gattsuru
1d ago
Finished Stoneblock 4, at least to opening up the creative chapter. Mixed feelings, like a lot of FTB modpacks, it's got a good early-game but gets bogged down as you go on, and it suffers a lot from making certain progression assumptions that the actual content doesn't back up. By the point you're doing actual automation challenges you have so many raw materials anything you can't just Replicate can be solved with simple spam, and by the point you've unlocked much of the combat stuff you have to beat the hardest available boss first and then it's just facestomping a bunch of also-rans. And it doesn't help that I'm not a huge fan of Mekanism, even if building a silly-large reactor is kinda entertaining. But there's a lot of effort that went into polishing the content and order that was there. Probably 3/5.
Trying Society: Sunlit Valley. It's not the first Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-but-Minecraft-like I've played, but it's far more committed to the bit. (Most) crops and animals are tied to the day/night cycle for growth and harvest, there's a large number of new processing blocks that are similarly tied to daily cycles, equipment has to either be found in-world or upgraded from stone-iron-gold-diamond-iridium (lots of things drop gold gear!), a lot of fabricated materials can be purchased from villagers, and focusing on profit or collecting a variety of materials for the Community Center. Not perfectly happy with the pacing and progression. Since villagers are used for a pretty wide variety of important components and items you'd normally craft, and only certain materials sell for meaningful amounts of money, that means a lot of optimal play has you either grinding beer, simple meals, or raw ore to immediately dump for sale. On the other hand, props for being one of the first modpacks to put Create late in progression, and still make it meaningfully useful and powerful. But I also haven't had much time with it.
gattsuru
2d ago
No, more that it's seems kinda confused for a technical person to make such a claim as if it means something. If by 'enriching' we mean just the whole centrifuge deal, obviously reactors don't do that directly (modulo some liquid sodium-fuel mix stuff not relevant here or anywhere not currently on fire). If we say specifically 'enriching uranium' in the sense of getting weapons-grade uranium from the output, than obviously not, because they burn a fissile fuel from one starting isotope to another, so by definition and by the nature of the uranium fuel cycle a uranium-fueled research reactor doesn't output higher-density U-235 (uh, technically, for times less than 20k years).
But reactors naturally change the isotopic makeup of whatever fuel (and everything else!) that's stuffed into them, that's what 'react' is talking about. The normal fuel cycle doesn't enrich uranium, because they essential convert the majority from U-235... but converting into Pu-239 is one of the main immediate steps. That's the normal next step in the uranium fuel cycle, and it's nuclear bomb material.
Not all plutonium is useful for making bombs, and indeed that's a good part of what makes modern power reactors nonviable for producing weapons: the very rapid cycling and burn rate of fuel that's required to get a high proportion of Pu-239 is intrinsically opposed to running a nuclear power plant, in ways that can be observed from space.
However, research reactors work by cycling input material through a high-intensity bath of neutrons at a controlled rate. Some of those processes are slow, both in time and in neutrons, but others are not. There's some efforts to make it hard to turn a research reactor into a ghetto breeder reactor, and more ways of making it really obvious, but even before considering the age of the reactor here, none of these are impossible or insurmountable tasks.
I'm not a technical expert or professional for this specific field, so I may well be missing some information. Hell, there could be some information I'm not even allowed to know about the statement here. But at least from the publicly available info, this is a definition of 'doesn't enrich uranium' that would exclude a breeder reactor. It's arguably whether it's even technically correct, and it's really hard to believe it's meaningful in the sense it was phrased here.
gattsuru
2d ago
Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium,
I make no analysis about the broader situation, but this seems incredibly confused, game-of-telephoned, or taken out of any useful context.
Ideally, this is the sort of mistake someone gargles their SIG over, but the combination of diffusion of responsibility, fog of war, and the possibility of genuinely insurmountable mistake means it's probably going to just end up rhyming with other past errors.
It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here.
I'm in the pinch point of several business decisions and the FIRST FRC comp season, so for now even my normal targets-of-discussion (subscribestar TOS clench, federal courts behaving badly, gun law) just go into the bullet point file to be filled out later, and I'll admit that foreign policy has long been one of my weak spots. But there's also a lot of FUD going around, here, and while there's some cowardice in not committing too heavily to positions that could be proven wrong, there's something to be said for people not making vastly confident positions first and then just ignoring their mistakes after.
Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016?
