> I will say that I find even in games that do pay some lip-service to the continued existence of subordinated peoples within large empires – I think particularly of Europa Universalis, Stellaris and Imperator – the mechanics and dynamics for managing those populations in a polyethnic, polylinguistic society are often sharply underdeveloped. In many games that don’t simply erase those populations, they are instead represented by a simple malus (e.g. “Non-primary culture, -x% production/stability/manpower/whatever).
I'm not sure this is a helpful comment. This is a common story with many medications, where someone notices their feelings are off and suddenly remembers that there is a probable root cause. It's why medications list side effects.
Another company like this is Blackmagic Design. Despite being overwhelmingly based in Australia, you'd think it was an American company based on office listing ordering on https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/company/offices and /company page.
It is a win-win for Photobucket users who have their images (which OP is NOT a cohort of) preserved long term and the startup who snapped up Photobucket's data and liabilities. It is fair to say that OP experienced a win-loss in this specific situation.
I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.
Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
Look, not to brag but DALL-E's "armchair in the shape of an avocado" was mine (https://openai.com/index/dall-e/). I remember trying to convey the gravity of this capability to my friends at the time, who I guess were not as impressed as me.
I just messaged a few of my friends who I know are devoutly Catholic (and also happen to work in AI): 3 out of 4 are currently reading it this morning for their Memorial Day.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
A commonly trotted out argument for continued investment in manned space flight is technological spillover: that all the money we give to NASA generates positive benefits in other sectors of the economy. I'm not so sure space toilets are generating that spillover. This seems like a uniquely expensive humans-in-space engineering problem. I echo the sentiments of Why Not Mars (https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm):
> The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free. [...] I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. [...] Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.
Given some system under test (SUT) with inputs (T, G...) and expected outputs derived from the inputs T', G' etc., a property based testing framework attempts to exercise the entire domain of values assignable to T, G, etc. against the SUT.
The generators of T, typically called an Arbitrary<T> can be constrained, e.g Arbitrary<number> could generate any float or just non-negative integers. Ideally we would define an Arbitrary<float64> or Arbitrary<u64>.
A sufficiently expressive type system makes it easier to narrow the gap between what is generated and what is assignable to type T, making it clearer what the valid input domain to the SUT is.
Note that this is contrary to the convention used in the Erlang community, where the number is used to disambiguate function definitions with different parameter counts, e.g. in https://www.erlang.org/docs/18/man/supervisor.html we see definitions of `start_link/2` and `start_link/3`.
It is a stylistic convention to always add this number to any reference to a function, even if there is only one definition.
> All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT was the only known material from which heat shields could be built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer and play chicken with the lives of NASA’s astronauts with this “flight proven” (but completely different) design, Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL’s large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule also uses PICA-3.
Is this addressed in EU5 with its new population/culture system https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Population / https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Culture? I have not played it yet.