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db48x

8,467 karma · joined July 20, 2011

db48x
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db48x··on Butlerian Jihad
Interstellar travel is a bit more difficult than that, and doing it at FTL speeds is presumably more difficult still.

But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.

db48x··on Butlerian Jihad
You might have misunderstood. Automation isn’t wrong, what’s wrong is allowing machines to control or direct humans. So a machine that builds cars is fine, and most worlds have plenty of those, but a machine that decides what the car should look like how how many to build would be anathema.

Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.

Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)

db48x··on Tesla Roadster
No, that is the very study that is completely absurd on it’s face. Watch the video again.
db48x··on Butlerian Jihad
It’s probably been a while since your read the book, so you have forgotten some things.

For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.

Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.

Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.

The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).

They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.

> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.

Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.

Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.

db48x··on Tesla Roadster
Did you not hear the claim that was widely quoted in the media that USAID had saved more than 91 million lives over 20 years? Anyone who believes that hasn’t done any math on it, or even thought about that number at all. I’m too hungry to be eloquent about it, so here’s someone else who is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4eQZdxlPCU>.
db48x··on Tesla Roadster
Anyone who believes that USAID was saving millions of lives (and that therefore millions of lives will be lost without it) hasn’t done the math.
db48x··on Tesla Roadster
The Falcon 9 has a much lower failure rate than that.
db48x··on The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
Server died already?
db48x··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
Yes, but Ubiquiti did a good job of advertising these features and making them available to the “prosumer” segment. With most other brands you have to go through enterprise sales, a distributor, or find them second–hand. Cisco might make the best APs ever, but good luck using them in your home.
db48x··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
Brilliant, one correct answer and three incomplete answers.

Same reason why you never implement a VPN using TCP sockets, for those readers who solidify their knowledge by triangulation (as it were) from multiple directions.

db48x··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
I’ve had no complaints with my UniFi APs, but that is a fairly small sample size. And I’m using an older model; I haven’t upgraded to WiFi 6 or 7 yet.
db48x··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
Well, they EOL’d their early–release WiFi-7 router that came out before WiFi-7 was even finalized, and simultaneously released one that they have spent an extra year debugging. Presumably they fixed the firmware bug that fixes the synchronization problem, or switched to a different implementation. It’s a really bad idea to buy early products like this since.
db48x··on Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled
How will you get your fake internet points now?!
db48x··on Ask HN: How bad Earth would have to be for terraforming Mars to make sense?
False premise. Terrafirming Mars is a necessary prerequisite to any kind of tinkering on Earth. If you haven't practiced on Mars, how will you gain the necessary experience to be trusted to do anything on Earth where the consequences of failure would be extreme?
db48x··on The Welfare State Is Crushing Britain
The wealthiest people already pay more of the taxes than the poorest. An estimate I saw last year was that in the UK the wealthiest 0.1% of people pay more taxes than the entire bottom 50%. They’re already taxing the wealthy to pay for benefits that go to the poorest. You cannot just keep adding more taxes on the wealthy and also adding more benefits for the poor forever.
db48x··on Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years
Production ion drives have ISPs between 1000s and 4000s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Comparisons). A fission fragment drive would have an estimated ISP of over 100,000s (https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-r...). Of course you can just buy an ion drive off the shelf, which is definitely an advantage. And making the fuel for a fission–fragment drive is probably going to be fun.
db48x··on Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years
It’s hard to call them “rods” at this point, since they melted and then cooled into tiny metallic droplets and shards after they were ejected in the explosion.
db48x··on Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years
Practical for many missions, just not for sending humans in person to other planets. For example, consider a mission to deliver a telescope out past 550AU so that it can use the whole sun as a gravitational lens. That’s more than 11× further than Pluto, but a fission fragment drive could get the telescope out there in about the amount of time it took New Horizons to fly past Pluto.
db48x··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
Exactly. Either way the keys are too close together for comfortable, and quick, typing. The solution is to move your right hand back to the keyboard and to leave it there. Since selecting text is usually what you do right before you copy it, learn to select the text using keyboard commands.
db48x··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
But they weren’t combined on the same system until decades later, after Windows became nearly ubiquitous and Linux systems started copying things from it.
db48x··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
Control-c meant cancel for decades before some idiot decided that it ought to mean copy instead.

As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.

db48x··on If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function
So much effort to reinvent half of Common Lisp. They haven’t gotten to the part where redefining a class causes all existing class instances to be lazily upgraded to the new class layout.
db48x··on What If Pull Requests Had an Explain Command?
Have you read _A Deepness in the Sky_, by Vernor Vinge? If so, do you remember the “Help” button?
db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
I think you may have misunderstood me.

LOD techniques are commonplace. Cities: Skylines and the sequel both implement them. Telling us that a game developer can use LOD to fit more graphics into the same poly budget is not telling us anything we don’t already know.

And the problem still remains that all the graphics must fit within a certain poly budget, usually whatever can be rendered at 30fps on the minimum spec hardware. Adding features to every property in the city to represent weeds, fallen leaves, broken concrete, grime, wear, etc all adds to the rendering cost of the game. It all comes out of the same budget, even if those features are invisible at longer distances. Worse, that cost is multiplied by everything the user has created in their city. The more such features the developers add, the smaller a city the user can build before the game’s performance drops to unacceptable levels.

Anyway, CS and CS2 already go to great lengths to add soul to the game. Every asset has defined locations where props can be placed. One house can have a swing set while the identical house next door has a pool, or toys, or a car, or shrubbery, or any of thousands of other possibilities. The author is just complaining that these props do not make his cities look dilapidated enough.

His most valid complaint is that the games don’t do much to obscure the exact property lines, which are always perfect rectangles. Perhaps in the future one will, though it will still have a budget to fit within.

db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
There were, and still are, other problems as well. The teeth were just the most obvious example.
db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
Teeth cannot rot and therefore won’t cause a negative thought if left unburied. Teeth also cannot GRASP, and therefore cannot be raised by a necromancer as an undead. A skull can be though, with or without the teeth.
db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
Yes, except the DF doesn’t compute shadows for all the teeth. Or texture map them, or use a shader to make them look wet and shiny.

Still, if they get knocked out during a fight then your dwarves have to carry them individually to the gravesite afterwards, so it’s not like you should automatically imitate DF when you write your own game.

db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
LOD (level of detail) techniques are used by practically every game ever written. It doesn’t mean that the developers can ignore the poly budget.
db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
I think it could be tastefully done. Even well–maintained objects age in real life, and that is often part of the charm.

Consider the 115 year old brick building in a town I used to live in, with the faded remnants of a 50 year old replica of the sign painted on the side by the butcher’s shop that originally owned the building.

db48x··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.

Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.

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