The only reason I can think of to get that data is to circumvent archive.org’s limitations on renting out stuff so your bots can slurp books without getting throttled.

That is, my best guess is that this was pirates seeing if they can’t add to libgen.

Or it’s a “prove you can do stuff” kind of deal.

Yes in principle to male plug, no to 240V unless the inverter sees a frequency to sync to. They won’t power anything during a power outage that requires the whole electrical installation to be set up for it so you don’t leak power to the outside and fry a lineman. Also that inverter attaches to one phase only which means that its power won’t even reach 2/3rds of your circuits. It does make the power meter go backwards though which is the point.

That said, ideally you’re using Wieland plugs and not Schuko so you won’t have exposed prongs. The VDE certified Schuko for feeding in up to 800W though and that’s exactly the amount parliament said doesn’t require a permit or even talking to your utility. If you’re doing everything new going with Wieland is the sane choice those outlets don’t cost a fortune, if it’s an existing installation though a) your landlord might not like it and b) electricians will demand more in travel costs than the outlet is worth.

ROMs back then got erased by UV light, EPROM. EEPROMs are a bit newer (though still ancient) and can be erased electronically, nowadays it’s a very sane idea to just throw flash storage at the problem. I think you can get modern replacement for pretty much any ancient form factor.

The way those things are used are basically big logic tables: Instead of using a bunch of logic gates, you store the output that’s expected given a certain input. Completely ancient technique, the limiting factor is storage space and sensibility – storing all addition results of two 32 bit numbers uses a lot more transistors than a 32-bit adder, but if what you want to put in there isn’t a thing that can be implemented few standard TTL components throwing storage at the problem makes sense even if you never plan to reprogram it because burning a custom set of transistors onto silicon is expensive.

Some more technical info.

It’s an legit 8-bit CPU implemented with TTL chips, what makes it a different beast than what they did back in the days is that its microcoding isn’t kneecapped. It would absolutely have been possible back in the days to build exactly such a thing, even from precisely those components. At least the TTL part, that is, I bet there’s wibbles around VGA etc. And because I already hear the detractors yes, 8-bit CPUs were microcoded: They decoded single external instructions into a stream of “load from memory, fetch from register so and so, switch on the ALU, put what’s in the ALU output somewhere”. They kept it as simple as possible and it wasn’t reprogrammable but that stuff there, that’s microcode.

Implementing CPUs in TTL chips also isn’t a new idea, that’s how early minicomputers were made (later on they got some specialised chips). And those things also used ROMs for their microcode. So you could say that this is a minicomputer capable of pretending to be different 8-bit microcomputers.

FPGAs are a completely different technology, those allow you to arrange logic in a (more or less) arbitrary topology. That is, looking at that board with all those TTL chips, it’d be the equivalent of being able to re-route all the board traces as you please.

He’s accused of tolerating such distribution even after being alerted of the fact so, yes, he’s accused of distributing it. For an online platform “we didn’t know about it because we don’t moderate proactively” is a valid defence, “authorities told us about it but we didn’t feel like doing anything about it because can’t be bothered / frozen peaches” isn’t.

You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.

And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.

Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”

“Type A” and “Type B”, I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for “I don’t want to name it but can’t call it foo and bar either because normies will be seeing it”.

As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided “male” and “female” because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you’re not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn’t consider the alternative.

That is: You’re assuming intent when there’s simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.

Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work

Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.

That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.

Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.

The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.

In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.

I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.

As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.

As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.

Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?

Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.

22% of new registered cars are electric (fully or hybrid). Still going to take a while but beginning to make a dent. Re-focussing on rail is another approach but that’s also a long-term thing, infrastructure doesn’t get expanded over night.

Another big chunk is heat, both domestic and industrial. There’s been huge dents due to better insulation and using more waste heat (mostly industrial settings), when it comes to source of heat that’s a more difficult thing. France is big on electric heating so they’re switching over automatically, Germany historically uses tons of gas and even with the new laws in place it’s going to take decades before everything is switched over to heat pumps and stuff.

The last big chunk is industrial feedstock, I’m including steel smelting in that. Long story short Canadian and Namibian hydrogen is in the pipeline. Not literally, but investment-wise. The first smelters using hydrogen are already online, ready to get switched over from blue to green, and I’m quite sure BASF already knows exactly which pipes it needs to double up and which to repurpose, their precursor production stage is already flexible AF, able to react in practically real-time to what’s cheapest on the market they’ll be ready once the hydrogen comes flowing.