It's... uh, not a position that has had a long and unbroken history of Absolute Winners. The 2021-2024 option might have sounded more professional, at least when he showed up to work, but he didn't exactly cover himself with honor when it comes to not killing civilians and children with misaimed drone strikes. I guess he didn't get a high score?
gattsuru
4d ago
Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.
All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the UK system (from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?), and it has some obvious and well-documented faults. But it’s still not quite as stupid as asking people to upload their photo ID.
That’s presuming you can get the system without getting OFCOM and that whole related mess — the ease of the system for normies may well have made that more palatable politically! — but my guess is that they’re separate results of different political drives.
gattsuru
5d ago
For another 'fun' example:
Herrera has become the district’s de facto GOP nominee in the wake of Gonzales’ departure from the race. A he firearms manufacturer and YouTuber who’s known on the internet at “The AK Guy.” went viral on Friday after a clip surfaced where he is seen boasting about his copy of Mein Kampf.
“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said in the video. In the clip, he appears to pull up a photo of it on his phone to show one of the hosts. “I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you could buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.” (Hitler’s hateful, antisemitic book appears to be available on Amazon).
... Herrera is an extremely well-known guntuber, and, to spoil the punchline, the clip is from an Unsubscribed episode where Herrera spends almost as much time making fun of Hitler as talking guns. The segment is literally titled "Hitler was a bad writer".
There's things you could say here. They're lying, they know they're lying, they know anyone who cares is lying, and they probably don't even think that their audience is this stupid and gullible so much as just to lazy to care about the full text of what they wrote. One could spend a ton of effort to show how that this guy isn't evil, or that this isn't anywhere near the same organization's behavior in an easier case, but that's missing the point: yes, the news media is hilariously biased, where have you been the last few decades. In any reasonable set of laws, this could be defamatory, but the problem isn't the statutes or the line between opinion and slander, when judges can move it back and forth depending on whether they like the victim.
It's that this is what people want. Eat at Arbies!
gattsuru
5d ago
For non-American Memorable Examples.
Kung Fu Hustle : Stephen Chow's magnum opus, and there's reason it gets referenced as an inspiration everywhere from Exalted to Chuubo's. Incredible action sequences throughout the entire film, incredible clarity and color grading, a great set of character arcs, and defined its own aesthetic. While it wears its western influences on its sleeves (there's a Looney Tunes segment and a reference to The Shining), a very strongly Hong Kong work. It's not perfect -- the CGI is dated in places, the pacing around the denouement is a little too fast, and some of its parody elements are no longer parody enough -- but I don't know of anything better in its genre. If you really like it, Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery motion around the same concepts and themes, but they don't really hold up.
Drunken Master II (aka Legend of the Drunken Master): the film that put Jackie Chan on the international map. I don't like it as much as Kung Fu Hustle, myself, since it's much stronger for its fight scenes than for its themes or plot, but it's significantly more grounded and less parody.
Princess Mononoke : it's long, it's (cartoonishly) gory, and some of its thematic commentary gets kinda confused, but one of the strongest Ghibli movies and I'd argue the strongest adult action Ghibli movie. Great characters and complex motivations, deep introspection on virtue, and better sense of things existing in a real space during fight scenes than some live-action works. Howl's Moving Castle is a close second in quality and a better introduction to Ghibli in general, and maybe Marnie and the Witch's Flower, but they're far less action-focused.
Ghost in the Shell : the philosophy is a little dated (and way too wordy) at this point, but when the worst you can say about a film like this is that it didn't predict LLMs perfectly, that's praising with faint damns. The more serious problem is just that it's slow-paced and all of the fights are very much curbstomps one direction or the other.
Akira: I'll have to give a disclaimer, here: it does have a famously bad ending, made worse that the original manga's somehow not any better. Like Jet Li's The One, I can't call it good so much as I can call it interesting. Still, there's reason it's inspired a literal generation of animators, and it's still something I like watching.
08th MS Team : technically an OVA instead of a movie, but basically just a movie. Forget all of the newtypes and super prototypes and hyperweapons and one-men armies. It's a war drama as much or more than an action film, and while it's not realistic, it's got an emphasis on realism. If you want a mecha action film that treats fights seriously, this is about as close as you can get, and it's backed up by fantastic animation and great pacing.
Uh, if you have access to the raw weights, it's surprisingly easy to change refusal behaviors. There's downsides to the various approaches -- I've been using GLM-4.5-Air-Derestricted, there's probably some impact on intelligence, and it's almost disturbing what it's willing to treat as 'normal' that the base model would recognize as weird -- but if you want to simulate a 4channer, it'll do pretty well.
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