Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).

However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.

Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.

Oh you poor things, the lack of attention we give you is what allows you to thrive. I’d almost shed a tear if there was an inkling of truth in those ramblings.

People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.

Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.

Any discussion of nuclear’s costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

• Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
• Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
  Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).

The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

Another long term goal of the EU is to promote peace and democracy across Europe.

Allowing Orbàn to further democratic backsliding at home and undermining of the EU’s democratic processes and missions goes contrary to that goal, and the usual withholding of EU funding isn’t a sentence at all to a quasi-dictator who revels in the fact that reduced funding means more social misery means easy elections for a populist who blames every problem on the EU.

Kicking out Hungary is a solution of last resort and we aren’t there yet, but in a system where Member States could turn totalitarian (and as Sovereign states we have no legal means to force out a dictator), exclusion must be on the table if we are to uphold our democratic values.

Of course not. There’s glory, there’s internal CCP politics, pooh bear’s ego, claims over the South China Sea, reducing the US sphere of influence, the fulfilled narrative of a “united China”, etc.

China doesn’t stand to gain anything pragmatic by invading Taiwan. However humans, and dictators in particular, do not always act perfectly rationally and in the best interest of their nation.

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted “her” on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads “hey let’s get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible”. There’s also the CEO tweeting “her” on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI’s reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You’re not getting a JEJ soundalike, you’re getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don’t just want “white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess” they have proven beyond doubt that they want “The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson”.

Also legality aside, it’s really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, you shouldn’t be able to make an AI replicate someone’s voice without their consent.

First time that Liège has ever been described as Northern in basically any context. It’s in Southeastern Belgium in Western Europe.

“Belgium is in Northern Europe” sounds like something ChatGPT would hallucinate. Or it’s bait to drive engagement.

The cruelty is the point.

One thing I’ve learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it’s about 100x more complicated than you think.

Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.

For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as “imperialist pigs” based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.

High school chemistry felt less like imperfect modeling and more like alchemy that sometimes yields tangible results. I can’t remember specifics anymore but there were many moments where I was like “you’re using too many shortcuts and this doesn’t make any damn sense mathematically or dimensionally anymore”. I know real chemistry is too complex to fit a high school program, but the way it was taught really was like a soft science cosplaying as a hard science.

Also chemists would use any pressure units before they used Pa. mmHg as a unit suffers from congenital defects I can only assume stem from repeated inbreeding.

New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don’t trust the DE to manage notifications properly??

So my colleagues know if they send me a message I’ll get to it when I’ll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.

So you’ve never once in your life bought a laptop or prebuilt PC, used or otherwise? Because if you have then you’ve paid the Windows Tax.

Well do I have exactly the brand new 1h37min queer video essay for you!

TL;DW: The modern concept of gender as separate from sex was not (originally) a progressive move. It was conservatives’ reaction to the medical discoveries of the nebulous nature of biological sex, to justify imposing the gender binary on trans people and especially intersex children.

Conservatives claim to care a lot about protecting trans kids from “radical decisions”, but the places that enact legislation to prevent teenagers from using puberty blockers are the same places that still allow and encourage mutilating surgeries on intersex babies.
It is not an accident. It is ideologically consistent with conservatives’ drive to impose their religious and cultural vision of the binary gender as a completely fixed universal truth, and they’ll use extreme violence to ensure it remains binary, fixed and universal.

I’ve read the exact same comment a year ago, and the year before, and probably the year before that tbh.

So I’ll say what I always say; I’ll believe it when I see it.