I’m not sure if you could call Talos Principle indie. Croteam is an ancient company (of Serious Sam fame), they sold out to their publisher some years ago (Developer Digital). Wikipedia says 42 people, that’s about the same ballpark as Wube (Factorio), way smaller than Coffee Stain (123), which yes vibes heavily indie (Goat Simulator!) but is part of Embracer Group.

If you look at Developer Digital and Embracer group they’re not really that small – certainly not smaller than CDProject Red, which is very much throwing AAA money at their projects and definitely had their own big business culture fuckups. They’re simply more distributed, instead of orchestrating one or two big projects they have multiple studios working largely independently on small to mid-sized projects. Talos and Satisfactory are AA scale.

Is Wube indie? Well, at least at the start they were, growing with Factorio’s early access. Still independent, as far as I know. Budget-wise they’re certainly not operating on a shoestring, though… you also have to take into account that they’re taking their sweet time for everything. Also AA.

A would be stuff like Celeste. That’s a broad category, I wouldn’t really call anything B unless you don’t have separate coder, writer, sfx/msx and gfx. Maybe toss the writer but anything under that and you’re smaller than minimum demo group size.

All this is to say: Can we please stop dividing the industry into “AAA” and “Indie”. CD Project Red is independent. They’re doing AAA. One is budget, the other is whether the studio has a corporate overlord lording over multiple studios. Game quality is a third measure. System requirements yet another: Factorio has no issues melting your CPU even though it’s highly optimised, then you have B-budget projects which melt your box because the dev has never heard of polycount and a background prop toothbrush has 400 quads… per bristle.

AI image generators don’t “consult” source images to generate an output.

Well, you have an artist breaking things down for an audience understanding neither the technical nor artistic aspect…

Modern AI generators are increasingly good at generating text. They still struggle a bit

I mean… SDXL still struggles a lot. The only thing you can get it to spell reliably is probably “Hooters”. There’s the one or other lora which makes it not suck completely but it’s still nowhere near actually good at generating text, the training just isn’t there. And even with that in place things like signatures are probably going to be gibberish.

While a naive (and cheaper) approach to AI generation doesn’t use layers, there are generators which do use layers,

Unless you start off training by feeding the model 3d data (say, voxels) alongside 2d projections I don’t think it’s ever going to develop a proper understanding of these kinds of things. Or, differently put: Learning object permanence (of sorts, related) is a meta-cognitive abstraction step that just won’t happen with the type of topologies we know how to engineer. It’s probably like 90% on the way towards AGI, so to get a simple topology to understand it we have to spoon-feed it permanence information alongside the (apparent) non-permanence.

Satisfactory did it earlier.

It’s quite easy to trick people with untrained eyes… for one, they have no idea what “consistent illumination” and stuff means. And something being off doesn’t mean that an AI made that mistake because humans make mistakes, too – photographs don’t, but the general problem is not just about telling realistic stuff apart but also illustrations. You’re looking specifically for mistakes that AI is likely to make, but humans are practically never going to make. And yes humans get hands wrong all the time.

Here’s a good video about what to look for and what not.

European police is very much armed. Also the UK has armed units even if your usual beat cop is limited to pepper spray and a baton or whatnot.

Elsewhere police regularly carry pistols, but are also trained in how to not use them. In my state there’s even an assault rifle (actual one) in every police car. Decades pass without anyone getting shot.

I think it’s a blend, in my example the police would bring them into custody, and then trained people work with them after that working out what happened and working with the justice department.

Nope. Police is not trained to deal with e.g. a psychotic person seeing zombies, if they try to take them into custody they’re only going to make things worse. It’s fine if police are first to the scene, but they should be trained enough to a) recognise that the person is psychotic, not actually threatening anyone b) call for backup from the people in white coats with haloperidol shots and c) shoo away bystanders. Perimeter duty. Yes, after 2 1/2 years training you’re on perimeter duty get used to it that’s your job.

The US approach to a paranoid schizophrenic scared shitless seems to be to make it worse by laying siege and throwing flashbangs.

There are many things that police aren’t needed at, like domestic issues, but there are plenty we do need them at too.

That’s probably the bulk of what beat cops are doing over here, short of investigating noise complaints on behest of the municipality and documenting traffic accidents, car thefts, maybe a break-in, whatever. Which is also why they always, and I mean always, come in male/female pairs.

Presumably when we’re talking off-site backups we’re talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.

Isn’t that what tapes are for.

Last I checked making a statement stating that you’re confused about something counts, semantically, as a question. No question mark needed.

But, fine, if you don’t want to tell me you don’t have to. I’m able to contain my curiosity. Certainly can’t put my ID, driver’s license, cash, and a hair tie into my phone. Nor, for that matter, put my phone into an ATM.

I’m confused why would you need a phone to pay via NFC. All you need is your card.