Jfc just spent 15 minutes trying to cancel a newspaper subscription this morning. Shame I couldn’t wait six months to do so.

Ohioan here. You’re not wrong. Sorry about JD Vance.

For me and mine, it’s carrots. Do you know how difficult it is to find carrot-free items? Impossible.

Devastating loss for the science community. I used this database in my PhD, and didn’t expect it to shut down ever.

Agreed, seems like a no-brainer. Typically this stuff is handled at an institutional level, with bad professors losing/ failing to achieve tenure. But some results have much bigger implications than just “Uh oh, I cited that paper and it was a bad one.” Often, entire clinical pipelines are developed off of bad research, which wastes millions of dollars.

See also, the recent scandals in Alzheimer’s research. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

Good riddance, Tom Bombadil. I don’t care how merry a fellow he was, those were my least favorite chapters of Fellowship.

Touche, forgot this was PatientGamers. Grim Dawn is basically the same sans MMO. It’s the best ARPG I’ve played like, ever, and it’s due for a huge DLC soon. Goes on sale for very cheap often.

Unlike Last Epoch, it’s more item-focused. Unlike PoE, the items aren’t a total nightmare to optimize…

Very interesting - I haven’t hit a single bug during my play.

A handful if my PoE friends have picked up Last Epoch which I’ve found to be more approachable. Little less MMO but a very similar game.

In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

Don’t stay in school, kids.

Nah. Fenced epee for a bit in a college club. Height advantage was pretty great. I guess it just depends on the weapon.

Outer Wilds was the best game I played on PS4. I strongly recommend experiencing it for yourself.

I would say the space ship/0g flight is maybe 30% of the gameplay, and you don’t need to be really excellent at it, thankfully.

Can’t say I’ve heard anything since launch, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Grim Dawn Item Assistant is your best friend. While you’re at it, Rainbow Item Names (or whatever it’s called).

Well if you liked PoE I doubt you’ll like D4. It’s a much simpler game. Sadly my only advice is to try GD and Last Epoch again. I’ve got hundreds of hours in the former and I just got 10 hours into the latter.

Last Epoch feels like a more approachable PoE. I thoroughly enjoy how the skills interplay with one another, but I still prefer the itemization in Grim Dawn.

The only reason I’m not playing GD currently is because I have too many QoL mods installed so my cloud saving doesn’t work, but I can cloud save for Last Epoch for my steam deck lmao.

They raised my rent 20% over two years and priced me out of two apartments. Glad to see progress.

It’s been in development for a while: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o

Even before the above paper, I recall efforts to connect (rat) brains to computers in the late 90s/early 2000s. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1012407611130

It’s a bunch of neurons that speak to a computer with a microelectrode array. So they “speak to” the neurons with electric impulses, and then “listen to” what they have to say. The computer it’s connected to uses binary, but the neurons are somewhere in between. Yes, the change in electrical potential is analog, but neurons are typically in their “on” state, recovering from their “on” state, or just chilling out.

The brain is incredible because of the network of connections between neurons that store information. It’ll be interesting to see if a small scale system like this can be used for anything larger scale.

Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There’s some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)

There have been other “bioprocessors” before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it’ll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like “learn” and “rememeber”) and are less finicky to work with.

My job is 8:30 - 5 with a 30 minute lunch break. So almost.

But, we also get 2 days/week at home, and can flex time as required. Tons of international work, so the flexible hours are a godsend when time zones are against us.

It’s a salaried position and depending on your supervisor and stage of your career, you’re expected to work 40-45 hours a week. Deadlines and ugly projects tend to increase hours work. I’m very lucky, as my industry can be pretty brutal with sudden ends to projects and unexpected layoffs.