It can’t compare to the epic Millerverse franchise finale: Happy Feet Beyond Thunderdome.

You may be thinking of the movie Paterson, starring Adam Driver as a bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, NJ and quite likes Paterson, the epic poem by W.C. Williams.

Not that the US tax code being a fucking mess is news to anyone who has encountered it but, wow, the US tax code is a fucking mess. I’m pretty sure that tax credits should ideally incentivize companies to create things, rather than uncreate them.

A Hohmann transfer to Mars takes something like 9 months, I think. It’s how we get there right now.

At risk of mild whataboutism: it’s difficult to pronounce loanwords and loaned names, in any language, mythological or not, and almost all such words are always mangled. As a Swede I cringe when I hear most Norse mythological names in English, as would likely a native Old Norse speaker if they somehow heard me say…

There are a lot of matriarchies in Randland, so I don’t think that calling the setting matriarchal is necessarily wrong.

Have they considered paring with a non-profit that sells softshell jackets? I think that would match well.

The thing is that most of her “critics” weren’t really reacting to anything she was actually saying. Games are — to these people — a space were women do not exist. Games are the cultural equivalent of the men’s bathroom, the very urinals of entertainment. They are a place where the No Girls Allowed sign is implicit…

Welsh is also not particularly heavy on consonants.

If you play a TCG -- or trading card anything, really -- then presumably yes, you gotta love manufactured scarcity.

I’d say that training a neural network is encoding some distinct patterns of the art and artist being fed as input as compressed data in the ANN. Those patterns are used directly when synthesizing an output, just combined according to what’s ultimately a very convoluted (pun intended) weighted average.

This made me check and I am pleased to report that the Wikipedia article for “Knuckles the Echidna” is still longer than the “Knuckle” and “Echidna” articles combined. It also has over twice as many citations as they do, so you know it’s quality scholarship.

Speedcubes use a number of tricks that make them more manipulatable than a Rubik’s brand. There’s the lube, sure, but mostly they just use a loser internal design with more give in how much each segment can move when forced, combined with magnets to make segments snap to alignment. They occasionally get messed up with…

You can always choose to read his comments on 7-year-olds liking Star Wars as him saying that Star Wars are silly movies for children.

It’s fine to appreciate a good pay-off and part of Multiverse of Madness’ problem is that it definitely was not one. That disappointment should not retroactively remove enjoyment already had from what came before. Wandavision was a good if silly show, with things to say about humanity capped by a so-so finale. The…

Holly Longdale, WoW’s executive producer and the producer responsible for Classic since 2020, was previously the producer at Daybreak Games responsible for running EverQuest’s myriad progression servers (which are, by the standards of EQ today, very successful). I’d say something similar is a fairly safe bet.

The first indication that something is wrong, to the extent that anything can be “wrong” in Venice other than … you know, fucked-up sea levels caused by global warming

Yes, a lot of traditional algorithms in computer science are considered AI. Search, route finding, spell checking, etc are topics covered by your typical AI textbook. Inverse kinematics is not, but that’s more because it’s a speciality subject than because it’s not AI. There is no formal definition for what is and is…

Kovarex (lead dev on Factorio, also incidentally the creator of the Starcraft 1 AI API) is a very good programmer, but also the sort of person who uses “SJW” pejoratively. He launched into a bunch of pointlessly aggressive tirades against cancel culture a couple of years back after he made a blog post extensively…

To get even more technical than previous posts: there are basically two different concepts we humans call “color”. One we can call the color-of-things, the physical properties of a surface and how it reflects light. The other we can call the color-you-see, your perceptual response when you look at a thing. These two…