The other day I read an article that said Grok claims Elmo is more athletically fit than Lebron James. I thought "Elmo must just be trolling us, and getting a laugh from all the anger he's causing among his haters". (of which I'm one.) He claims to be a serious businessman and then he pulls shit like that. Or dumb actors in spandex robot suits. It might even refute the claim he can't be funny: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/13/it-soo...
But now I'm wondering what if these stunts aren't even jokes but earnest proof of deep deep insecurity.
Not that the Bondi misinformation can be considered acceptable humor. "Haha I trolled you about mass murder"?
Interesting read. Digging in and fortifying positions is very much still a crucial part of war. For example, in the current Russo-Ukrainian war, structures such as trenches, bunkers, basements, towers, buildings etc. are crucial for holding onto terrain. Also obstacle-like structures such as concertina wire, anti-tank ditches, dragon's teeth, minefields, czech-hedgehogs, etc. are all over the place. Wherever soldiers appear, they basically dig in and start fortifying, constructing structures both for their own protection as well as for obstructing enemy movement. An interesting recent development are kilometers-long anti-drone tunnels along key logistical routes, meant mostly for stopping rotary FPV drones that are trying to intercept logistics
Thermite temperatures are over 2000 degrees celsius. It is literally burning iron and aluminium.
Material science can do amazing things but a capable "fire resistant cloth mesh", cheap enough to use in the quantities required, will be a good trick.
It does not need to survive the direct impact of the thermite, it just needs to self extinguish and not light large areas of the mesh on fire. A couple foot size holes don't matter much in miles of mesh.
This doctrine is changing fast in that conflict. Any enemy structure sticking out is a prime target for drones, and there around 10,000 drones used daily and this number keeps rising continuously, often one-way FPV kamikaze drones. Anything that sticks out is bombarded into oblivion, the tactic now is more akin to hiding or blending with surroundings.
Once they figure out cheap way for semi-autonomous swarms (as in 1 guy piloting say 50 drones, mix of bombers, kamikadze ones and possibly ones carrying some AA rockets) skies will be full of little deadly plastic birds and fortified positions on the battle line will be fully thing of the past.
Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
Brood War's longevity is thanks to the map maker, which has allowed the game to be balanced around maps. The size of your spawn location, the ease with which you can expand, and the paths to different bases drastically impact what kinds of strategies are viable. If there's a high ground location, it becomes much harder to break that position as the attacker. The amount of resources per base (mineral patch count, mineral patch size, 1 gas spawn, 2 gas spawn, mineral only) all impact which strategies are viable.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.
It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.
Brood War has aged like fine-wine. As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the key to Brood War's longevity comes from the map maker. Every detail is carefully considered so that none of the races can get away with a crazy advantage. It's really a special game, and every new season of ASL still feels magical.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and was going strong for a good decade or so, before being ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and, primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).
There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that existed in america with quake and friends, and the constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea. Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the culture works.
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I agree. I think people underestimate the size of the Korean Brood War scene, even relatively early on. In my country, I had seen some huge LAN parties with associated competitions, but then I got introduced to Korean Brood War competitions; they were filling stadiums with audiences and had pyrotechnics and professional TV productions and everything. It was insane.
Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
IRC works in the browser now thanks to IRCv3. Matrix is another option
The invitation system gives a false sense of privacy. There are bots that crawl publicly posted invites, public IRC channels, etc. Eventually people will understand that IRC and discord are public in the same way we understand usenet to have been public
Yeah, sadly it is the spambots which have killed off independent platforms more than anything else. It sounds like something which could easily give rise to conspiracy theories from people putting the spammers into the same mental baskets as the controlling companies. It isn't the expense of having to leave on a raspberry pi running a server.
You might want to look into ADHD and executive dysfunction in general. As a fellow ADHDr, I know the struggle is real. But there are ways to improve this, both behavioral and pharmacological.
Suffering from executive dysfunction obviates that there is no free will, and it's as if good health is simply having that illusion work out harmoniously.
“I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already.”
Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption? Costs of electricity being one thing, carbon footprint an another. Do we really want such a setup running in each household in addition to X other devices?
