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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • if you ever feel so inclined, all you need to make your own tortillas at home is:

    1. masa flour aka specially treated corn flour

    2. a stovetop and a pan for cooking

    3. a plastic food storage bag

    4. something with a flat bottom, ideally transparent

    5. water

    the bag of flour typically has instructions for how much flour and water to mix. you can mix it by hand and form it into balls by hand. the size of the balls only matters if you care about the tortillas being “the right size”.

    From there, you press a ball flat, toss it on an already hot pan over medium heat, flip it after a couple of minutes, and remove it after a minute more. to press the ball flat, place it under your flat-bottomed transparent thing and mash on it until it looks tortilla-shaped enough for you.

    the plastic food storage bag is optional/recommended to stop the tortilla balls sticking when you press them. cut the food storage bag open along its seams and remove its zipper if it has one. what you have left is a single sheet of plastic with a seam/hinge in the middle.

    it might be sounding like a lot but it’s really just:

    • mix flour into wet balls

    • mash flour in your “press” made of random flat dishes and a plastic bag

    • cook the thing a little

    • eat

    if you iterate on those 4 steps a dozen times, you’ll be out like 50 cents of flour and you’ll have produced at least one satisfactory tortilla. and it’ll be so, so much better than store bought, you’ll think about it every time you have store bought tortillas therafter.



  • So tl;dr he/his team did two things:

    1. argue the way AI uses content to train is legal
    2. provide artists a tool to prevent their content being used to train AI without their permission

    On the surface it sounds all good, but I can’t help but notice a future conflict of interest for Zhao should Glaze ever become monetized. If it were to be ruled illegal to train AI on content without permission, tools like Glaze would be essentially anti-theft devices, but while it remains legal to train AI this way, tools like Glaze stand to perhaps become necessary for artists to maintain the pre-AI status quo w/r/t how their work can be used and monetized.




  • it’s such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it’s not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen’s feature creep. When Roberts’ funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should’ve changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:

    Original funding goal: $2 million US

    Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US

    If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They’d have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that’d gone as planned, the dude’d be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.

    Oh, and we’d have a game like this:

    Pick up jobs as a smuggler, pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, or enlist as a pilot, protecting the borders from outside threats.

    A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in

    Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want

    Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore

    Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions

    If caught alone in an online ambush, send a distress broadcast to your friends and if they’re nearby they can jump in-system to save your bacon.

    You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Spaceships adjust their trajectory and orientation just like the real thing.

    10X the detail of current AAA games (as measured in polygons)

    Range of scale never seen before in a game - ships from 27m to 1km scale, all at same level of detail

    Support for Joystick, Gamepad, Mouse, Keyboard, as well as HOTAS, flight chair, rudder petals, and VR

    the cardinal rule regarding “in-game purchases” is: Players who spend money purchasing in-game credits will have no advantage over players who spend time!

    Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts’ wildest whims

    The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.

    funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign

    original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/







  • Are you expecting 1TB cloud storage for free?

    Your point stands, but let me point out that when gmail started their “9GB free” thing way back when, that was an unfathomable amount of storage for some of us. And gmail’s not the only service that’s offered huge amounts of free storage over the years. So yeah, I think it’s probable that a bunch of us have been primed to expect free storage.

    edit: Also given how cheap cloud storage is from ie MS Azure

    Depending on storage type you pay $10-$18/mo once you’re using a full TB. If you use less, you pay proportionally less. Dropbox’s 2TB for $10 is a comparatively better deal if you use it all, but if you use 1TB or less it’s not. Which, now that I’m looking at it, probably means their business model is counting on a lot of underutilized storage caps from their subscribers.