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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • … Some time back I put forward the idea of just making a game that is like, half splinter cell/mgs stealth combat, and half dating sim.

    Basically, you have to guide the neediest, clumsiest, insecure, easily distracted, most frustrating npc through what is ostensibly a combat game… but the game just actually is an escort quest, with extra steps.

    I put it forward as a joke, and a surprising number of people said they’d play it.

    Apparently, fun, … is just a kind of frustration, that I guess… seems solvable.


  • While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.

    More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…

    The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.

    (Not In My BackYard)

    Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.

    We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.

    … The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.

    I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.


  • I literally have to give my local LLM a bit of a custom prompt to get it to stop being so overly praising of me and the things that I say.

    Its annoying, it reads as patronizing to me.

    Sure, everyonce in a while I feel like I do come up with an actually neat or interesting idea… but if you went by the default of most LLMs, they basically act like they’re a teenager in a toxic, codependent relationship with you.

    They are insanely sycophantic, reassure you that all your dumbest ideas and most mundane observations are like, groundbreaking intellectual achievements, all your ridiculous and nonsensical and inconsequential worries and troubles are the most serious and profound experiences that have ever happened in the history of the universe.

    Oh, and they’re also absurdly suggestible about most things, unless you tell them not to be.

    … they’re fluffers.

    They appeal to anyone’s innate narcissism, and amplify it into ego mania.

    Ironically, you could maybe say that they’re programming people to be NPCs, and the template they are programming to be, is ‘Main Character Syndrome’.


  • So, to combine both:

    Make The Sims, but they are taught to be industrial engineers, who build factories instead of homes.

    You can only partially direct their social and personal actions, you can’t do the builder aspect of The Sims now, you have to teach them how to do it.

    And your Sims have to both hit production quotas, and also not all kill each other.

    Or, make Factorio, but what you’re building is personality templates, who you then put into some kind of dollhouse type environment, and keep testing, untill you manufacture androids that produce the… sitcoms?.. that you desire.


  • … so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?

    … Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?


    I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…

    …for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…

    Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.


    Just getting any fusion generator than is any miniscule amount of truly over unity, thats not enough.

    Thats infinite energy… if you have an infinite amount of time to wait, and an infinite amount of some kind of battery system to contain that energy in.


    Synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.

    And for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.

    If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.

    It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.

    Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…

    Yeah I’m calling bullshit.




  • Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.

    Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.

    Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.

    Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.


    With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.

    But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.

    Motorcycles… have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.

    Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.

    Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.

    The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.

    And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?

    I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.

    Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.

    And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.

    They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.

    Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.

    Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious…, than I would on a bicycle, where…

    … you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk… if there even is a sidewalk.

    Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.


    Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.

    Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.

    Motorcycles can do that.

    So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.


    I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.

    We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.

    We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.

    I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.



  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoFuck AI@lemmy.worldOn familiarity
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    22 hours ago

    It’s a tumblr post, yes, of course they paid $80k for a 4 year degree in how to draw specifically comics.

    This is very normal for tumblr standards.

    Oh wait, did I say tumblr, I meant BlueSky.

    They’re the same thing, the same people.

    Oh wait, is this actually a uh um, a reblog of a tumbr post onto BlueSky, by the same person, dual posting on platforms?

    Oh look, it is.

    Tumblr is BlueSky is Tumblr is BlueSky.