Even if you use an honest-to-god land line how long is the distance your call has to travel before its running on the same fiberoptic lines as the internet?

Reminds me of this video.

The author speaks directly to the reader about this:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

She laments her inability to make Omelas seem like a real place, to convince the reader that such a society could actually exist, and invites the reader to try in her stead:

But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

Finally, after some more description she again directly speaks to the reader to ask them if Omelas seems real:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

When the answer is “no” they add the detail of the suffering child, which is necessary for all good things that occur there. How exactly torturing a child results in the city’s scholars being smart or ensuring good harvest is not explained at all, and yet by some narrative alchemy the setting is transmuted from something meaningless into something interesting.

The non-subtextual point of the story is that we as a people cannot imagine even a fictional setting without injustice. The subtextual point of the story is that we cannot imagine a society without injustice, fictional or not. Just as the people of Omelas described in the last section convince themselves that the injustice of their society is necessary, inevitable, and futile to fight against, so to do we convince ourselves that the injustices of our society are the same way. And yet there is some hope offered in the titular ones who walk away:

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The author admits that she herself cannot imagine “the kind of place they’re going to”, in other words the kind of society that is not based on exploitation but is not an impossible utopia like the Omelas described in the first section, something that could exist in the real world (it seems the author failed to convince even herself). Nevertheless these people who are not her “seem to know where they are going”. This is an invitation to the reader to try to do what she couldn’t by herself: figure out how to structure such a society.

So, you can see what I mean when I say that its funny that this story that laments our inability to engage with anything but suffering and exploitation, is engaged with almost exclusively by talking about the mechanics and moral implications of the suffering that it uses as an example of this very tendency.

The funny thing about that story is that its not supposed to be some sort of moral quandary, the suffering child isn’t the point at all. And that’s not subtext, the author straight up speaks directly to the reader and says its not the point.

And yet its practically the only thing I’ve ever heard people mention about it.

I think they meant to say superfluid helium.

I mean, if we’re making up a story about a kind of demon it probably shouldn’t be a healthy relationship.

A succubus sucks your soul out through your crotch, which feels great until it doesn’t. That’s why its supposed to be a scary monster.

The post says, “until you die of natural causes”, but for a counterpart to a succubus I think it would much more appropriate if it was able supernaturally influence you to reduce your worries and make you more and more dependent on it (just as a succubus can supernaturally charm its victims). Gradually you care about less and less as you lose all motivation, and at the end you don’t even bother to struggle as your soul is ripped from your body.

This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.

It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.

To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.

I remember the days when bugs in x86 CPUs were almost unheard of. The Pentium FDIV bug and the F00F bug were considered these unicorn things.

This is the case for a lot of inventions.

The American way

nonlethal methods

I’ll tell you why these two situations are different.

In the case of the electric burner:

• Ceramic top electric burners transfer heat by IR radiation, which leaves the surface of the burner in the shape of a very wide cone. By lifting the frying pan above the burner you are probably creating optical paths by which that IR light can go to places other than the bottom of your pan. Moving away from a heat source like this lowers its intensity not because the energy disappears, but because it spreads out over a greater area. If the stove heated the pan with an IR laser it almost wouldn’t matter how far away it was (there would still be a small amount of loss from air absorption). Potentially you could change the electric burner by adding IR reflectors around the gap between the burner and the pan, but reflection isn’t 100% efficient either, so there would still be some losses compared to just pressing the pan directly against the burner.
• They try to make the glass ceramic material that these stovetops are made of as IR transparent as possible, so that most of the energy ends up in the pan instead of in the ceramic. But they aren’t perfect, and even without a pan sitting on top of them the material will become quite hot. This is relevant because heat flows from hot areas to cold areas, the larger the temperature difference the greater the rate of heat flow. As such, seperating the pan from the ceramic surface in this situation wouldn’t make much of a difference. To be clear its not good that some of the energy goes into the ceramic instead of the pan, but that’s the difference it makes for this comparison.

In the case of induction cooking:

• The induction coils magnetically couple to the pan that sits on top of them. This is a near-field effect, not a radiative one, so things like optical paths and the square cube law do not apply. In fact if you remove a pan from an induction cooktop the energy will have nowhere to go but back into the coils and driver circuit. Most induction cooktops will shut off in this situation because they aren’t designed to be able to reabsorb that energy (the wok ones seem to be a little more tolerant of this though).
• The ceramic is essentially completely transparent to magnetic fields, and isn’t heated by them to any appreciable degree. As such the ceramic surface in an induction cooktop will be relatively cold. Any heating that the surface experiences is a result of pulling heat out of the pan on top of it.

In other words with induction cooking heat appears inside the metal of the cookware without a need for there to be a path by which it can enter. Because of that you can eliminate the paths by which it could exit.

I should say though that the glass ceramics that cooktops are made of are actually pretty good thermal insulators (as evidenced by the fact that, even in an electric cooktop, the entire surface doesn’t get hot, just the area above and right next to the burner). I don’t know if they are better insulators than a centimeter or so of air, but if so then separating the pan from ceramic surface might actually be detrimental, like taking off a blanket when you’re cold. But if this is the case then it would be detrimental for the opposite reason: because you would be reducing the insulation.

It should be insulated, the more insulated it is the less heat will leak to places other than your food.

Some of them have a metal rim that holds the wok just above the ceramic.

Because, as a reaction to generative AI, so much emphasis is now placed on authorial intent, and the interplay of that intent and the process by which the artist realizes it. Such as being able to recognize a specific artist’s mannerisms and read emotions into the shape of their individual brush strokes. Like in your previous comment:

I am creating what I see with my mind’s eye, using the sensibility and the motor control that I’ve developed through years of practice.

I feel as if 10 years ago the conversation was very different. I think back then if someone said “the most important thing about art is being able to see the imprints of the artist’s will flowing from their mind, through their hand, and into the workpiece” people would immediately bring up something like Fountain and say that art can also lie in selection and the creation of context, not just in the creation of the object itself.

do you not feel most of the work lies in selecting a moment in time & a point of view?

I do feel that way, which is why in the next paragraph I mention selection.

What does that mean for Jackson Pollock style paintings, where the content of the painting is at least partly determined by chance?

Or algorithmic art, where the artist writes code for a computer to execute (such as a fractal renderer or cellular automata) but doesn’t necessarily know what the final result will look like?

Or Duchamp’s Fountain, or photography in general, where you’re just adding a frame to a thing you didn’t create.

I feel like 10 years ago it would be very uncontroversial to say something like “art is as much discovery and the act of selection as it is creation”, but not so much now.

Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn’t be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Of course that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be thinking about whether we’re using software efficiently and for good reasons. Plenty of computations that take place in datacenters serve to make a company money but don’t actually make anyone’s lives better.

lol, the MBAs will go “we have less users now, that means we need to shit on the remaining ones even harder so we can still meet our growth targets”.

Okay, now imagine the city spending a billion dollars a year on preventing shark attacks, and elections being decided based on the candidates shark policy.