New Orleans would kick ass as a Fallout setting.
Other fun options would be to make it isometric
Pillars of Eternity is one of the best modern CRPGs. BG3’s success shows that there is a market for this if done well. No better time than now to try it.
The 35 year lifespan mentioned in the article seems overly conservative to me.
Agreed. That’s probably the lifespan of continuous operation, if I had to guess. After that, it might need to be shut down for deeper maintenance and retrofit. If you’re willing to do that though, these things run basically forever. We’ve been maintaining giant clocks for hundreds of years, and this isn’t much different than that.
It was definitely already a thing. Grandfather clocks operate on gravity batteries with chains and metal weights. The issue has always been scaling them up in a way that isn’t insanely expensive: all those heavy bobs and chains on a clock can be replaced with a watch battery that’s like 1/1000 the weight and will run for just as long. However, chemical batteries–even rechargeable ones–eventually deteriorate and turn into waste. Big chunks of concrete or iron or (most commonly I think) water last a lot longer. You get much less energy density, but much longer lifespan (and using stuff that’s pretty common already). As we (speaking loosely, and not 
) have started caring more about sustainability, batteries that can be made from recycled crap we have laying around and maintained like basically giant clocks start looking more attractive.
The other big thing that’s changed is scale of renewable production. Most battery solutions have been focused on point-of-use storage, and there the energy density matters a lot. I can put a 10 kw/h lithium battery in a closet at my house. To store the same amount of energy with gravity, I’d have to put King Kong up on the Empire State Building and drop him off, which I cannot do in my garage. However, as more renewable energy capacity starts spinning up at major centralized locations where space is at less of a premium, the cost/benefit shifts. I can build something like the thing in the article (or a huge water pump in a reservoir), and yeah it takes up a huge amount of space, but it’s in the middle of nowhere rather than my house, and it effectively lasts forever relative to a Tesla power wall or whatever. If you’re regularly producing hundreds of extra megawatts of solar power and space isn’t at a premium, then the stability and longevity start to make the cost and size worth it.
Probably much less so than a comparable chemical battery, and you don’t need any rare earth elements that catch on fire if you look at them wrong or destroy ecosystems if spilled. Modern human civilization is pretty good at maintaining big purely mechanical doohickeys.
Sure thing. I planted two of them a few seasons ago, and I thought I lost them entirely the first year. They died down to the ground in the fall. But they sprang back up in the spring, and now they’re huge and healthy! It just took them some time to get comfortable.
Raspberries often take a few years to really get established in my experience, especially in non-ideal soil. You might get a year or two of mostly vegetative growth before you start getting berries, which should also be enough time to get them stable enough to remove those boards. I’d give 'em something to climb on too.
This is what you get when nobody actually reads or understands Turing but bases all their ideas on what they think he said.
Prosecutors also highlighted other evidence they claimed proved that the protesters planned violence, including their decision to communicate and auto-delete messages on Signal
The fact that their use of Signal was successfully presented as proof of terrorist intent should be extremely alarming to everyone.
Boy I can’t wait to see what they’ll choose!
This should be taken as an obvious, conclusive refutation of the idea that capitalism is a meritocracy.
Li said that students could get the genetic or hormone test options listed in the initiative, in lieu of a genital exam.
Ok, what about when those things don’t match the assigned sex? What do we do with those kids? If we start doing mass hormone and chromosome testing, I think we’re going to find that there are a lot more “edge cases” than we think there are.
I don’t have kids, but I don’t remember this ever happening to me as a child.
No argument from me. It absolutely has its uses–some potentially really significant–and “Attention is All You Need” and the subsequent literature very much is a landmark development in automation. It’s just terrible for like 97% of the use cases it’s being pushed for right now, as well as being developed with the explicit goal of actively making the world worse (because it’s under the control of the world’s worst guys, for the most part). If this tech were genuinely open, being developed responsibly, and used for the things it is genuinely good at without being shoved into applications it isn’t good for, it could definitely solve some problems.
Industrial scale assembly lines at least have the virtue of consistency. That’s one of their main benefits: you get the same thing at the same quality every time. LLMs don’t even get you that.
If you’re not looking for food, a wisteria would climb that nicely and would look beautiful.
Holy shit, no wonder they wanted to keep this under wraps. This is lazier than what I’d expect from a high school senior with senioritis. How embarrassing.
It’s free if you just want to watch on your local network (for now). The pay features are to be able to stream off-network (and a few other things). Still outrageous.
Definitely no poors living on Lake Tahoe. This is a real 
situation in my opinion.
I was pretty disappointed with Outer Worlds 1/2, but I actually enjoyed Avowed and loved Pillars of Eternity 1/2. This could be interesting if they actually take some risks and don’t try to make it blandly appealing to everyone (though I’m not super optimistic about that). BG3’s breakout shows that there is a market for relatively crunchy true RPGs with good writing and production values.