jbattle

13 ms·

1.
by jbattle 6mo ago
I just want to say it blows my mind we're likely to literally land on the moon before we get a proper KSP 2
2.
by jbattle 1y ago
Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called Balance of Power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's
3.
by jbattle 1y ago
Biden's inaugural address was full of this "To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward.
4.
by jbattle 1y ago
I dread the idea. The leaf blowers running nonstop 10 months a year are noisy enough. Maybe I can convince all my neighbors to fly barrage balloons in all the back yards.
5.
by jbattle 1y ago
Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to ke
6.
by jbattle 2y ago
I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize “cavemen” had come before? I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this topic. Im no historian but i felt lik
7.
by jbattle 2y ago
Lake Michigan is BIG. The location of this thing isn't public but Chicago is closer to Cleveland than the middle of Grand Traverse Bay. Washington DC and NYC are closer together than Chicago and G.T.B. I'm no expert in the Great L
8.
by jbattle 2y ago
I'd argue that a suite of tests that exercise all reasonably likely scenarios is table stakes. And would have caught this particular bug. I'm not talking about 100% branch coverage, but 100% coverage of all happy paths and all unh
9.
by jbattle 2y ago
create a subscription for a test user. delete it. Make sure you can create another subscription for the same user. create subscriptions with and without overlapping effective windows Those seem like very basic tests that would have highligh
10.
by jbattle 2y ago
There are only 12,000 coal miners in WV. Only 45,000 in the whole US. Obviously there are a large cast of others supporting the miners directly and indirectly (e.g. truck drivers, manufacturers of mining equipment, etc). There are 341 milli
11.
by jbattle 3y ago
There's an old video game called Seven Cities of Gold wherein you play a european explorer poking about the new world. It has procedurally generated game worlds, and claims to use some plate techtonics. I don't remember if you cou
12.
by jbattle 3y ago
I have little fear about AI generating propaganda. It's cheap to write a crappy article and fake a photo or two - or choose a real photo but twist the story around the photo. What I worry about is "artificial / generated cons
13.
by jbattle 3y ago
I'll throw in a couple more good pieces of music by Ethiopians: This is from an album of older pop music. From the little I've read this is something like live bar music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSUuqP7RFj0
14.
by jbattle 4y ago
Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly one
15.
by jbattle 4y ago
Fabulous writing - I have tons of work to do tonight but read both parts, chuckling the whole way down and up the Mississippi.
16.
by jbattle 4y ago
To be pedantic, these aren't really the "ancient Egyptians" people usually imagine. King Ramses and Tut and that lot. When these people were buried, Egypt had already been ruled by Greeks and Romans for 300 years (longer than
17.
by jbattle 4y ago
If you have a VR headset, VTOL VR is amazing. All the controls you interact with by reaching out and flipping toggles. The graphics are good enough. You get three aircraft with the base game and there's a DLC available that adds an AH6
18.
by jbattle 4y ago
In the 'Once and Future King', the boy who will be King Arthur looses an arrow into the air, just for the joy of it. A crow comes out of nowhere and grabs the arrow. Art's foster brother believes the crow was actually a witch
19.
by jbattle 5y ago
What's the difference in this case? Doesn't seem too different from how camouflaged eggs would have developed (maybe just faster because the selection mechanism is so strong). When I think of selective breeding I think of humans p
20.
by jbattle 5y ago
> In other words, it could well be by nature, that recognizing black faces is harder than pale faces under the normal camera and scene settings. This might be the crux. Why are pale-face-recognizing settings the "normal" settin
21.
by jbattle 5y ago
I disagree. Obvs D&D evolved out of a literal wargame (chainmail). And there are a lot of influences from wargaming, but 90% of the focus (from the beginning) was on: - Characters who grew and changed each time you played - Exploring p
22.
by jbattle 6y ago
I always tell my wife to bury me without a casket, wearing tanned animal skins, covered in shells and with a bunch of flint arrowheads scattered around. Just to give some archeologist 5,000 years from now a real cracking paper to publish an
23.
by jbattle 6y ago
Really good question actually! I peeked at the javascript and it looks like when you hit `run`, it is calling the step at a setInterval (if I'm reading this right, as fast as the browser can call run) So at the end of each run call, th
24.
by jbattle 6y ago
To be fair, Cahokia was (if I remember right) the only large city for literally 1000 miles. If anything that impresses me all the more - these people may have spontaneously invented the idea of urbanism. I believe there were widespread trad
25.
by jbattle 6y ago
Given how long governments have kept records (domesday book, bablylon) and how few governments have slipped into totalitarian hellscapes, I'm not as worried about this as you are. I'm more concerned about the patriot act & etc
26.
by jbattle 6y ago
I can't tell if you are trolling. I'll assume good faith. We show ID to enter bars. We show ID to buy certain products. I provide identifying information when I pick up tickets at will call. Some items (like houses, cars, guns) yo
27.
by jbattle 6y ago
I'd trust this system if it were double-blind. The government issues an identifier to me (separate from SSN). I feel OK giving that number to restaurants. If there is a reason to initiate contract tracing, the restaurant hands its list
28.
by jbattle 6y ago
Yeah there are concerns about methane being released from melting permafrost. I can't find information about how old the permafrost is - but my understanding is tens of thousands of years old. I also can't tell if the methane itse
29.
by jbattle 6y ago
A) the lower bounds of climate change is now +2°C. The MWP was maybe +1°C. B) (Possibly) I can't tell how long that change took to come into effect. One of the current concerns is how rapidly climate is changing. C) Evidence points tha
30.
by jbattle 6y ago
Sounds like the rock is riddled through with fractures. Weakening the whole mountain

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