In addition to energy, the biggest reason I no longer use old desktops as servers is the space they take up. If you live in an apartment or condo and don't have extra rooms, even having a desktop tower sitting in a corner somewhere is a lot less visually appealing than a small NSA or mini-PC you can stick on a shelf somewhere.
Tastes differ. I personally find the 36U IBM rack in the corner of my apartment more visually appealing than some of my other furniture, and consolidating equipment in a rack with built-in PDUs makes it easier to run everything through a single UPS in an apartment where rewiring is not an option.
? It’s not like the machine would be custom built for him.
Are you saying it’s fine to drive a huge truck if you’re single and just need to get around the block to buy a pack of eggs, just because the emissions are nothing compared to those required for making that smaller, more efficient car that you could buy instead?
If your only use for a vehicle is a weekly or even daily trip around the block to buy a pack of eggs, the best environmental choice is to use a vehicle that is already manufactured. If the only vehicle available to you is a semi truck, that’s the best choice. Even over a lifetime of daily trips, the difference in emissions between the semi truck and a golf cart won’t make up for the emissions of manufacturing the golf cart and transporting it to you.
Of course this is a contrived example that ignores the used vehicle market or the possibility of walking around the block.
no, they're saying the emissions needed to create that smaller, more efficient car may vastly exceed their car's emissions during its entire lifetime under their use. so it may be a net loss.
> Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption?
Obviously depends on the actual usage, and parent's specific setup, lots of motherboards/CPUs/GPUs/RAM allow you to tune the frequencies and allows you to downclock almost anything. Finally, we have no idea about the energy source in this case, could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
> could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
(I don't argue for fossil fuels here, mind you.)
Plus, the countries have shared grids. Any kWh you use can't be used by someone else, so may come from coal when they do, for all you know. It's a false rationalization.
> Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
> I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
So if I have 10 mining rigs connected to the state power grid, what the source of that energy has matters nothing for the environment? If I use a contract that 100% guarantees it comes from solar, it has the same environmental impact as if I use a cheaper contract that guarantees 100% coal power?
I'm not sure if I misunderstand what you're saying, or you're misunderstanding what I said before, but something along the lines got lost in transmission I think.
> I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already
> I wish people would understand that waste is waste
I think the point is that the configuration from the post can easily run as low as maybe 30-40W on idle, but as high as a couple hundred depending on utilization. An off-the-shelf NAS probably spikes at most in the ~35W range, with idle/spindle-off utilization in the 10W range (I'm using my 4-bay Synology DS920+ as a reference). Normally the biggest contributor to NAS energy usage is the number of HDDs, so the more you add, the more it consumes, but in this configuration the CPU, the RAM, and the GPU are all "oversized" for the NAS purpose.
While reusing parts for longer helps a lot for carbon footprint of the material itself, running that machine 24/7/365 is definitely more CO2-heavy w.r.t. electricity usage than an off-the-shelf NAS. And additional entropy in the environment in the form of heat is still additional entropy, whether it comes from coal or solar panels.
Humanity currently produces 30 TWh, with roughly 60% of that from fossil fuels. You connect 10 mining rigs. There are two options for what happens to the world's power generation:
1. You affect the mix! Your rigs create new solar and decommission coal plants! The world is cleaner!
2. You claim a "clean slice" of the existing mix. You feel good because you use only solar, but MRI machines still use power, so their mix is now "dirtier" without changing the actual state of the world.
In real systems, it's probably a combination of the above. I assume our decisions only meaningfully matter by exerting market pressures over longer timescales.
The issue here is not having an easy way to block porn, the issue is enforcing it. And easy ways to block apps and websites already exist. One I can recommend is called Freedom.
I want a "one button solution" to keep the boomers and the elderly from getting their brains fried by facebook and voting for authoritarian parties that want to implement such antiliberal mechanisms
early cremation, not like they're any kind of useful nowadays. "but you'll be in their place someday", yes i'm sure of it, being poisoned physically and mentally by every single thing existing i'm pretty confident i'll live till 50.
dafuq is "normal" food? if by normal you mean usual or typical for a supermarket, then that would be mostly highly processed foods full of sugars and fats. Now that I think about it, what one actually wants is the not-normal foods, the raw unprocessed minority
reply