A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.

The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through the game, not so much.

It would be interesting to fish through the code to see how it was put together.

...officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas...

Why are there still competent people at CDC who are able to do this? Anyone who knows anything about anything, was supposed to have been fired months ago and replaced by incompetent flunkies.

Commander Putin's orders have been very clear about completely disarming all American capability, whether it's in our health systems, military, or infrastructure. Who is the pro-American traitor in our midst, disobeying orders to destroy the USA?

If we're going to disobey Putin's orders, then won't he kill or embarrass our president? That must not be allowed to happen!!

Talk about exploiting a loophole. Had no idea that was happening. I'm assuming they did not pass on the savings. I've never seen a third party booking go down in price after being booked.

When I book directly with Marriott while signed in, the lowest price is usually 'flexible' (You can cancel it.) Sometimes I use third party sites to get a really low price if I know I'm not going to cancel, but lately I've been booking directly with the hotel to avoid hassles if it's a major chain I have a login for.

Due to business travel, I had a year or two where I had platinum elite status with Marriott. (the only scenario in which earning status points has any effect - if you live out of a hotel for 3 - 5 days a week and someone else is paying for it, or you launder a ton of purchases through a points credit card, but those can have yearly maximums) The various perks were nice and there were enough points to pay for a lot of our personal hotel stays for that year, with free room upgrades wherever we went. Fun while it lasted.

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

$230

My jaw drops, but then I split. Half of me remains smugly looking down on fuckwits, but the other half hears that Samuel Adams' Utopia, which costs about the same, is supposedly showing up in CostCos, and while I can't justify getting a bottle .. maybe I don't have to justify things.

No.

No, it would still be stupid to do.

It must be nice to have the luxury of doing that. For most of us that kind of money would be a helpful windfall in these rough times.

Suck/not-suck aside, would you at least agree that it's as good as The Mandalorian?

Eyeball monster == Baby Yoda. So. Fucking. Cute.

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.

It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.