plasma gun

One of the first “aha” design moments I ever got was the Doom plasma gun. There was a kid’s toy version of the American M-60 Light Machine gun that I had. The back half was pretty cool on its own, the typical thumper machanism to make noise, but it also had secondary triggers in the stock and a little gear that would advance a belt of soft plastic ammo. Didn’t do anything except move, but the effect was cool.

The front actually came off, and was a pretty decent quality suction-dart shooter. However, if you turned it around and used the the mating surface as the “muzzle…” BOOM! (or “ZAP” I guess… lol) Doom plasma gun, down to the exact number of ridges.

Theater lobby vs streaming lobby. YAY!

Frankly, as long as they stop memory-holing completed projects like Zaslav did, it will be at least a modest improvement.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

Absolutely. I think there will always be room for thoughtfully filmed 1.5-3 hour storytelling, but this idea that you have to go out to a communal viewing on a screen that fills your entire filed of vision feels gatekeepery and fetishistic. Just like playhouses before them, cinemas will settle into their best use cases, and sensory spectacle seems to be the one where they offer a competitive advantage. Another one is serving dedicated cinephiles, but that market is not as big as Spielberg, Scorsese, etc. want it to to be, and they sound like old men shouting at the sky when they complain.

Now that said, I think a 65"/5.1 is much closer to a movie theater than it is to a phone screen, so I personally hope we don’t get too much stuff filmed and framed for the latter, but maybe that’s just me on my path to being an old man shouting at the sky.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

1. Spoiler tags.

2. You’re not going to get anybody to agree to “Trust me bro” on keeping the 8-figure alien VFX out of the marketing. Spoiling Rocky was pretty much a pre-condition to this being done as a big project, and…

I don’t agree about the movie being better, mostly because I think getting Mark’s inner monologue made much of the humor land so much better than the vocalized stuff in the movie. And they had to handwave a bunch of the more technical sciences and engineering that I found genuinely interesting in the book. But it was very cinematic and a pretty solid adaptation.

That’s certainly fair, and probably more common among people who’ve gone into both with an open mind. There are certain things that books simply explore better than films, and the more in-depth “Swiss Family Robinson” competence-porn and meditation on isolation did work very well. Someone who wants that particular story with more depth and different pacing can always make a good argument that the book is better," but I do sometimes like to gently push back on the notion that any book is inherently better than its adaptation, not to make you a straw man or anything. :-) Also, for the record I really liked the book a lot.

I thought Damon did a very good job with converting the monologue into video messages and very much caught the spirit of the character. I honestly didn’t miss the rover ride, which dragged and made an already constrained story positively claustrophobic, though the science and geography it showed was obviously core to what Weir wanted to do. I also just had a personal bugaboo where I struggled with the fact that every book character other than Watney was drawn thinner than thin and had clunky dialogue, so I found it a chore to wade through their scenes. The script doctors and professional actors made them much more palatable in the movie.

I think first-time-novelist Andy Weir just didn’t really have more than one character in him at the time, and that character was his “juiced” author-insert. You can see him stretching his literary wings in Artemis but it falls flat in many ways, though that setting could result in a really good project of its own if they tweaked the characterizations some. PHM was nice because it kind of took a more incremental step of giving the author insert more flaws, making genuinely excellent use of his second character, and making the “plot device humans” comfortably deliver exposition and obstacles from the sidelines without being distracting.

I actually think The Martian was better as a movie. I think I’m rare in going that far, but most people seem to think it was a pretty solid adaptation. Weir has improved as a writer, and so PHM has more to work with but it’s playing with a lot of the same techniques, so I’m optimistic this movie will be decent or better.

They clearly felt like they couldn’t even market the movie without revealing one of the major spoilable plot points, and frankly I’m sympathetic, but I’m curious how they’ll handle the other.

Here’s a slightly more nuanced, but still ultimately disappointed review. Sounds like this one is old-fashioned Nov-Dec overhyped Oscar-bait.

While bots seem like the obvious answer, there’s also a possibility of demographic shift over time towards a younger and more mainstream commenting/posting population. More young adults with no baggage asking for advice means cutting ties is more likely to be a novel suggestion for them and has less friction, and more young adults (and, frankly, kids) in the commenting population means less nuance, more “edge”, and generally more advocating for hot-takes that have attracted upvotes in the past.

My summary of MCAD suites is getting pretty long in the tooth these days, and IIRC one or two of the niche ones are simply not available anymore, but it still might be useful.

For what it’s worth, I use Alibre Design in Windows, and do STEP touchups and smaller projects in Linux (where I spend most of my time) on FreeCAD. I just really like the timeline and workflow in Alibre, and it very rarely crashes.

I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”

I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.

Adults also make a face with how much it’s a copy of Frozen’s premise.

Definitely very similar, but it’s different enough, I’d say. It sort of makes explicit that there are cultural repercussions to imposing Elsa’s burden on everyone, that embracing individuality can ironically create a stronger sense of community, and then, in splitting Elsa into Rumi and Jinu, it allows for parallel redemptive tracks, one who never had a “Let it Go” first act moment at all and suffered because of it, and one who really thoroughly bought into the anti-social aspects of it but is then gaslit into thinking they can never be anything better.

If we can do the Hero’s Journey a thousand times, we can do Elsa’s every few years, especially when the rest of it is changed up and fun. I do think there’s a world where K-Pop Demon Hunters comes and goes without making any waves, but the songs are all earworms and it hit at just the right moment, apparently.

Sounds like he’s made peace with its living on in forks as well. Nice to see he’s doing okay.

For your edit, you don’t want the direction of shear forces right along the layer lines. This is less pretty but will be much stronger for the intended purpose.

HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.

I haven’t really thought about anything remotely in spitting distance of sim racing since I was playing XBox One Forza games (mostly the Horizon one that is set in the Riviera-ish region) with a Thrustmaster TMX (I think?) clamped to a Home Depot Fliptop table.

This looks really cool. May I assume the Moza drive unit was the priciest component?

Dear Jordan Catalano, Angela is not as into you as she thought.

Also, for Tron Ares specifically, I know that I am instantly turned off the moment a franchise that mostly exists in another world/dimension/etc. decides it’s going to do something in “the real world.” I know Tron isn’t as bright-line as other IPs, but the appeal is still largely in seeing how the inside of computers and networks is anthropomorphized and analogized into an alternate universe that comments on contemporary anxieties about technology. Nobody was asking to see light cycles and recognizers in LA.