Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik might fit the bill? It's about the history and modern use of materials like glass, steel, concrete, etc. in everyday objects. Maybe not for very young kids. Wikipedia has a good summary of the content.
While most of it is pretty relaxing it opens with the author getting stabbed on the subway so watch out for that maybe.
Why can't tabs just be a visualization of browser history with the most recently used entries cached and bookmarks can go to hell (aka just be used for a hotbar)
For me not really. Open tabs are a TODO list, that are organized by work session. They get opened next to each other while I am working, and when I come back to that work, I find the tab group. I clean them up when I no longer need certain pages, and only leave open the ones with unfinished business. I visit literally hundreds of pages that are closed per open tab.
It is like I have a huge desk with papers that appear to be strewn across it, but actually are organized and the layout is important to my train of thought.
> The project no longer involves collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses. WIV has no role beyond contributing more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection, Daszak says.
From the article there's also supposed to be additional review of further grants to deny anything that might look like gain of function research.
My laymen's take is that monitoring viruses for spillover is still important, maybe more important than ever, and gain of function research has negligible benefits and probably shouldn't happen? On that basis, what's presented in this article seems to be on the right track.
It could be bad in terms of the outcomes for consumers even if it's produced ethically.
Imagine all junk food and sugary soda was produced with sustainable farming and renewable energy. It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.
I don't really have a position on this, but it seems easy to imagine how someone could.
If you say "I don't see the grounds for banning or regulating porn" but you mean "I disagree with the concept of consumer protection regulation altogether", you're wasting people's time.
Just say the more general thing in the first place so people don't have to bother trying to argue the finer points of the specific case.
I don't think that's a fair bar. There are arguments for consciousness in non-human animals that don't depend on a full explanation of consciousness in humans.
But that also doesn't imply we should suspect any particular AI of being conscious just because AI in general could be conscious in principle. We don't expect worms to be conscious just because animals can be.
I wasn't clear. I'm talking about consciousness in general, humans, animals, octopi... I keep reading but haven't found an explanation that satisfies me. Ray Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about computers and consciousness in his "The Age of Spiritual Machines". I was skeptical about a lot of what he wrote when I read it many years ago.
Now I'm not sure it matters. If people imbue their devices with intelligence and emotions then that's what they perceive. I've since learned about Tulpas. Some people have imaginary friends that seem very real to them. People will likely move their Tulpas out of their minds and into their AI's.
If Tulpas are a (very mild and benign) form of split personality (see also : writer's characters manifesting a kind of will of their own), then "moving them out" might be just an illusion... at least until/if much more advanced technology comes along. (It's then pretty much the same question as the possibility of "mind uploading".)
It does cover every case though. The solution for the orbit of a mass in a 2-body problem is always an ellipse! (Or a parabola/hyperbola for an escape trajectory). You can find the derivation here [1], it's not too complicated.
There is no way for an asteroid and the earth to interact gravitationally to change the asteroid's orbit from what it was coming in. Non-gravitational interactions (like hitting the earth/atmosphere) can do it.
Also, over many interactions and a long time you can have orbital capture in many-body situations, but there is no general equation for this (look up 3 body problem). This is how you get objects accumulating at Lagrange points for example.
TLDR: The equation you're asking for does not exist. Sorry, wrong question!!
A golf ball is around 4cm, and an arm's length is around 70cm. To be the same apparent size, it would have to maintain that same ratio. The atmosphere is like 50-100km thick (highest weather balloon flight was >50km) so you would have to be seeing it at a further distance than that.
So your asteroid would have to be at least several kilometers across. That approaching dino-killer size. You're definitely misremembering some part of this.
True, but are they finding them - especially the ones on the sun side of our orbit? Remember, this one was found by an amateur. Now, NASA is claiming authority for it.
I was in a similar situation a year and a half ago. I quit my job with nothing else lined up, despite advice to the contrary, and found a new one in a few months.
It worked out well for me, and I'd probably do it again without much hesitation if it felt necessary.
That's probably not enough to decide if it's worth it for you, but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.
Word of caution: the market today is in a completely different regime than a year and a half ago. I would be hesitant to drop out without something lined up. I don’t expect things to improve drastically in the coming 6 months.
> Cheating to reveal information locally was still possible, but these few leaks were relatively easy to secure in subsequent patches and revisions.
I don't understand this. Running the whole simulation locally on both ends means that a modified client would have access to the whole game state, and I don't really see how you could patch that out.
Anyone have any idea what they actually did? Try to detect modified clients? Obfuscate the game state to make it harder to interpret?
In age II, it was CRC checks of game state that prevented cheating! Games would get out of sync if there was a mismatch, which could happen for various reasons.
I worked at MacSoft during the Age2 and Age3 days. The ports were faithful to the windows versions, but cross platform hadn’t been solved at the time because of this problem.
It also made long game play sessions longer because the calculated state kept getting more complicated.
There was one particular Mac OS X update that broke math interoperability for multiplayer because they changed how math worked on the OS. This meant we had to bundle a common math library to ensure the game the game states would line up, preventing unnecessary CRC checks.
