Good thing I finally finished voice training and no longer need Helium to pass 👍

In my opinion apple doesn’t provide great value for the hardware and they’re lacking on the repair front. But when it comes to software, it’s so far and away better that I can’t justify staying on android. I mean forget about iMessage but go watch apples recent event and ask yourself how many of those features have parity on android. Very very few of them do. And androids watch OS is a joke and always has been.

Like yes the apple ecosystem sucks to be stuck in, but it’s also a strength if you embrace it. Nothing like those interactions between devices exist elsewhere. And the only other thing is configuration but it’s a minor pain point, not something I’d decide an OS on. It’s not that iPhone just works, it’s that it works at all. Many features on android aren’t widely supported and often get abandoned. Android just adds and adds more useless things every year without the refinement they need to focus on imo.

The pledge of allegiance in US schools

No problem! Glad you found it interesting :)

Theres some cool reasons behind that and I encourage you to look into it but the summary is that a lot of our rovers use those oversized wheels so they don’t sink and instead spread their weight over the top of it. The regolith does get more compact as you go down, so that also helps prevent sinking all the way to the bottom.

The other part is that both for rovers and astronauts we map out areas of high risk and avoid them. The Apollo astronauts landed in a specific spot and had certain areas to explore for that exact reason.

Then when it comes to the LRV (the moon buggy) that we brought up there, that thing has very lightweight tires that are essentially just mesh wire. Helps to spread the load and they deform easily to get better traction in the loose rock.

I had the pleasure of handling engineering replicas of the tires on the LRV and also newer generation martian rover tires. Including another engineering sample of the wheels on perseverance. NASA has a giant soil bin with a material that mimics the regolith that they use to test those wheels to prevent the rovers from sinking. Basically just attaching the wheels to a fake rover rig, loading it with weights, and then they drive it and track it in real time 3D space to measure slip and sinkage and all that.

The glass just has high angularity like the other particles it comes from so while in and of itself it isn’t useful, highly angular particles make for better interlocking when made into cements.

And I don’t think they’re as worried about the depth of the dust in the highlands but it definitely makes exploring craters on foot impossible with the regolith present. You could absolutely get buried in it if the depth of the dust is 10m deep in some spots. We have a lot of concerns with the dust and how we can make long term survivable hardware which is part of what I worked on.

Not sure what will blow your mind but here’s some fun facts I feel like people don’t commonly know:

1. Lunar regolith isn’t shallow, in many areas the regolith is 5m deep in the highlands and in craters and other areas it can be as much as 15m deep
2. The regolith contains agglutinates, particles of rock that have been melted together by meteor impacts. They’re basically rock glass that contributes to the high abrasion of the regolith. We don’t have much of that stuff on earth and it’s very hard to make ourselves.
3. Due to the lack of atmosphere, much of the dust is charged statically and will cling to astronauts and machines. I knew teams working on a sort of pulsing electricity in a grid of wires to repel the dust off of panels and suits.

Well, yes we’re getting a better one. I worked on Artemis adjacent projects and NASA isn’t just dreaming, they have plans for an actual moon base. It might take a decade or two, but it represents much more sustainable research and more beneficial research than what we have now in the ISS.

For those interested, I worked as an intern on a few lunar soil related projects and the plan is to actually build stuff with it. If you’re interested, AMA

I mean yes but imo the solution isn’t any of that. The problem is that Reddit has super niche communities that people expected to have enough users to build here. That isn’t the case. And we shouldn’t be looking to transplant entire communities because that rarely works.

People really need to hear this: You need to be cross posting every single niche community post into a more general community. There are too many posts on here that exist in a knitting community but not in a general hobby community that’s more active.

This is how Reddit works and we need to follow the template. You need strong pillars that people can flock to and then branch out from there. Examples might be r/funny, r/sports, etc. Then if people want super populated places to go and chat and post, those general communities are there. If they’re new, they can find your niche community by browsing the populated places. We don’t need templates for communities, we just need to have a few really populated places with high engagement to promote natural growth.

Oop nevermind, might’ve been my vpn blocking it

So awhile back I tried this by having my system SSD be a smaller 500GB drive and I had another 1 TB SSD for games but turns out I was doing it all wrong.

Seriously just invest in a 1 or 2TB M.2 SSD and thank me later, especially if you’re on windows. Then have a hard drive for programs you care less about and for data storage. My current config has even kept the 1TB SSD as an auxiliary gaming drive that I use for games of lesser importance or demand.

I just wouldn’t ever put a windows install onto a drive that’s slower than any of your other drives and also you have to be very careful about the size of that drive. I tried to do this on a 100GB SSD like a decade ago and it didn’t go very well

This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.

So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.

And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.

Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.

Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.

Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.

Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.

What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.

There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe

Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.

The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.

Borat has that bussy 😩😩😩

Yeah except most consumers no longer care about goodwill when buying new products so they’ve just figured out that it doesn’t matter what they do. So if a company has goodwill at this point, it might as well just be unspent money.

I think this is the biggest myth of conversation. People always tell you to search for people whom you share something in common with, but the reality is that nearly everyone shares something in common and there’s no reason to go searching for it.

The key to a good conversation with a stranger is to initially do two things: 1. Ask details about the stranger and 2. Intertwine that with yourself in some way. You don’t even need to share this part.

Good conversations have these things I’ll call “footholds” where you intentionally give each other details shortly after meeting in order to create those ties in conversation. If you ask where someone is from, you should shortly offer up where you are from as well. Or if you ask about a hobby, offer a light comparison to your own.

Once you have enough of these footholds, the conversation should flow freely. If it ever doesn’t, ask the stranger more about themselves. And trust me, just be interested in what they say.

The first part, absolutely. But I think a lot of that is biological so I don’t see fantasy as a problem. You should keep it to yourself though.

The second part I think Id somewhat agree with except the hacker can’t blackmail you with it because it’s just as likely that they created it. And even if they did blackmail you, I would view that as the damage caused by the hacker, not by the individual.

Like if someone put something nasty about me down in their diary where they expected it to be private, and a hacker sent me an email of that diary page, that’s entirely the hackers fault. The diary writer was expressing an emotion or desire or whatever in complete privacy. Was their creation wrong? No, I don’t think so.

And to be clear I’m not saying people should go to this type of fantasy, this is all a thought exercise for ethics, but I think a lot about this stuff because as much potential for bad as it has, it also has some potential for good. All of the women I know experience behaviors such as stalking, obsession, unwelcome sexual advances, etc. on a regular basis. There is a reason those men don’t turn to free porn. Incel behavior is also just as bad in many ways. So could AI and deepfake stuff result in many of those men keeping that stuff to themselves more? Maybe.

And before you say that these perverts will just send fake nudes to you and harass you that way, we should absolutely be prosecuting people that do so. That’s an entirely separate convo tho.

I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.

Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.

My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?