That parts gonna happen anyway.

Even if battery energy density started getting close to that of liquid hydrocarbons, and thats a looong way off still, youd still need more batteries than you would fuel because batteries dont get lighter as they discharge like burned fuel does, rocket equation stuff. A 747 carries ~150k kilograms of fuel, if that didnt burn off thats an extra 37k kg the first quarter of the flight, an extra 75k kg the first half of the flight and so on...

Battery planes may never make widespread sense, if we ever start generating enough carbon free energy cheaply enough and even if all ground transport goes battery electric or whatever, at some point it might still be worth it to just make carbon neutral jet fuel with air fuel synthesis. That seems closer on the horizon than the battery tech needed for large planes to be feasible, hard to beat jet turbines for that application.

A steam gift card can be laundered entirely within the steam economy tho, a dunkin gift card doesnt let you buy and resell special donut skins.

Oh thats already happening. https://www.reddit.com/r/simps...

The alerts are so much worse too like "Hey, looks like you slept like shit, should probably take it easy today." thanks google but not really up to either of us. Already knew that and fitbit was a lot gentler about it...

I know everybody turns off any new features immediately upon release, but with the new(ish) agent the way some of the various bits and pieces have come together has been pretty great.

Credits are global now, so youre watching something "why does he look familiar?", you click down to the actor now it shows you their whole filmography, you can watchlist stuff right there, and even a little category 'Youve seen them in' with anything with them in any of your libraries youve watched by recent. Not just other shows if youre watching a show or only other movies if youre watching movies. And since you can just search and browse through anything/anyone now, its actually replaced IMDB for me just because its sooo much cleaner. https://watch.plex.tv/person/n... vs https://www.imdb.com/name/nm00...

And speaking of the watchlist, thats universal now, you can search and add stuff you dont have, from any service, even stuff thats not on any service, and the watchlist can interface directly with the *arrs, so youre looking up that guy from that thing, watchlist another of his movies, radarr goes and does its thing. You can add upcoming stuff too and they even have trailers now, so i dont have to go to Youtube anymore cuz it doesnt make me wade through 20 fake AI trailers before finding the one on the actual studios channel and then it doesnt autoplay some assholes reaction or breakdown of the trailer i just watched right after.

AND if your users have their watchlists public, you can monitor theirs too, so friends and family can just watchlist stuff you dont have without leaving the plex app, so you dont need to try to convince them to use a third party app like Omni to request stuff.

All the other social features still suck tho, their own lack of features makes you abuse the rating system as a filter for other things instead of as a rating system, but replacing IMDB and youtube for at least my purposes has been pretty nice. Some of my users dont have their watchlists public either so i still have a facebook group chat for requests cuz who wants to use some third party app for requests. .

$750 is ridiculous tho, i paid $100 during a 50% off sale a couple of black fridays ago, but with all my collections and playlists and everything and especially all my users switching to Jellyfin wouldnt be as simple as everyone pretends, but if in the future they roll out Plex2 to loophole my lifetime or try to charge my users individually ill figure it out.

Ever since I started writing code in 1980, I've continually wondered if we'll ever reach a plateau where consumer-affordable tech is so good the average person won't need it to advance anymore. Eventually computing and networking will be fast enough, and storage will be huge enough, that we can all essentially have full copies of the Internet on our phones (or whatever), and intelligent, locally-running agents that can tell us anything we want to know, conversationally in realtime, including results that require analysis. At that point what would a faster or bigger computer do for you? Hardware and software will definitely get there, but getting permission to have and manipulate the content will be an even bigger barrier. I don't see a scenario like this happening as long as economics is still a force in the world. Food and electricity will probably be free before information will.

https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

Some of the old timers are really amazing to engage with. A friend of mine who recently started running a Traveller campaign emailed its creator with a question about a rule detail, and got a very friendly, informative answer. They've since corresponded on other aspects of the game. I had a similar experience with one of the producers of a fantastic stage satire of Star Trek that I saw back in the 90s (which unfortunately was shut down by Paramount's lawyers). I think the important thing is just to be respectful of their time and privacy, and not to come off as a drooling fanboy lol.

The 80s saw the dawn of BBSes, the precursors of the Internet. I wrote my own in the late 80s in Turbo Pascal - Tomb of the Unknown Modem - which I ran for several years in Portland, OR. It had about 200 registered users and 20 or 30 regulars. I only knew a couple of them personally. It was divided into 10 sub-boards, which included a joke board, play-by-post D&D and Robotech campaigns, and an adults-only "hot tub". It also had a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote called "Toddler Terror". I put in a separate phone line for it so it could stay up 24/7 on its 1200-baud modem. It all ran on a 2MHz portable PC made by Televideo, with no hard drive, just dual 360k floppies! Good times.

There's no sense blaming people for being dumb enough to vote for politicians who hide the truth from them. I think it's more important to fix our problems. But if you really want the ultimate scapegoat it's individuals who manipulate public perception for their own personal gain. That group ranges from uber-powerful media moguls to people who create misleading memes for reddit points.

A lot of people did the right things, just not powerful enough people. Activists have been raising hell about CO2 and other emissions since at least the 1960s, long before Antarctic research revealed the hole in the ozone layer in 1985. Offset credits for lead started in the 70s, and were expanded to CO2 starting in 1988. Mark Trexler, one of the drivers behind carbon offsets, said they were largely a philanthropic effort at that time, to get that ball rolling until public policy caught up with reality - which still hasn't happened. "No one then thought that we would be doing offsets 35 years later.” Ideas for public good often get shouted down by money interests as "communism".

I'm sick of saying this same thing on reddit and getting douchevoted by people who tell me I don't understand how AI works. Nice to get some validation from AI scientists who clearly do know how AI works.

In a random conversation this morning a Home Depot employee told me he and his friend have figured out a way to do VR without a headset, which they're working on turning into a business. I didn't ask how they were doing it because I knew he wouldn't be able to reveal it, but I'm very tantalized. Looking forward to this new development and hoping it's real. Just so I can point back to this comment if it comes true, the guy's name happens to be the same as a well-known agro company.