???

Only bet I ever won was the only one I ever really took, because I knew I couldn’t lose. I was discussing Colombia with someone (we’d both been there) and they forgot Colombia has both an Atlantic and a Pacific coastline. We bet on it, and since I know world geography on the continental scale nearly by heart, I won the bet.

I wouldn’t have even taken that bet if I had a 75% chance of winning, because I bet $100 but was broke. Never bet on even the slightest uncertainty if you can’t afford to pay, it’s not worth it. Fortunately, I’d been to both over both coasts of Colombia on planes, seen Colombia on all sorts of maps and globes, and reality is consistent enough that coastlines on a map don’t change until the real world changes first plus a delay to update the maps, and internet failure would just mean the bet was off. I had basically no chance of failure and the guy would have been pretty patient in the 0.0000000~0001% chance a freak accident occurred.

Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but if your chance of winning is lower than your chance of dying or having your life permanently ruined if you lose, you’re better off walking away. And that’s why I never liked the Golden Saucer type games in Pokémon and Neopets, one spin really is just one spin for me, win or lose, because if I don’t win the first time on a luck based “game” then I see it for what it is… an obvious con.

Yeah, if it’s 50% then I’d take the bet but the game is never that generous. As they say, the house always wins.

Removed by mod

That’s it. Launch the fucking nukes, ALL OF THEM, EVERYWHERE, at the whole goddamn region. If neither side is going to spare each other’s kids, I want that whole area fucking gone.

I know that won’t happen so I’m going to fucking kill myself. I hate every last one of you, humanity is nothing more than spiteful monsters and I refuse to live in a world where my choices are comfortable misery and uncomfortable misery. Moving to the middle of nowhere is not my idea of “freedom”.

Their kids didn’t target that school. You know damn well I fucking didn’t mean the Hamas’ kids should die.

Ah. Alright, fair enough, thanks for correcting my mistake.

I want these “Hama’s” bastards fucking DEAD. Do NOT target people’s kids, end of story.

If that is gross revenue, I have bad news for the EU. “X” is, IIRC, operating in the red since Musk bought it.

Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

Oh so you admit you’re a shill for bp or aramco. When it comes to shills, the first person to mention a brand name is the one getting paid.

I guess you’ve never heard of the beach with sand that is more radioactive than Fukushima and has been since long before nuclear energy or even nuclear weapons. People go there because the black sand is pretty and because it doesn’t have enough ionizing (cancerous) radiation to hurt anyone, it’s actually really popular.

Not all nuclear power plants are equal. Fukushima barely reached “level 8” on the danger level of nuclear accidents, which is the catch-all “really bad and off the charts” level. Even though Chernobyl was also “off the charts”, the soviet nuclear program was also focused on using power plants to make weapon’s grade plutonium and their design was flawed severely, so Chernobyl was and still is much, much worse.

Three Mile Island was a maintenance issue, and Fukushima was due to catastrophic damage, so what if we could build a nuclear plant that relied on something other than technology to prevent a meltdown?

Simple, gravity. Trains used to crash into disconnected carriages from other trains whose engineers never realized a coupler broke. Now, when a train starts, there’s pressurized air in a hose running the length of a train and when it fails the air is released; that was the only thing keeping the brakes on every car _de_activated. So the train immediately comes to a halt. That’s what an actual failsafe is, but nuclear plants currently in operation don’t have that because they were built in the 1950s and 60s on the cheap.

Instead of air, an electromagnet in a NEW design keeps a seal at the bottom of the plant closed. If the electricity fails, the seal is opened by gravity. When the seal is open, the nuclear fuel is sent dropping into a cooling tank with enough water to keep them cooled off for 100 or more years, during a mere few months of which we can repair the minimal damage easily. Unfortunately, the design was held back for decades for numerous nontechnical reasons, and now the average person is too fucking terrified of past failures based on the lies of businessmen and the shortsightedness of Cold War paranoia to use something that actually works.

The US military has, in all likelihood, been already capable of this for the past 15-30 years. Google has no market other than the public, and there’s no way to stop it from tagging rich people as “that asshole who owns what used to be twitter” but also the general public (us) would just end up flagging people we hate or envy or who we want revenge on to ruin people’s reputations.

There is no upside for a tech like that in the hands of big money, not even for big money; done the way Google would do it, it would fracture society like nothing before it and that includes utterly destroying the economy before leading to some sort of nuclear exchange.

