u/Astrokiwi

Divorced, beheaded, died; Divorced, beheaded, loo

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ - fun for one playthrough; it runs in the browser and is free.

I always felt King William II's death in a hunting accident, while his heir (future King Henry I) was present, was a little bit suspect. Maybe it's time for an inquiry.

We use it a lot in astrophysics simulations - but yeah, I did end up learning the Navier-Stokes equations more in grad school than in undergrad.

I used to drive by that one a lot, loved it every time

"St Louis du Ha! Ha!" is my favourite one named after the body of water it's adjacent to.

Just having multiple tens works - especially if you're doing multiple levels of advantage (as you do in Dragonbane)

Specifically thinking of Dragonbane - it indirectly descends from BRP/Runequest, but it divides everything by 5 to get d20s. But the whole family of Into the Odd/Cairn/Mausritter/Mythic Bastionland etc games are d20 roll-under. And Black Hack and similar games too.

The 2d20 system is also roll-under, for Star Trek Adventures, Dune, Fallout, etc.

You might - in something like the Hyperion books, you don't just have interstellar states, you have interstellar cities and interstellar rivers. Portals with instant teleportation mean that you can visit multiple planets in an afternoon shopping trip. In that extreme, where interstellar travel is instant and free, there's not really any barrier between worlds at all - you could have a single interstellar political system, as, in practice, it's basically all one single very large world. For a less space opera exploration of this sort of thing, in the Terra Ignota series there are free and fast antimatter-powered flying cars around the globe, and anybody can go anywhere on Earth within a couple of hours. This dissolves the entire concept of "place" - what historical country the characters are in starts to no longer matter, because anyone can go anywhere at any time. The series is about the breakdown of this society, so when things stop working, it's jarring for both the characters and the reader to be stuck in one place - or for "place" to even matter at all.

The other thing is that space opera always underestimates how society changes. This is somewhat by design - often it's just taking modern society, or even some version of a historical society (or societies), and giving them spaceships. Star Wars is about cowboys and samurai in World War II with lasers. Even more grounded series like The Expanse are still pretty conservative in that sense - there's a few changes from living in space, and a few social/political changes, but generally it seems like one of us could live on that Earth and fit in pretty ok.

So the fun scifi question is: what does an interstellar society even look like? How have attitudes on colonialism and resource gathering changed or not changed? Should we assume it'll be some sort of free market capitalism still? Would wanting "control over worlds" become unfashionable?

I guess that's what The Culture dives into a little bit. Humans can ask their robogods for anything they want, but asking for a free planet is considered a bit gauche. That seems very plausible to me. A lot of things that people desire are status symbols, but when they become trivial to acquire, they are no longer status symbols. If interstellar travel is very easy, and terraforming is very easy, then taking control over multiple planets just seems rude - you could just get your own colonies if you really wanted.

There's a lot of things you could play with here. How do you think quick and easy interstellar travel, combined with practical terraforming, would change a society? How practical and how desirable would it be to even try to exercise control over quadrillions of people thousands of light years apart?

Assuming for d100 we're thinking of a roll-under d%, and thinking primarily of BRP and similar: the maths for modifying difficulty can get a bit more cumbersome. Rolling advantage/disadvantage takes more rolls because you can't roll multiple d% at once without the dice getting muddled up, unless you have different coloured pairs of dice. You can add or subtract +-20% etc, but it's hard to balance that, especially for large bonuses, without hitting 0% or 100% too often. Some games will use half your % for some rolls, but that's slightly more mental maths.

Overall, even for e.g. people with mathsy PhDs, it's just slightly more likely that under pressure at the table they'll do some silly mistake like "66%+44%=100%" when using bigger numbers for calculations at the table. At the same time, this extra precision only makes a difference of at most 3% to any roll compared to using a d20.

For d20 roll-under, you can easily roll a pile of them to get a difficulty distribution without having to do any arithmetic at all. Any arithmetic for adding/subtracting bonuses uses smaller numbers and is just slightly less likely to cause an error.

There are some advantages - people like seeing the % given explicitly, and you can (as the top commenter said) actually get two semi-independent numbers out of one roll. But I like to use smaller numbers, and, where possible, just let the dice do the maths for me.

I get the books for Traveller because it's the archetype of that whole genre of space adventure RPGS - and then just go and run Scum & Villainy or whatever instead.

