monotremata

I mean, I don’t have the encyclopedia anymore, so I guess I can’t really prove it to you. But it was sort of my introduction to the idea that not everything in an encyclopedia is necessarily true, so it’s pretty memorable for me. I recognize the irony of using another encyclopedia here, but Wikipedia mentions in the History section of its Pain in Animals article, “Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals#History ) I obviously don’t know the story about how the line ended up in World Book, but I know they employ fact checkers for every line in the book, so presumably in the 50’s the line reflected some kind of scientific consensus, as bizarre as that sounds now.

When I was a kid in the 80’s, my sister and I found an old World Book Encyclopedia from the 50’s that someone in our neighborhood was throwing out, so we brought it home. It had some interesting “facts” in it. E.g., did you know that guinea pigs are perfect as subjects for scientific research because they’re unable to feel pain? 1950’s worldbook did!

They absolutely do want to get rid of state and national parks, though. There’s valuable minerals on some of that land, and other land that can be repurposed for grazing cattle. They’re whittling it away as fast as they can already.

Sounds like it could be really useful for VR displays. The best optics for VR right now use polarizers to fold the optical path repeatedly through the same lens, but a side effect is that only a small portion of the light makes it to the users’ eyes. Could also extend the battery life of phones; the display is the main power draw for most phones, and the higher brightness make that worse. I understand why people are reacting badly to these being described as “brighter,” but it does also mean “more energy efficient for the same brightness.”

I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it's Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He's made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don't think the game is available on Steam.) I didn't actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here's Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it's a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn't offer reviews and whatnot.

I’ve recommended this before, so it’s possible people will have heard of this from me, but Gateways by Smudged Cat Games is pretty great. It’s a puzzle platformer but it gets very, very complicated as you go on, especially once you unlock the ability to use all the different mechanics at once. It’s a pretty smooth learning curve up to that point, though.

“Do you guys not have phones?”

And say what you will about the T1, but let’s give credit where it’s due. Trump Mobile aren’t gouging their fanbase…not yet anyway. Against all expectations, the T1 is actually well priced when compared to the equivalently specced 512GB U24 Pro, and the only things you give up are the 60W fast charging and your dignity. That’s from the iFixit article. I checked the website and they’re currently listing it for $499, whereas Amazon has the U24 Pro 512gb (which I think is what they’re saying is the equivalent?) for $699. So maybe it’s actually cheaper? But I wouldn’t buy either one at this point anyway. The U24 Pro released in July 2024 with the promise of two years of security updates, meaning it’ll be out of support in a month. I can’t imagine this “new” version will get any support at all.

Jerry Falwell was raising alarms about Tinky Winky all the way back in 1999, because they had a male voice actor but carried a bag, and had a purple triangle on their head. There are no depths too stupid for the culture wars.

I think they care a *lot* about the lawful axis and not at all about the stupid axis.

It’s because in the US pixel phones are one of the only ways to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Or, in other words, to actually own a phone.

I would in fact think they must all start that way.

Yeah, this is what I was going to call out. Calling it "100% solvable by humans" and saying "if human scores were included, they would be at 100%" when 20-60% of humans solved each task seems kinda misleading. The AI scores are so low that I don't think this kind of hyperbole is necessary; I assume there are *some* humans that scored 100%, but I would find it a lot more useful if they said something like "the worst-performing human in our sample was able to solve 45% of the tasks" or whatever. Given that the AIs are still scoring below 1%, that's still pretty dark.

Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn’t run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.