Quite a while ago I decided, for what reason I don’t know, to take Dwarf Fortress’s exported fully-populated world, translate it through a layer of LLM to obfuscate all the races to new fantasy races and create outlandish points of interest, and put the whole thing in a renderer that could dynamically move around and zoom to create a nicely rendered watercolor-style map for a massive explorable TTRPG type world.

I gave up the idea when it was like 1% done but if you’d like to have any of the nonsense I created in case there’s something useful you can turn it into, you’re welcome to it. It’s in Python.

“Where there’s muck, there’s brass”

In general, if you can do the more difficult aspects, then you’ll be more in demand (both because people need them done, and because it’ll serve as a badge that yes you know what you’re doing in a general sense).

In games specifically, it’s more likely that you’d find yourself doing optimization, or the low levels of porting a game from one system to another, as opposed to writing an engine from scratch. If it were me, I would probably get involved in some existing project and try to write a new low-level system (e.g. a Gaussian splatting renderer for Unity or something) as opposed to just reinventing a new engine of my own. But absolutely, if you’re skilled with the deeper systems aspects as opposed to just using the existing tools, it’ll help you generally speaking.

Yeah. Normally there’s a swiss cheese model where multiple failures had to line up together to make a problem. MCAS was the only non-flight-crew-related problem I’ve ever heard of where it was just one thing. One thing failed, the plane flew itself inexorably into the ground, everyone’s dead, the end.

And, engineers involved tried to raise the alarm that it was a problem.

The whole history of the decision-making that led to the MCAS system made it clear to anyone who’s ever worked in an engineering organization that more failures were coming. The engineers saying “This is a problem, don’t do it this way” and the management saying “STFU, I’m in charge, do as I say” never, ever leads anywhere good.

Some people didn’t read up on what happened to Ernst Röhm

I could run my own, yeah, that’d be a fine option. I plan to at some point anyway, just trying to avoid the time investment for as long as I can postpone it. I found some likely places and DMed the admins to ask if it’d be okay; if no one’s open to the idea, I might bite the bullet though yes.

Yeah, I’m sorta inclined to agree; I looked at how it works out in practice and it’s definitely a little obnoxious. I disabled it for now.

It’s tough because I’d like for it to be accessible both from the big instances like lemmy.world, and from the instances like beehaw that have defederated the big instances. So that tends to imply that a good home for it would be on one of the little instances. But, it’s not gonna sit well on the little instances if it’s making a firehose (relatively speaking) and overwhelming their local feeds.

IDK; I’ll ask around and see if I can find a good home for it. Absent some person coming in and saying “yes ruining the local feed is ok” I’m gonna conclude that that’s not SDF though.

(From memory, so there might be tiny mistakes in the language:)

“If we could climb the highest steeple
and then look down on all the people,
and shoot the ones not wholly good,
as we, like noble shooters, should,
Why then there’d be an only worry:
Who’d be left to bury
Us?”
    -Walt Kelly

Sounds like it’d work great. You might want to use something like DigitalOcean instead of your home machine, for a couple different reasons. DigitalOcean is cheap for this type of application (like on the order of, IDK, $5-10 a month or something).

Also, fair warning, the current generation of Fediverse software is a pain in the ass to install, even before you get into issues of upgrading it, staying on top of security of the server, etc etc. But sure, it’s doable if you’re savvy and willing to invest some small time into it.

You just blew my mind.

I kept wondering why semi-literate politicians with fully-illiterate supporters would write books at all… who is the target audience? What makes it worth the trouble? Like I don’t agree with their priorities but I see them as perfectly effective at what they’re trying to do; why are they doing this weird thing? Why can I buy a book Matt Gaetz “wrote,” hardcover, on Amazon for $10?

This makes it make sense.

I mean, it’s working for her so far. What else is she qualified to make six figures at, let alone while not having to behave professionally or do any work?

If she believed in hell, I think she’d have some reservations, but as it is I think she’s probably pleased as punch about the result.

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” -FDR

Also:

Che wants to see California legislators change their approach towards entrepreneurship.

“Make that path easier. Make it less expensive, make it more simple, streamline it. Instead of putting roadblocks in front of it, open it up. Guide people,” Che said.

Do we think this guy got a bunch of free money from the government during COVID?

Oh look, he did. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it was a good program and good to make use of it. But, his whole attitude during the article of complaining about how difficult it’s going to be to figure out how to use it in such a way where he won’t have to pay it back really smacks of “I have never worked in a dishroom or behind a register even a single day of my life.”

Be grateful. You fuck. Just like you should be grateful that our economic system gives you a little squad of people to run your business day-to-day for you and you get to keep the profits, instead of complaining that all of a sudden you won’t be able to have them do it exactly the way you want them to, whether or not it can economically produce a living wage for them. With lunch for the fancy people and all. You fuck.

I don’t think she cares what the actual policy is. The point is, she gets to make noise about the right’s well-trodden favorite topic. What’s actually going on is of no concern.

TL;DR: “Doe 537” or whatever has been identified as some person you’ve never heard of, and it’s unclear whether that means they were guilty of anything. Also Bill Clinton is in there, although it’s also not clear if he was guilty. The only actual indication of wrongdoing by anyone in this fairly long article is here, which I will include with some level of sadness but without comment:

Alan Dershowitz has sought to get numerous filings unsealed, arguing they would disprove Giuffre’s misconduct accusations against him as well (the two settled a large number of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits against each other and their lawyers in 2022, with Giuffre stating she “may have made a mistake” saying Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz).

I nominate “stating she ‘may have made a mistake’” as this year’s six Hemingway words that by themselves communicate the whole goddamned story from beginning to end.

Good point, just added that to my comment as well.

FWIW, 23andme isn’t saying this just out of the blue, but to defend themselves in court from being sued by people who lost their data because of people reusing passwords.

Honestly everyone sucks here. Don’t reuse passwords for anything remotely important. And, don’t allow people to sign in to any remotely-important web service without 2FA. (Edit: And, if you are going to be sloppy protecting your users from having their accounts broken into, don’t give users access to every other relative’s data for no particular reason.)

Passwords aside, I’d never in a million years entrust my DNA information to some random outfit on the internet and assume that good things would happen to it, but that’s just me.

I’m fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul’s report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I’ll cut to the punch line. It’s:

• $659 billion in interest on the national debt
• $236 billion in “improper federal payments” – basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn’t have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
• $851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items

Or, to put it in visual form:

Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.

Just one?

Yeah. The US government is one of the biggest and most byzantine entities on the planet. You’re going to be able to find some bullshit in there if you look. But that doesn’t all of a sudden mean this culture-war pettiness is the whole problem, and the tax breaks and giveaways for the rich and the Death Star defense budget all of a sudden aren’t relevant to the discussion.

Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills; photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds; the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear; $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development; and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to “struggling” music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.

Oh, so it’s culture-war bullshit. Neat.

“Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,”

Oooooh… okay, I get it now. It’s a desperate attempt to find a catchy and memorable thing to blame that isn’t “we give money to rich people by the trillions and tax them less than we do the electricians.” $6 million is like a week’s worth of lost tax revenue from any one of 500 different companies. But sure, tourism in Egypt is the problem. Everyone please remember that.