Readit NewsIt was such a gratifying experience to build out that server network and the accompanying integrations that attracted so many and built such a great community. I miss the days in college when I had time to work on stuff like that just for the love of it. I hope you are doing well!
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons.
This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now.
The article seems to try very hard to find something positive to say about these groups, and comes up with:
“Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.”
There’s nothing very unique about agreeing with the WHO, or thinking that building Skynet might be bad… (The rationalist Moses/Hubbard was 12 when that movie came out — the most impressionable age.) In the wider picture painted by the article, these presumed successes sound more like a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.
With EVs, we might get some battery packs and drive trains actually lasting this long. Maybe not with nmc batteries. But some lfp batteries seem to have enough charge cycles on paper that they really could last that long. 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles. Of course lots of other things might fail. But at least electrical motors are known to be pretty durable. That's not a common failure point on EVs as far as I know. But there's plenty of other stuff in EVs (electronics, cooling systems, suspension, etc.) that can break.
Of course, it will be a while before we'll see EVs that have driven that far as those type of batteries have only been on the market for a few years and even with 100K miles driven per year (which is a lot), it would take 12 years to get to 1.2M. This Toyota took quite a few decades to get there.
According to the article, this car actually wasn't particularly durable (the words 'rust buckets' were used). But if you just keep patching it up, of course it will run fine. And greasing up all the bits that would normally rust seems smart as well.
To me this makes it less interesting. I would be amazed if the original parts (outside of what gets replaced for maintenance) lasted that long. But it’s hard to judge how durable the car is when everything has been replaced
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk