genocidicbunny

In that same light, all of us programmers sold our souls for cash to make the Facebooks and Flocks and OpenAI's of the world. Don't throw stones when you live in a glass house.

> They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.

Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"

Alaska does the same too. Especially with their shorter flights, you might have more than 2 of the same flight per day.

I don't know how easy it is to find in the US, but I tried French Bloom while visiting Marseille and found it to be a great NA wine.

Edit: it's a sparkling wine, but imho that makes it more versatile. Gives you a NA option when everyone else is breaking out the bubbly.

Not fully. There's a lot of institutional inertia that makes it hard to train and hire new ATC controllers. The pay isn't that great, it requires a lot of education, and you might have to move to some small city to get started for your career -- you're not gonna be doing JFK fresh out of certification. That might be fine if you're in your early 20's, but by the time you're qualified to be ATC you've probably got more than just job goals in your life. And unlike the military->civilian pipeline for pilots, there's not that many people who could transition to civilian ATC after a military career.

The current admin is probably not helping much, but it's an issue that goes back quite a bit.

It shows another generic large semi-industrial/semi-commercial building with a fancy facade around the lobby/reception area and a big blocky rectangular warehouse-style building behind it, with a little mechanical area outside of it. For a moment I thought I was staring at a satellite photo of parts of south San Jose, Sunnyvale or Newark. I can't even begin to count how many of these I've seen in my life. And counter to your point about aesthetics of an office building, I have seen plenty of office buildings that have nice shaded and tree-covered parking lots that aren't wide expanses of asphalt, with pleasant outdoor areas, and architecture that might not be exquisite, but fits well with the time and place it exists in.

Notice I said that it's the populace who will gain an appetite for flattening Iran, not that it's actually practical to achieve that. You could very well find yourself extending the war for much longer than it would otherwise go on, because there will be increased political support for it.

Look at what 9/11 did - for quite a while after the attack, which was heinous but in the grand scheme of things nothing compared to the scale of destruction that was visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan afterwards; And at least for a few years, very many Americans were in favour of those conflicts.

I'm not saying it's possible to accomplish that, just that directly harming the comfort of the American populace is a good way to unify large parts of said populace in wanting to destroy you. There's a non-zero chance of increasing America's appetite for war rather than reducing it with such actions.

Trouble is, there's a good chance that a large portion of the population will then be in favour of ending the war by escalating it to the point of flattening Iran. And that portion of the population has somewhat of a correlation with the political base of the current administration.

> They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.

The irony is that soldiers in the US military are usually better trained than the cops, and aren't going to magdump when an acorn hits their patrol car.

A lot of them _want_ to be able to go in guns blazing and not having to be careful. They're living out a Warrior fantasy.

I don't know that Microsoft is without significant blame here. They provided a mechanism for LG to do this without the necessary checks. They could just as easily make part of the WHQL process and related agreements state pretty clearly that such behaviour is forbidden and will result in anything from financial penalties to driver decertification.

If anything, as shitty as LG's behaviour is, Microsoft gave them the tools to eke out a little more money at the expense of the consumer, and a company like LG is not likely to leave that money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts. As the scorpion told the frog - "It's my character".

It's both. Getting into the multi-billionaire levels of wealth takes a certain mindset that can probably be easily associated with some neurological disorders and personality traits that one could describe as 'monstrous'. But becoming that rich also disconnects you from the reality of the average person. Your time by necessity to maintain and grow such levels of wealth is going to be spent among other people who are either in a similar position, or want to be in a similar position and are trying to ride the coattails up the wealth ladder. And try as you might to avoid it, it will skew your mental state towards that disconnect unless you take significant effort to avoid the benefits that being at that level of wealth brings to you. Most people who would be willing to eschew said benefits are also probably not the ones trying to seek out such positions of wealth in the first place, so they're going to be severely underrepresented in the wealthy circles.

Because that was exactly the jump for me. Ultrasound led to expedited surgery that happened within 2 weeks of the ultrasound. The results of the surgery led to chemotherapy. It wasn't long between the ultrasound and BEP being hooked up.

> What's so bad about having some false positives?

Having invasive surgery. Undergoing chemotherapy. The former is bad, the latter is basically a 'lets hope it kills the cancer before it kills you' situation.

It's arguable which one is worse, but I'd rather not have to ever partake in either of them again.

No, it's mostly nonsense to them.

You know what's a progress indicator? An actual progress indicator. Not some text telling you such and such process is 1234/5678 steps done...followed by yet another line of text telling you that the process is now at step 3 of 20. It could just be a % indicator with a spinning cursor, unless the -v/-verbose flag is present.

Of course artists can learn to understand what all this means; But that is not their job, they have other things to deal with besides the esoteric and overly verbose CLIs we programmers often make.

That is exactly what one of my earliest CS teachers taught me.

No news is good news.

> artist should use any of the nice frontends that work on top of git and hide its verbosity.

Right up until something goes fucky. You know how many times I got messaged by someone dealing with vcs going wrong for them at a late hour in the evening? If I had a nickel for every time, I wouldn't be rich, but it probably would have bought me a gallon of gas.

It's not the verbosity strictly speaking. It is the minimal level of abstraction between you and the vcs and it can hardly be helped by a 'nice frontend' when things go wrong. And they will; they always do.

While I agree that git is a tool for the development of an operating system kernel, it's become clear that this is not the general perception of it. I don't mean those of us who have followed it throughout it's evolution, but those that are not 'in the know'. I have heard probably too many programmers pushing it as the end-all-be-all solution for version control even in environments not appropriate for it.

I will disagree that the output is too complex; it is. And yes, the large binaries issue is also a huge challenge to it's use. There's only so much time in the day, and when you work in gamedev there are often severe pressures to perform, and spending extra time to get into the weeds of a version control system is often not possible without sacrifice.

I apologize if I came off harsh and combative. Gamedev is a passion for me and I spent many years in that field, including working on proprietary version control systems because existing ones like SVN, Git, Perforce...etc did not fit the needs of the team.

One of the things I very frequently heard from the non-programmer disciplines was how obtuse and indecipherable the existing version control systems were. That is where I'm coming from.

Your knowledge is still appreciated, by me as well, because while I am well familiar with the way git works, I have worked with many people who were not, and did not have the time or budget in their minds for understanding it because they had many other concerns. That is what I mean when I said that I worked with some brilliant people -- I could not do even a modicum of what some of them were capable, and likewise they probably weren't capable of the same modicum of what I was doing.

I don't know what specifically the GP post was trying to insinuate, if anything at all, but it resonated with me as someone who had experienced the same thing many times over in my career. And I probably judged your comment a little harshly on first read, which is mea culpa. You provided good information for those newer to git and seeking to understand how it actually works besides the cheat sheet guides you so often find.

> Git is a tool by programmers for programmers. If folks outside the programming community are able to use it, great, but that's not its target audience. You don't need to convince me why git isn't suitable for artists.

Precisely, and I think Lore is an interesting proposition for exactly that reason.

Now explain this to an artist with very little programming experience beyond what they picked up from their coworkers.

I don't mean to be too glib, but some programmers have this decrepit idea that anyone working with computers should understand programming to be able to fully utilize them.

I worked in gamedev, and many of my colleagues were brilliant, but your comment would read as complete nonsense to many of them. That is the problem git has in the gamedev space. You're trying to manage teams of programmers, designers, sound engineers, gameplay specialists, producers...even c-levels. The parent comment to yours is right, to many many people who work on things that Lore could be useful for would find git to be gobblygook.

As a long-long-time Lego fan, yeah, some of us will buy the 'knockoffs' if they provide something different that Lego itself wont.

I myself have tried many of the non-Lego lego sets over the years. One that has been holding my attention recently has been Lumibricks, which integrates lights into the sets, and is also cheaper than official Lego sets for similar part counts. One of the big things I've found is that where Lego wins a lot of points is on their instructions and build steps. Many other companies either make their instructions hard to read or parse, or don't do a good job with progressively building up subassemblies so they don't collapse in your hands. But there are some Chinese companies that are now making the entire experience a similar quality level as Lego does. A lot of the 'knockoffs' also focus more on the visual of the model rather than the play. Lego itself is often willing to sacrifice some realism to make sets be more playable, much to the chagrin of some fans.

Lego used to have a huge moat in manufacturing. They made good molds, they perfected the processes for making pieces (barring a few problematic colours....cough brown and dark red) and they invested heavily into clear design targeted towards accomplishing a certain level of play and excitement from those buying and building the Lego sets. Now though, those things are not a moat, they're just basic table stakes, and there are a lot of other new players entering the market who are doing just as good. I've seen multiple stages of Lego's evolution over my life, and I think they're going to need to come up with something new that's not just a silly expensive noise/light brick to continue to command the price premium that they do. Sure, their IP deals will probably float them for a while, but without bringing something new to the recipe, they might slowly start to go the way of jello deserts.

It's actually supposed to do exactly that! The set is supposedly designed to be built in the same order as the real life basilica was and is being built.

Ah I see. What I've been trying to do is integrate the LEDs into specific pieces instead, so I've mostly been using individual ones rather than strips. I was actually inspired by a Lumibricks set for my method of routing the pieces. Currently I'm trying to add lights to the modular Cinema set, which I think would be great, and I've had to resort to cutting out parts of bricks to get things routed around.

> The LED string was ~$60 and it was a silly amount of work but I have it sitting over my left shoulder during conference calls and people ask about it constantly so it was fun.

My first experiment with adding lights was to the Technic Porsche set, and interestingly, in meetings it doesn't get blurred as much as the rest of the background (probably due to the lights I put in it) so I often get asked about it as well.

Thanks for sharing!

I'd love to see the back of that if you actually integrated the LEDs into the main engine (and I apologize if you did post other photos, I have X mostly blocked so I can only see the directly linked post.) I've been hacking at adding some lights to a few sets that I thought would look great with actual lighting on them, and my biggest challenge has been the routing of all the wires in a way where the lights actually look like they're integrated into the set and not just randomly sticking out of places.

They're doing the best they can given the budget and size constraints. The set has to simultaneously be interesting and not tedious to build, cost a somewhat reasonable amount, not be too huge that no one can display or even reasonably build it at home, and able to closely enough replicate what they're trying to model.

Could they make a bigger version of this set that is more closely resembling the real thing? More than likely, yeah they can; look at the displays they have at Legoland. But would that more detailed version be accessible for even the well off AFOL? Most likely not. It'd be too big, too expensive, and too unwieldy, and will probably still fail to capture some of the details of the real thing.

I've talked with a Lego designer before, and for some themes they're not allowed to even request new molds. Even new colors of existing pieces can be contentious. My own head canon about the bonsai set is that the reason they made such a big fuss about having the recolored frogs is because it probably was a big fuss internally too. "Who'd ever need pink frogs?" sort of thing.

This is actually not particularly true. In fact, the problem of unique pieces almost ended up sinking Lego because they were spending so much on molds and manufacturing of a single piece that was only used in one set. If the set didn't sell well, Lego could potentially lose money on the set overall because of all the tooling costs.

Back in the aughts, they redid their philosophy of having large single-purpose pieces and went to having those large pieces be replaced by subassemblies of much smaller pieces that were much more general purpose. That's when SNOT became huge in Lego's official sets.

As someone with multiple decades of experience with Lego, things now are much much better than they were back in the 90's and early aughts specifically because of this pivot that Lego did. There is something to be said about part count inflation, and how many of the parts nowadays are tiny little pieces rather than the big 2x2 or 2x4 bricks. And also, some sets and some themes do require their unique pieces. Friends has their little minifigures that are different from the standard minifigs. The Mario sets might need to have some specific pieces -- there's no standard 'mario mustache' tile. But overall, Lego has done a pretty incredible job of increasing the utility and decreasing the single-use aspect of many pieces.

So the set supposedly is going to be built with the same progression as the real thing -- the parts of the basilica that were built first in real life are also the first parts of building the Lego set.

So I kinda wonder, what is the scaling like if you account for the actual build phases. How many pieces would you have to do on each of those 200 days to match the real-life progress of the basilica.

So, fun trick with sets like these, that are in the more 'professional' space of Lego is that most of the time, these sets are very open ended because they only provide you a bunch of common pieces. Which you can buy yourself.

Bricklink has a wonderful feature that you can take a set and then part it out into a wanted list, and then search seller inventory to find those parts. That's how I built that giant Imperial Star Destroyer set from the aughts for a little over $200 instead of the like $1000 that used copies of the set were going for at that time (it's probably even more now.)

Just for funsies, I looked it up, and you can get the whole 21050 set for about $150 now on bricklink, which is a pretty good $/psc price. Considering what the set is, and the lack of stickers, means it should be easy to wash a used set to get all the pieces nice and clean; a laundry bra bag with a fine mesh works great for this.