The situations aren't comparable. Oakland is a major city that is absolutely big enough to have its own police department. One of the biggest problems with it is that it is understaffed - it would be good for the city of Oakland to hire hundreds more officers. If the city was barred from running a police department and policing responsibilities were transferred to the county, that would itself be a huge political issue - it's already the case that the Oakland electorate is at odds with the electorate of Alameda county at large about crime and policing - and realistically the county sheriff would have to hire a huge number of the same people currently doing policing in Oakland.
I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech. If anything, I think that technological development created to serve Earth-based demand also has benefits for making space exploration cheaper and easier - computers have gotten way cheaper and way more powerful since the Apollo Guidance Computer, which has obviously affected the entire world in countless ways but also means that we can computerize every aspect of space launches, generally for good.
> I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech.
It clearly was, at least in several examples. It looks like he's getting it right from NASA:
My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.
If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?
These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?
Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.
Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.
Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.
There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.
Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.
Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.
Really I think that deliberately courting persnickity people dissecting how Wrong it is that your pixel-art game has art displayed in three different pixel sizes that have aggressively non-integer relationships to each other might be a great way to get some free marketing. :)
If you want to look at a company that does pixel art right for the modern era, Yacht Club Games is probably the gold standard with games like Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower.
I was disappointed to learn that the article from 404 media about a "Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center" in Ypsilanti, Michigan wasn't actually a data center with an on-site nuclear power generator, just one that Los Alamos is partially funding and will use. Anyway I think the concerns of everyone opposed to data center construction in Ypsilanti mentioned in that article are stupid, I consider 404 media to be poltically hostile to my interests for writing about it with that editorial stance; and certainly linking to it doesn't make me more inclined to view Protonmail unfavorably.
Can you elaborate on why you think the OP is incorrect? The hit piece on the Ypstilanti data center is quite an embarrassment for any honest news reporter.
There's complex politics around hyperscaler data centers, and I'm sympathetic to the complaints against (though in full disclosure I am biased towards building anything, having seen my country held back for years by people opposed to building anything). But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is. It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry. I'm not going to be polite and give them any benefit of doubt. I know the people they're harassing personally and professionally and they're wonderfully kind and intelligent.
If the supercomputing project dies because of this, yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands.
> But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is.
It may not be a hyperscaler data center (I actually don't see that as the argument anyway) but it is a data center and that's part of the issue in today's landscape, irrespective of if you pick a particular side.
> It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry.
Oh, I get it. I worked for a defense contractor for a number of years and every Thursday we had a small group of protestors that would harass us if we walked across the street for lunch. I engaged a few times to ask them if any of them had ever taken a commercial flight as the building they were protesting in front of built most all of the ATC systems the US operated at the time.
But, I'm still going to argue: it's not that simple. While I'm in support of the US continuing R&D through use of new HPC facilities the use cases are not cut and dry. Nuclear weapons are a zero sum game and while I think many would fully support continuued research into improving nuclear weapons systems and scenarios I don't think it's all that productive to continue to invest heavily in expanded nuclear weapons development. Especially having now seen too many administrations being handled by old men who don't have much to lose if they destroy the world.
But, to state "yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands" sounds fucking deranged to me.
The New Guinea highlanders were equally ignorant of the existence of the Australians, or most of the other peoples outside of the New Guinea highlands. But it wasn't one of the New Guinea highlanders who took the initiative to make the discovery, it was "some random Aussie". So I think it's fair to credit the discovery of New Guinea highlanders to the Australians, rather than the other way around.
Yes for the first two since it's an unambiguous free trade and free movement of labour zone extending between areas of similar education and economic development, even if they receive more money from tax than they supply, since internal free movement is an essential prerequisite for most kinds of manufacturing to be profitable. The latter is an oddball.
It obviously benefits the UK populace to put off having to deal with any civil conflict in NI indefinitely but this is minor compared to the other side of it: does having a non-united Ireland as a way to reduce Irish competitiveness and geopolitical regional heft produce more value from preventing problems (like losses of jobs, increased corporate tax avoidance, marginally increased rates of corporate espionage by third parties using Eire as a base, Ireland having more negotiating power in commodities agreements, Ireland acting as a refuge for enemies of the state in times of UK civil conflict) from arising than it costs to maintain NI?
That latter side was a very serious issue in the history of the UK, England, etc prior to globalisation and the UK has to hedge its bets against the odds of globalisation going away. A good book on this is Land of Troubles, published by Routledge.
Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
I'm sympathetic to hostility towards many members of the Rust development community, many of whom are left-progressives who think it's politically and morally important to exclude and socially-punish people who they view as being insufficiently deferential towards communities they deem marginalized.
But Rust is actually a better language than C, in multiple ways; and it is in fact bad that so much software in common use is still written in C. C is extremely hard to write correctly and hard to maintain; this fact explains a huge amount of security vulnerabilities in the widely-used software written in C. Rust mitigates this to a large extent, and is also just more pleasant to write because it has better syntactic and semantic affordances than C does - also better developer tooling.
I think that people who are not Anglophone left-progressives should use Rust, in part because I think it is bad that a highly useful programming language is associated with Anglophone left-progressives. Certainly, regardless of one's non-programming-related political beliefs, you should not ground your identity in making a virtue out of sticking to C.
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