a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice.

I think this is a ridiculous thing to criticize too. Dialogue is important in a game like this and it has (sometimes lethal) consequences.

Imagine if this argument were applied to combat. It turns out that it is impossible to beat some encounters by role-playing a loner wizard who refuses to cast spells. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe that is a valid criticism.

So the Stanford post assumes that we continue to consume roughly 2% more energy per year. At that rate, in 1000 years we would go from consuming 1.753×10^13 W to consuming 6.98×10^21 W. This would be 40,000 times the energy the sun puts on the Earth. Because most energy quickly turns into heat, this would heat up the entire surface of the Earth to the point where it is uninhabitable. I feel that tidal locking would be the least of our concerns at that point.

Professor Liu seems to have made a simple mistake: What his model showed was unsustainable was not tidal energy, but actually his assumed exponential growth rate of energy consumption to ludicrous levels, levels that would spell disaster for the Earth.

That said, the website's math checks out. The linear approach is a very basic year 1 physics problem that can be quickly confirmed.

The values we need for this calculation:

The mass of the earth (M) is: 5.97×10^24 kg

The radius of the earth (R) is 6.37×10^6 m

The angular velocity of the earth (w) is 7.29×10^-5 rad/sec

The current total worldwide primary energy consumption is 1.753 × 10^13 W. This is pretty close to the article's assumption

The equations necessary:

The moment of inertia of a solid sphere of uniform density is: 2/5 MR^2

Rotational kinetic energy is calculated by: 1/2 I w^2

After some very basic plug-and-chug:

This provides a moment of inertia of the earth (I) of: 9.69×10^37 kilogram meters squared

And a total rotational kinetic energy of: 2.575×10^29 kg m^2 /s^2 This is pretty close to what the Stanford website calculated.

So if we used the suggested 1% here, it would take around 5.0 x 10^10 years to tidally lock the earth to the moon with our current energy consumption. But that's not what was assumed in the article. It was also assumed that we would continue to expand our energy consumption by a constant 2% per year. This requires basic calculus.

We have energy consumption that starts at the previously mentioned: 1.753 × 10^13 W

Below, n is equal to the number of years.

This leads us to a consumption growth formula of: 1.753×10^13 * 1.02^n

To indefinitely integrate that formula, we simply divide it by ln(1.02), which gives us: 8.85236×10^14 1.02^n (we will drop the +c because it's not necessary here)

And now we just need to solve the following equation for n: 2.575×10^29 = 8.85236×10^14 1.02^n

Solving gives us a real solution of: around 1681 years. This is close enough for me to say that the math checks out, considering that I didn't start with exactly the same base formulas. But ultimately this is besides the point. The math is right, but the premise of a constant 2% growth is ultimately unsustainable. Short of building planet-scale radiators to shed heat, the earth would become uninhabitable by virtue of the sheer energy consumption alone.

At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don't lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.

And now this is also just how we communicate that the speaker is stating their own pronouns. If I put "Pseu he" as my username, there's a high chance of confusion. If I put "Pseu he/him" as my username, it's obvious what I'm trying to say.

I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

Relevant

Well, the typical way of measuring q does measure the energy it takes to get the boulder up the hill, but not the inefficiency of the machine to get the boulder up there and the ineffency in extracting its energy as it goes back down.

There's a lot of unsexy research that could make fusion come a whole lot sooner. More efficient powerful lasers, better cooling methods and design for superconducting electromagnetics, more efficient containment methods and more thought on how to extract energy from the plasma efficiently, and then making it cheap enough to build and maintain that we can actually afford to build them.

My parents briefly discussed sending me to a military-style boarding school because I was not the greatest kid at the time. This one wasn't the "kidnap you and force other kids to watch you pee," kind of place but it did bill itself as structured and instilling discipline.

Naturally, they googled and researched it and places like it. My mom found stories about the stress that such places out on students and research concluding that kids often end up with more behavioral problems rather than less. After that, they never brought it up again.

This kind of research probably isn't going to change minds in an argument, but there are parents of transgender kids who are exploring treatment options. They very well might be convinced by research when it comes down to sending their own kid to conversion therapy.

If you have infinite inventory space, then you need a way to navigate through infinite items. Towards the end of the game, a player could easily have nearly every item in the game. For some games, that would be fine, but for many, that would make the list of items prohibitively long. Filtering and searching would help, but if you're looking for an item that you forgot the name of, a search doesn't necessarily do much.

Then there's balance reasons. Some games use their inventory system to limit the player, making sure they don't start a level with enough health potions and grenades to cheese every fight.

In survival games, a finite inventory sets the gameplay loop: you go exploring/mining and then return to base, drop off your stuff and head out again. It makes your base valuable, if only because that's where you keep most of your resources and moving would be hard. It also gives the player a break from one task. I played a Minecraft mod that gave me an effectively infinite inventory. I went mining for so long that it started to feel like an awful slog. Because my mine shafts went on too long, getting back was itself a hassle. When I reverted back to a more typical inventory size, I could feel how a full inventory breaks up the grind and prevents mining from getting out of hand.

First off, the first amendment says otherwise.

Second, in this case, it was an expert on the opioid crisis pointing out that the lt. governor had made policies that made it harder for people with opioid addiction to get help or be safe without being prosecuted. And that naturally this had the effect of people not pursuing treatment that could potentially land them in legal trouble. She wasn't commenting on the personal life of Dan Patrick, she was commenting on his policies and the consequences of those policies on a subject that was the topic of her lecture and her field of research.

As a 70-qubit quantum computer, it's not going to be doing many helpful calculations. The benchmark used is random circuit sampling, which is doing a bunch of random quantum operations, and then reading the result, and it is compared to a supercomputer simulating the various random operations. This algorithm isn't useful outside of benchmarking.

This also makes Sycamore a particularly ineffective "weapon" considering that we don't really use encryption that's less than 1024 bits, which is well outside of the capability of our current quantum computers.

It's a 70-qubit quantum computer. It doesn't have enough memory to break even rudimentary 128-bit encryption.

The algorithm that it executed was also not Shor's algorithm (the one that could potentially break encryption). The benchmark used is called random circuit sampling, which is just doing a bunch of random quantum operations between pairs of qubits and then reading the output. It's one of the fastest quantum speedups of any known algorithm.

This. As much I would like someone to really change things for the better, I could absolutely see laws like the ones passed in Florida and Texas being passed nationally if elections go poorly.