"Absorbing radiation" doesn't generally make something radioactive. Gamma rays and beta particles will ionise things and cause chemical reactions, and even alpha particles don't generally create a lot of radioactive elements. Instead it's more the direct effect of radioactive material from the bomb directly "falling out" and landing on something, rather than radiation itself being absorbed.

Right but we see that in mainline Spider-man and X-Men comics too. "Control vs freedom" is the main theme of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series in the 70s. Captain America and Daredevil etc directly confront the morality of killing or not killing in various series. Moral grayness is a major theme through much of the "grimdark" era, and was a big part of the Marvel Ultimate universe. This is all stuff that happens in mainstream Marvel + DC comics now - I'm only leaning towards Marvel examples just because I had Marvel Unlimited for a while and caught up on a lot more of the history there.

I've come to believe that "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" really just means superhero stories that aren't super simple stories for little kids. It's really the same transition that prose scifi went through with the New Wave etc, going from pulp adventures to imaginative speculative fiction short stories to really getting a bit deeper in characterisation and ideas in more literary novels.

Like, we can call Invincible deconstruction/reconstruction, but it's hard to find anything that happens in Invincible that doesn't happen to Spider-man at some point, so by that definition I'd end up calling most mainline comics deconstruction/reconstruction as well.

RADIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

GOODNIGHT

The main issue for me that puts books over TV shows is that the practicalities of producing a TV show disincentivize making a consistent multi-season plot with a beginning, middle, and end. You never know if the show will suddenly be cancelled or extended, and there's so many people working on a show that ending at a natural stopping point just kinda sucks for everybody working on it. You also never know if actors will re-sign their contracts or not, what the budget will be in the future etc. So they end up with a very improvisational writing style, throwing out mysteries and deciding later how to actually resolve them - and if that's too transparent, it ends up disappointing. Even in shows adapted from finished series you can see additional padding being added to space things out - I swear in The Walking Dead we had the same tense "Saints collecting tribute" scene at least twice.

With books, the crew is much smaller - there's still more than just the author involved, but not nearly to the same scale as even a low-budget TV show - and people are more faithful to authors than they are to TV creators - the writers of the Expanse are able to capitalise on their huge Expanse success and bring many of the readers over to the new Captive's War series. So you can get a bigger focus on story and character first, without so much of a risk to the creators' livelihoods when they actually finish a planned trilogy in three books.

I'm basically requesting that the province adds data centres above a certain size be added to the Class I or Class II lists. This is pretty close to what Alberta does, where they set the threshold at 75 MW.

Ok so if it's that way around - yes, if you already have the PCs, you can get a bit of "free" heat out of them. You're right on the core point - there's no reason to be concerned about the inefficiency of running a bunch of electronics at once if you are using electric heaters anyway; running those electronics just means you can turn down the heating. Gas heating might still be a bit cheaper per kWh than electric heating, so it's down to that sort of secondary factor. But even frivolous use of a PC in a cold area in the winter isn't really a waste of energy.

Honestly I've come to terms with the fact that space opera - in the broad sense of "anything with lots of spaceships in it" - has never actually been about the future, it's almost always just the present day with spaceships and a bit of reflavouring to make things look high tech, other than a couple of magic gadgets. They almost never really change society very much. Even on the "harder" end, other than the spaceships and protomolecule tech, much of The Expanse seems barely more advanced than the current day either.

I think it's just much easier to argue for something in the abstract than to actually act it out in practice. It's all too common, for instance, for someone to argue in favour of feminism while literally talking over women in the process. And then we have Isaac Asimov, who portrayed a progressive rational society, and publicly spoke in favour of feminism, while openly feeling up women at cons.

As I've gotten older I've come to realise there is almost zero correlation between the complexity, depth. and moral standards of someone's writing and that of their character. I guess if the inverse were true, then we'd expect ethics professors in a philosophy department to be the highest examples of human morality, and that's not what we see.

I think 1 kW of old gaming computers is still a lot of power - it might be 3-5 PCs. A cheap 1 kW heater is like $30 from Walmart, and will be quieter, less hassle to set up, and more reliable (you don't lose heating when the PC crashes from its constant uptime).

You could probably get some old PCs basically for free, but there's still more set up and upkeep, and they'll be noisier and take up more room. If you're just paying $20 for a piece of junk PC, it's still cheaper to just buy a single space heater from any discount store. But even if the PCs are being given away fro free, you still will have to maintain their uptime and have less direct control over the heating rate than you would with just a cheap space heater.

