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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • There was this guy that made a pumped hydro water tank on his roof and by his calculations a cubic meter of water was equivalent to a AA battery.

    That sounds crazy. Let’s do some math. From what I can find, a double A battery contains about 10-14 kilojoules of energy. Let’s use 14 to be charitable.

    A cubic meter of water weighs about 1000kg. We know the formula for potential gravitational energy U = mgh. So if we used all the energy from the battery, we could lift the water:

    14000 = 1000 * 9.81 * h
    h = 14000 / (1000 * 9.81) ≈ 1.43 meters (4 feet 8 inches)
    

    That assumes 100% efficiency of course. Still, lifting a ton of water even two feet ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Batteries have a lot of energy.


  • This is basically correct but i would add sometimes it’s better to add chips than to add mult. For example, if your score is something like:

    10 x 50 = 500
    

    Adding +50 mult here would give you 10x100=1000 points. Adding +50 chips will give you 60x50=3000 points.

    Adding to the lowest of the two numbers improves your score the most. Especially early game, mult is much lower than chips, so you want to improve mult. However once you have some good mult jokers improving chips becomes important. Especially in high card based decks, where you get very few chips from your hand.

    If the multiplier jokers come in, the picture can change again. It makes adding mult more valuable because the addition will be multiplied.


  • is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

    He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

    If you browse through it’s not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

    He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There’s a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean “yes.” He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

    To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.


  • The sad truth is that there are overriding geopolitical strategic interests behind the US support of Israel. The American executive power recognizes this, so military support is not going to go away as long as those interests are a concern.

    They may pay some lip service to the whole genocide thing, but this is ultimately realpolitik. Human lives do not matter when they are not American.



  • China leads the world in both renewable energy usage AND coal use. And by a lot.

    They also have some of the most people (is India ahead nowadays? I can’t keep track), and they manufacture tons of things meant for export to other (including western) countries.

    The point being, everybody is greenwashing. China is greenwashing their energy mix. Western countries greenwash their own energy by essentially outsourcing the production and thus pollution. And this isn’t about China really. I could say the same for a bunch of countries.

    The small consolation is that beside all the green propaganda, some progress is at least being made. Probably not enough, but some.





  • I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

    The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

    Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.