Do you still remember what actual toolchain you used to build Age2? I have been looking into these games for some time, and the Mac build has been helpful, but has some oddities, like very weird floating point argument passing to functions, or unpredictable vtable placement ... knowing which exact compiler toolchain was used, would be incredibly helpful! I know it's probably some VisualAge C++ version because of the name mangling, but not exactly which.
In the Definitive Edition, there has been observed cheating in online ranked mode where players give themselves infinite resources. Evidently there's a way to do that without going OoS. This was probably the same in the original. This is besides the less complex cheat, removing fog of war. Seems the only thing stopping most people from cheating is, they don't want to.
Also, I used to play the Mac version a lot. It was great! Shame they made the remakes Windows-only.
You can call the command creation functions yourself, making the game think it's part of the simulation [1]. These types of cheat have been around ever since the original game, and the HD edition [2].
I was thinking of reverse-engineering the game's calls out of curiosity, but I figured someone else already did it and wrote a nice article about it... and there it is.
Sorta. You have to mess with the DLLs and Proton settings to make multiplayer work, and even then it's laggy. It also works in Wine on Mac in some cases, but for me it always had problems.
But CRC checks wouldn't prevent things like revealing units through fog of war right? The presentation of the game state couldn't be CRCd because each player has a different view of it. And the cheat client doesn't have to modify the actual game state to get that information out.
The game actually tracks this too, what is visible for each player, which gets slightly complicated with diplomacy changing. Of course this doesn't prevent you from just patching other parts handling this, but you cannot just simply modify this value, it will desync as well.
One of the unofficial solutions used in Warcraft 3 was to spawn an illegal 3D model object in the corner of the map by a trigger as soon as the map begins, or during random spot checks during the map gameplay.
The model would crash the game (and world editor, that's why we have to spawn it during runtime) when displayed, but it wouldn't get displayed when under fog of war, so you'd put it in a place that is impossible to be seen by a player under normal circumstances. But if someone uses a fog of war cheat or a maphack, it'd crash for them.
Of course it won't prevent you from more advanced hacks which e.g. modify the client and display an overlay of the enemy units rather than just revealing the fog of war.
Similarly, a common technique used within notably the DotA community (of which's map didn't have such a tripwire) was to analyze the replay for what were termed "fog clicks", since for whatever reason object selection is part of the command stream and those using maphack would often, intentionally or inadvertently, select objects otherwise under fog.
That's cool. AoE2 scenarios sometimes had a different kind of anti-cheat, preventing players from deleting buildings that would otherwise count as points to enemies who raze them. That relied on a lot of complex triggers that I think involved spawning birds to keep count of things.
As long as users are running the game on their own computers, preventing that type of read-only cheating is not possible. "Solutions" to this problem come in the form of invasive spyware, such as Warden (Blizzard), Easy Anti-Cheat (Epic), Vanguard (Riot), etc. These are programs that run with the highest possible priviledge, inspect all memory/storage/devices/input, and report what they find to a server.
So you're saying that in order to avoid the "elitist" nightmare world of "just play with your friends, and people you trust" and "normal people are never going to want to be able to run their own servers!" all we have to do is hand over unlimited powers of surveillance to games corporations and succumb to their daylight banditry, paying a premium price for the privilege of being able to play call of duty with the teenage edgelords you may know from such online wonders as "youtube comments"? Sounds like a bargain! Sign me up! :)
Ok, so option 1) is to make internet multiplayer run on a game server, not peer to peer, but that's not exactly running the game on their own computers.
Another option would be for the peers to only send data that the other should know (fog of war), but that's a lot trickier. Because you then need to figure out how to validate the unseen data wasn't cheating, too. You might be able to do something with this today, because storage, computation, and bandwdith has grown so much.
Maybe store all the local state changes, and when a block becomes visible, send its current state first, and then stream the history as time permits; the other side would accept the state initialy, until it could fully validate it.
You would need some way to keep the randomizers in sync and fair, too.
But that only protects from seeing what should be invisible; you could still have computer enhanced movement and maybe enhanced display of data attributes that weren't supposed to be human visible.
Yes, not having the entire game state on the user's computer in the first place is a solid choice. And for many games, that's exactly how multiplayer works. They run all the logic on a server, "never trust the client" (that is, validate all the input that clients send to the server), and only send data the user needs to know.
However for something like an RTS, the amount of data in game state updates can be prohibitively large to transmit to clients. The deterministic lockstep networking model described in the article is a solution to that problem. In that system, the only data transmitted is input, and each client updates locally, so it does require them to have a copy of the entire game state.
Run entire game on server, send stuff to clients, get inputs from clients. Or full-on stream the game like Stadia (RIP). Which is hard with low-spec hardware.
I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection.
I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.
The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
As much as I am nostalgic, I agree with this. So many people here say how intuitive icons were, but which one of you can explain the meaning of the 5th icon on the first picture in the article, the one with an app window in front of a folder? I used Windows starting with 95, so it probably saw it many-many times. But now it is impossible to either remember or guess its meaning.
It's the icon for the "Programs" submenu of the Start menu. It is somewhat cryptic, but I think it's difficult to communicate "here's where your installed programs can be accessed" graphically. I don't think the icon is used anywhere else, so it's not much of a problem. You'll never see it out of context without the accompanying text.
While most of it is pretty relaxing it opens with the author getting stabbed on the subway so watch out for that maybe.