It is because everything associated with Dwarf Fortress is innately funny.

Haha, I started reading "The Tales of Alvin Maker" and basically quit the first book by the middle, in disgust.

If everything OSC writes is like this, then I pity his readership.

Keep your stupid ideologies and "moral" views out of my books.

Also, the tone, the tone of his writing..

As for benchmark, I consider A. E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and Clifford Simak to be top notch.

This guy just rubbed me all the wrong ways, is all I'm saying.

What job ?

The "three laws" (or equivalent) will apply to every robot made NOT for the US army.

I played the Game Boy version as a kid on a yellow/green GB, the memories and trauma runs deep.

I only made it to the third level (the one after bike level, oh the nightmares) twice (or three times).

So yeah. My nerd cred is still intact,

(for those not in the know, the original Battletoads is arguably one of the most unfairly hard games ever made, next to Ghouls'n'Ghosts and ilk. except more unfair) (also Takeshi's Challenge does not count, for it was just a troll)

Nothing changed from ages past.

You are still a slave working for a "caveman" slave owner (CxO et al.).

If you disagree with me, try doing what you really want in life; hard, huh ?

Because it requires "caveman" mentality.

Anything else is sheer denial.

I hate Smartphones and after my old phone broke down, I ain't even buying a new one.

Living without a mobile phone is like living without a (annoying) stone chained to your leg.

It's measurably better quality of living.

Now why after reading all this I am reminded of a certain Futurama episode ?

I honestly find the whole situation really funny.

Now all we need is Iceberg MKII, and we're set.

Oh man, where is David Brin when you need him ? :P

I opened this newspost actually hoping that the guy somehow made a convenient, portable multi-kilowatt focused laser beam, and also solved cooling problems in one go.

That would have kept me a bit interested.

This tho ? Pure false advertising, it is as much (less actually) exciting than a 1 watt powered laser pointer. With todays technology, we could be building more content rich shinies, as opposed to form rich shinies. Form has its place, but as a nerd, I really prefer, and see beauty in, function, and the engineering itself.

This is cost effective for what they want to do, and that is building space things in space, from space-mined metals.

Do you think bringing up all the metals to space and then 3-d printing from them is cheaper ? It is debatable, but I think efficient in-place mining methods evolved to an efficiency-extreme will be cheaper than bringing the same tonnage of materials from a Earth gravity well.

Moon gravity well, otoh.. That may be the golden middle of convenient mining (you are still on a planet) + easy escape of gravity well.

Configure from known inputs yes.

Design no.

What ? There exists a natural language parser ?

I am not aware of ?

That implies perfect translations and ..

Heeeeey, wait a minute ..

Agree totally.

And sadly so.

If there was any progress AT ALL in the field of AI, we would have seen at least SOME improvement in game AI, right ?

Right ?

With octocore multi-gigahurtz processors and gigs upon gigs of ram ?

I am being coherent here, actually.

But we've seen stagnation at best, and true degeneracy / devolution at worst.

I think the field of AI is a VERY GOOD mirror of entire human andeavour -- lots of big talk amounting to a pathetic amount of bullshit, fake or falsified results, achieving nothing meaningful (still conning some money in the process).

Actually, this is where you fail to understand the brain.

The neural system is the brain, extended.

The eyes are the brain, the penis (especially that :) is the brain, the ears are the brain, senses of touch / pain / pleasure / tastes are felt by the brain, everything directly, becaus the brain is a fractal tree (central brain that we call "brain" is only a hub/processor).

This is how I see / have always seen it.