survive in water. The real perfect predators are dolphins. They were in the water, left it, and returned just to show us they still got it.

Yep. The worst part of winter isn’t all the clothing. It’s getting undressed every time you arrive at your destination.

Disagree. One of the main purposes of military training (in most, maybe all, cases) is to strip everyone of their individual autonomy.

If you’re not OK with what you’re ordered to do, you should not do it

The problem with this that soldiers are explicitly trained to not even consider their own judgement of their orders. They don’t stop, judge, then pull the trigger. They just pull the trigger. If they disobey an order, they’re court martialed. It’s the military’s justice system that then gets to decide if the order was unlawful. The system is designed to strip soldiers of their power.

If a 28yo enlists, they share some responsibility simply by knowingly joining an immoral organization. But most new recruits are in high school. They don’t know what the hell is going on.

All this to say: the leaders who have stripped young boys of their autonomy in order to have them commit horrific acts that will scar them for life in order to protect their own regime, they’re the real villains. I see the individual soldiers as victims.

give me an example of a modern uprising where the protesters used weapons to achieve their goals.

Uprising was maybe the wrong word. But off the top of my head, the Black Panthers and the IRA both used lots of weapons to achieve their goals. The Black Panthers were considered by the FBI to be the biggest threat to the US government in the 60s. They were eventually stopped with counter-intelligence, infiltration, criminalizing, and disarmament rather than military action.

You bring up good examples of uprisings that didn’t use weapons and times that uprisings were suppressed with military force. I guess I would slightly walk my original claim back. However, I still think that the people having guns is better than not. I can’t find an article, but during the 2020 BLM protests, there were plenty of armed counter protesters. The police were harassing the protesters and leaving the counter protesters alone. Lots of ink was spilled about how this showed which side the police were on. That’s probably true. But there was also some Texas BLM protests where the protesters showed up armed and the police didn’t fuck with them. They didn’t need enough firepower to win a battle. They just needed enough to deter aggression.

This argument never seemed true to me. A typical uprising isn’t suppressed with tanks and fighter jets. It’s suppressed with police. Your uprising doesn’t have bases and fortifications to bomb. An uprising isn’t attempting to control territory. The military and all it’s power isn’t really built to supress an uprising. The US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having the most powerful military in the world because asymmetric tactics work.

When I owned a Miata, I almost put a yellow triangle flag on the radio antenna to make it look like an RC car.

Part 2 was not a disaster. Personally, I think both parts were really good. No idea where you’re getting such a negative opinion of part 2.

I interpreted this to mean that you need to learn a lot of math in order to have a career in astronomy. I don’t think OP thought it was possible to actually go to the star and math was the limiting factor.

I don’t drink at home. I’ll let loose when I’m out with friends but at home I don’t drink. I had a period of my life where I was very close to becoming an alcoholic. It wasn’t until a recovering alcoholic (using extremely broken English) suddenly seemed very concerned with me and told me I could talk to him any time that I realized where I was heading. A couple years later I messaged him to tell him how important that moment was to me. I don’t even know if he could read English well enough to get the point but I hope he understood.

I agree with this sentiment. In general, I think that leftist political ideas are quite popular when you swap out the leftist terminology. “The real culture war is between the shareholders and the workers” doesn’t raise a person’s guard like “The bourgeoisie are oppressing the proletariat”. It also forces you to explain a little about your meaning to somebody who maybe doesn’t already know what these terms mean. Whenever I’m trying to talk politics with someone who is open-minded but not explicitly leftist, I try to use this tactic so I don’t immediately run into a wall of conditioned responses.

Babe, you got a Haas? I said I wanted to try CNC, not this Fischer Price Tinker Toy shit.

(I don’t actually hate on Haas but I know they’re often more light-duty than some other options.)

Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.

My house has 2 other units and we all share one network. Without a VPN, my neighbors could see all my network traffic. I don’t think they know or care how to do that but it’s enough to keep me on a VPN at all times.

North Korea is the only one that could fall under that category. It just seems like a ton of resources to throw behind a tiny fraction of the nuclear threat to the US. Couldn’t we station boost-phase interceptors in South Korea and/or Japan for a whole lot cheaper? An anti-satellite capability is much easier to get than a nuclear ICBM. If they can make a nuke, they can take out a satellite.

Ultimately, Golden Dome is a wunderwaffe. The Trump administration is excited about it for the same reasons the Nazis were excited about their military vanity projects. It’s hard to discuss it purely in it’s own merits without also considering the reason it is being pursued. It isn’t being pushed by top people in the military or Pentagon. It’s pushed because some high up fascists saw the Israeli Iron Dome and were like “we gotta have one of those, but BIGGER, and make it GOLD”. It’s an aesthetic marketing halo project for MAGA fascism.

The second key is, in order for it to be viable, you need enough of them in space to actually have the impact that you need.”

This is the part that makes Golden Dome non-viable IMO. Golden Dome is attempting the holy Grail of ballistic missile defense: boost phase intercept. The idea is that the missile is slowest, biggest, and easiest to detect and track immediately after launch. Golden Dome is attempting to place the launchers in orbit.

The problem is every satellite takes a predictable path, so the launching country could just wait until it’s not overhead and launch. This means you need a bunch of satellites in a spaced out orbit so there’s always one over the launcher. And you need that for every potential launch site. And most nuclear capable countries have road-mobile ICBMs, so you need enough to cover the whole country. The launching country could just knock out a satellite to punch a hole through your defenses and then launch in the brief window. So now you need redundancy. But every redundant satellite you place can be countered by one extra anti-satellite missile. Anti-satellite missiles will always be cheaper to build than satellite-based interceptors. China has 110 nuclear ICBM silos in one field in the desert. Are you going to be able to shoot down 110 missiles launched at the same time from the same area?

The author makes it sound like Reagan-era Star Wars was infeasible but now it’s fine because of technology. I really don’t think the fundamental economic issue has been resolved. It would take these satellites becoming much cheaper to deploy or some kind of counter to an anti-satellite missile.

A good bicycle is what I was going to put. I was able to get rid of my car and dramatically cut my spending on rental bikes and public transit.

A method of optimizing parameters for manufacturing bearings. Specifically the raceway superfinish process.

There are several machine parameters (oscillation speed, stone pressure, time, etc) that go into the superfinish process. The only output is surface roughness. I created a way to optimize for a low roughness. The best part was that once you set it up, you can just start printing out worksheets and handing them to engineering techs to get some more data collected.

Before I did this, superfinish parameters were considered a bit of a black art and were only adjusted when there was a problem. This means they were always as bad as they could possibly be.

Me and my friends used to get high and play geometry wars on the 360. Lots of fun passing the controller around to see who can get the farthest.