Froztnova

It's also a matter of whether it would be worthwhile to reveal the existence of such a capability in a given case.

If I were a government and had just spent a pretty penny on implementing the necessary infrastructure to defeat an encrypted routing scheme, I would probably not use that capability to bust internet drug dealers and other petty criminals, resulting in everyone scattering to a new scheme or to seek security through obscurity in some hand-rolled solution. I'd save it for national security level threats. High value targets.

Though thinking about it further, it would still be workable to gather compromising information on low-value targets without necessarily acting on it.

Hah, I wrote an interpreter for this in C years back after hearing that it was a good first project for people who have an interest in virtual machines and emulation.

I think I actually used some of the diagnosis/test suite ROMs that the author linked to smooth out the last few issues my implementation had.

I also implemented the quirk flags and made them GUI-toggleable.

I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.

But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.

And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.

For a time I thought steam on Linux had begun to add .desktop files for games. Nah, just Factorio. Wube really is the GOAT.

This is what I've been using for a long time now. It's probably too technical for most people, especially if you're talking about syncing across multiple devices, but that's not a problem for me.

Ah yes, the moral height of humanity: The 1980s.

Exhalation is really excellent.

It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.

It's been getting pretty bad around here lately. I had someone reply to a post I made in that Idiocracy thread a few days ago advocating for eugenics. Really really gross all around.

People here think that they're much smarter than they actually are.

My mind goes to the science fiction novel Footfall by Larry Nivel and Jerry Pournell, in which Earth is attacked by aliens and, at one point, a journalist figures out about a secret project to carry out a counter-offensive and is going to run a story on it, obviously against the wishes of those involved with the project.

Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.

This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.

It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.

It does explicitly reference IQ and, at one point, shows an adult taking an intelligence test and trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.

I mean yes but the point at the end of the day was that the people who were breeding in Idiocracy had genetically inferior intelligence.