I would only go for "PCs as heating" if (a) you have lots of space, (b) you can get the PCs for literally free, (c) you can get excess PCs so it's okay if some run at low capacity for updates, (d) you are extremely tight for money and that you really need to save a one-off purchase of $30-50, even if it adds hours of effort in the long run.

Using computers for a little bit of heat to "take the edge off" makes sense though. If you have a small office, turning on an old laptop or two to run updates & do backups can add a degree or so, which could allow you to turn down the central heating a little (particularly if nobody else if home and it's just you in your small office/bedroom).

I would generally put this more as a "bonus" than as a real cost-saving tactic. It's like getting award points on your credit card - if you're already spending money, it's not a bad idea to choose a card with good bonus points. But it would almost always be a bad idea to buy something on a credit card just to get points (unless you're just below some point threshold).

A heat pump is more efficient than a resistance heater. It works on the same principle as a refrigerator. A fridge transfer heat from the inside to the outside, but it takes some "work" to do this, which adds extra heat - it's not a "free" transfer, it heats up the room more than it cools down a fridge. A heat pump is the same the "fridge" is the outdoors, and the "room" is your whole house. It transfers heat from the outdoors into your house, and the energy required to do this adds extra heat - it heats up your house more than it cools down the outdoors. This means 1000 W put into a heat pump gives you considerably more than 1000 W of heating - additional heat energy is being transferred from outside.

For a resistance heater - just dumping electric energy into heat - yes, a 1000 W computer produces the same heat as a 1000 W heater. Note though that a high capacity 2 kW heater is fairly affordable - like under $200 for a good one - but that's like thousands of dollars of computers. It's several high end gaming PCs running at once.

It might work for a small office, if it's not too cold or as supplemental heat - or if you basically have a small server farm running in your house. But the $ per kW of heating capacity aren't worth it unless you were going to be using that extra compute anyway.

I basically just play the popular AAA action games & RPGs, it just takes me like a year to play through each one. I add in some sessions of indie games and older games a bit in there too - had a good couple of months of Kerbal Space Program around when Artemis II was happening, and playing random levels of various Halo games now and again.

But mostly I spent like a year playing Veilguard, then a year playing Cyberpunk, and now after a couple of months I've got off the first planet in Star Wars: Outlaws.

I love the game design aspects here - there are 9 distinct locations with clear paths between them, and its laid out almost like a grid, keeping the locations distinct and spaced out. It's a touch like the overworld map from Doom.

We don't require businesses to pay corporate income taxes when they don't make money.

There's a huge difference between "making a profit" and "making money". Reinvestment - e.g. starting up a new data centre - cuts into accounted profit, as does C-suite bonuses, or deprecation write-offs from ageing GPUs. It's also more complicated than "Everwind is based in Halifax". There are real examples of real businesses that run successfully for many years without ever making a "profit".

Is there some reason we need to treat this business differently?

Sobeys, Irving, Walmart, Tim Hortons etc are big companies, some with foreign ownership, some with local ownership. But all contribute directly to Nova Scotia, even if the profit might go overseas - we directly benefit out of getting cheap products from Walmart, Sobeys employe over 10k people etc. They provide employment and services directly to people in the province - there is a clear positive impact. Even if we could debate the specifics of pricing, employment law, and how Tim Hortons' profits go overseas, we can still buy their cheap and convenient but mediocre coffee, and work there.

Data centres are a much bigger risk. They employ far fewer people, and don't directly provide a local service. It is entirely possible they will exploit Nova Scotian resources while contributing a disproportionately small amount to the economy.

But it is also possible that they will contribute a lot as well. Given the scale of this thing, this is something we should know and have some enforceable assurance of in advance, rather than just hoping in the goodwill of a large for-profit corporation.

Additionally, this is not really free market capitalism - there isn't a competitive force that would allow local consumers to choose a different data centre, or to choose an alternative that has lower risk; there is no "free market" here for consumers at all. Removing rules on corporate oversight does not lead to greater freedom and prosperity - it leads to monopolies, which can end up essentially a de facto government except you don't get voting rights. This isn't a monopoly, but it's another situation where something big enough is happening that trusting free market economics just doesn't really work. Pressuring government for intervention is the only tool consumers have to protect their interests here.

Or, something like "I switched to a different technical field, and was promoted to Senior and managing a team in 18 months" likely looks good as well