I would sign up for this if it’s opt-in and either decentralized or local storage-based. Otherwise I hope the fuckers who would ruin this idea for greed crash and burn.

But I remember we did it. “Okay, Brian, the record’s five. The record’s five… Okay ready? Go!”

Huh? Just for clarity’s sake, is this a good or bad thing?

Honestly this is yet another reason to distinguish between photographic images/live video of a minor, and the disgusting but necessary evil of fictional material. With scams like this and new AI generation capability, I’m scared that even kids younger than 13 who haven’t even been forced to be involved in that photographic/video crap will be blackmailed using only their face and black market image AIs that draw on dark net CSAM.

By making fictional content legal while conversely increasing penalties for adults who exploit or attack REAL children in ANY way, not just sexually (because let’s be honest, this scam, kiddy porn and a lot of physical non-sexual violence towards children by strangers is about exploiting kids for the money and nothing else) you deprive the black market of material for an AI-based extortion plan.

The only other option is to make it illegal for anyone under 18 to post content on the internet at all, which would kill Lemmy and the fediverse, big tech, VR, online gaming and modern education.

Yes, but that’s because it motivated them to strike. That’s basically the less violent version of a riot.

I build rail networks and cities in most of the games I play. There’s something cathartic about building that’s different from the catharsis of destroying or stealing.

As for CP2077, I actually like that they included cars because it’s a dystopia. If cars, stroads and limited access motorways are the worst transport system ever, which they very much are, use them exclusively in dystopian future worlds and you’ve basically driven home the point easily. Of course, the fact that there’s a metro system in Night City would cut into that, but clearly the people there have bought into carbrain like nothing we see in real life, judging by the disdain going on a date by train gets and the description of how the saying in Cyberpunk’s world is de facto “Bread, Circuses and Automobiles” since the 1950s.

If anything, their over reliance on cars is a very anti-car artistic statement.

Notepad++, because I mostly program OpenTTD mods.

Fair enough. I meant that there’s two "realistic"s out there. There’s what’s scientifically proven, and there’s what pop-culture has led us to believe; they overlap but the latter is significantly less required to tell the truth.

How childlike are teenagers? More than you think thanks to Dawson Casting. Why do Aluminum Christmas Trees exist in the Peanuts universe? Because that was an actual ugly fad back in the 1960s. Why do cars always explode when they crash in movies? Because it looks cool and reminds people that the Ford Pinto was a death trap and so could their Tesla be.

Pop-Culture is art, not science, but most of us (myself included) take it for granted that what is and isn’t fictional is easy to spot because real people sit on chairs but only action movie heroes can survive jumping out a plate glass window to escape an explosion. Sadly, fake news exists because fiction has never been 100% clear on what is fake in movies and books, and since 2016 neither is reality for some odd reason (Life imitates art, go figure).

If every Aluminum Christmas Tree was just a wry commentary on the commercialization of a Christian holiday, World War One would never have happened. If the poles for traffic lights weren’t designed to shear off and fall to the ground if a car drives into them, there would be a lot more road fatalities, yet people deride Grand Theft Auto, American Truck Simulator, Crossout and other games with drivable vehicles and destructible environments for unrealistic traffic lights that you can push over by driving into.

Science, as accurate as it is due to only trusting the verified and being willing to de-verify whatever turns out to be misinformed, is not the default coding language of our brain; We are usually very emotionally-motivated, so people believe in everything from a flat earth conspiracy to “science is my one true god because my parents abused me and were constantly going on about Jesus and sinners to cover up that they were bad people, therefore all religions must be evil” to “capitalism is inherently good because I saw my neighbours dragged into the night to never be heard from again by the Soviet secret police” (for the record, I hate both systems but monarchy and anarchy don’t appeal to me one bit either so… eh).

So yeah, tl;dr, take it from a fiction writer that people will often believe anything that speaks to them, and therefore our definitions of “realistic” were quite different.

I really did mean “realistic-looking, but not reality” as much as you meant “scientific consensus”, and I get why that’s easy to confuse… sometimes I just forget when posting on social media that most people don’t have a good memory or the desire to memorize things from fiction as disparate as Aboriginee mythology, Hypnopspace Outlaw, the Backrooms, Paprika and Inception, all well enough to remember every single one of them (and many others) involves dream magic/super-tech of some sort. My apologies for forgetting you probably don’t write fiction for a living.