Good riddance, Tom Bombadil. I don't care how merry a fellow he was, those were my least favorite chapters of Fellowship.

Touche, forgot this was PatientGamers. Grim Dawn is basically the same sans MMO. It's the best ARPG I've played like, ever, and it's due for a huge DLC soon. Goes on sale for very cheap often.

Unlike Last Epoch, it's more item-focused. Unlike PoE, the items aren't a total nightmare to optimize...

Very interesting - I haven't hit a single bug during my play.

A handful if my PoE friends have picked up Last Epoch which I've found to be more approachable. Little less MMO but a very similar game.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02720-y

To be fair, my job involves very sensitive medical data. We've seen entire businesses shut down because of data breaches.

I'm 100% so far at my job, but we had one test that tricked somewhere around 30% of employees. They spoofed everyone's supervisor and made it look like an urgent Teams message was pending.

Usually, if you get phished you lose your bonus. They made an exception that one time.

In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

Don't stay in school, kids.

I've never seen anything like this - cryptic board games, akin to cryptic crosswords. Anyone else know of games in a similar vein or genre?

There are options to buy premium currency, but even after the massive update last week you can still play for free and have a blast.

Outer Wilds was the best game I played on PS4. I strongly recommend experiencing it for yourself.

I would say the space ship/0g flight is maybe 30% of the gameplay, and you don't need to be really excellent at it, thankfully.

The duality of humanity right here. I hated academics and I'm way happier facing clients. Because even if they're being unreasonable, they're still paying me more than a living wage which is more than I could say about my advisor

+1 to all of this. See also: https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1296

Can't say I've heard anything since launch, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Grim Dawn Item Assistant is your best friend. While you're at it, Rainbow Item Names (or whatever it's called).

Well if you liked PoE I doubt you'll like D4. It's a much simpler game. Sadly my only advice is to try GD and Last Epoch again. I've got hundreds of hours in the former and I just got 10 hours into the latter.

Last Epoch feels like a more approachable PoE. I thoroughly enjoy how the skills interplay with one another, but I still prefer the itemization in Grim Dawn.

The only reason I'm not playing GD currently is because I have too many QoL mods installed so my cloud saving doesn't work, but I can cloud save for Last Epoch for my steam deck lmao.

I'm not sure I agree here - I think the resin printer might not be a good entry point, but I'm curious to hear what others think. I've heard resin printers require special ventilation and the photo-resin is carcinogenic. Once dialed in, an FDM can do pretty great for detailed parts. Especially with a smaller nozzle. So I'm not convinced jumping straight into a resin printer is wise.

I used my Ender 3 for a few years making miniatures, and they came out pretty great. Of course, then I tried switching to a larger nozzle and I still haven't managed to get it running... but that's my fault.

The software is a little finicky and likes to show you whatever profile is active when you switch to it. So if you don't like a key bind for Cov 6 and you tab over to the software, it switches back to your default profile.

And, if the game isn't officially supported, you'll have to manually locate the files. Usually not an issue but it was a pain for Minecraft.

Pretty minor grievances though, the software works 99% of the time.

Logitech G502 has been going strong for 3 years, and I love it so much. The software is easy enough, and I can't live without profile switching. I have two I use for daily driving - one with Ctrl, Page up, Page down, Forward, and Back on browser - and profile 2 has Win+Tab, Alt+Tab, and Navigate through Alt+Tab bound. Biggest downside is updating game profiles is a bit of a pain.

They raised my rent 20% over two years and priced me out of two apartments. Glad to see progress.

It's been in development for a while: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o

Even before the above paper, I recall efforts to connect (rat) brains to computers in the late 90s/early 2000s. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1012407611130

Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There's some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)

There have been other "bioprocessors" before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it'll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like "learn" and "rememeber") and are less finicky to work with.

My job is 8:30 - 5 with a 30 minute lunch break. So almost.

But, we also get 2 days/week at home, and can flex time as required. Tons of international work, so the flexible hours are a godsend when time zones are against us.

It's a salaried position and depending on your supervisor and stage of your career, you're expected to work 40-45 hours a week. Deadlines and ugly projects tend to increase hours work. I'm very lucky, as my industry can be pretty brutal with sudden ends to projects and unexpected layoffs.

Ooh, I know this one. It comes from old English, meaning "small thing"

I have to ask - was Guandong a warzone? I'm all for pointing out how awful things are, and that's a lot of money for a rickety pier, but I do want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples.

https://youtu.be/ainyK6fXku0?si=hTSP3-5T3oH8JOjt

Thanks for the recommendation, I was worried they would be missing some of my artists but they had 99% of my music. Can't wait to ditch Spotify.

ETA: dear lord the sound quality is so much better. I had no idea what I was missing.

We've got some really good theories, though. Neurons make new connections and prune them over time. We know about two types of ion channels within the synapse - AMPA and NMDA. AMPA channels open within the post-synapse neuron when glutamate is released by the pre-synapse neuron. And the AMPA receptor allows sodium ions into the dell, causing it to activate.

If the post-synapse cell fires for a long enough time, i.e. recieves strong enough input from another cells/enough AMPA receptors open, the NMDA receptor opens and calcium enters the cell. Typically an ion of magnesium keeps it closed. Once opened, it triggers a series of cellular mechanisms that cause the connection between the neurons to get stronger.

This is how Donald Hebb's theory of learning works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory?wprov=sfla1

Cells that fire together, wire together.

Actually, neuron-based machine learning models can handle this. The connections between the fake neurons can be modeled as a "strength", or the probability that activating neuron A leads to activation of neuron B. Advanced learning models just change the strength of these connections. If the probability is zero, that's a "lost" connection.

Those models don't have physical connections between neurons, but mathematical/programmed connections. Those are easy to change.

Actually, we've got some pretty sophisticated models of neurons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project?wprov=sfla1

See my other comment for an example of how little we truly understand about neurons.

It's not a terrible idea by any means. It's pretty hard to do, though. Check out the Blue Brain Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project?wprov=sfla1

ETA: not to mention the brain is a heck of a lot more than a collection of neurons. Other commenters pointed out how we just discovered a new kind of brain cell - the brain is filled with so many different types of neurons (e.g. pyramidal, Purkinje, dopamine-based, myelinated, unmyelinated, internet Ron's, etc.). Then there's an entire class of "neuron support" cells called neuralgia. This includes oligodendrocytes (and Schwann cells), microglia, satellite cells, and most importantly, astrocytes. These star-shaped cells can have a huge impact on how neurons communicate by uptaking neurotransmitters and other mechanisms.

Here's more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_synapse?wprov=sfla1

Heck, we barely know how neurons work. Sure, we've got the important stuff down like action potentials and ion channels, but there's all sorts of stuff we don't fully understand yet. For example, we know the huntingtin protein is critical to neuron growth (maybe for axons?), and we know if the gene has too many mutations it causes Huntington's disease. But we don't know why huntingtin is essential, or how it actually effects neuron growth. We just know that cells die without it, or when it is misformed.

Now, take that uncertainty and multiply it by the sheer number of genes and proteins we haven't fully figured out and baby, you've got a stew going.

Time to reboot and replay!!!

My understanding was you needed to have a second copy to 100% - I was always missing a specific mission item. So I never completed the game.

I loved FFTA so much, and did not care as much for FFTA2 on DS. Easily sunk 1000 hours into my GBA copy.

10/10 no notes

I won't tolerate slander against JYOCHO, they're one of my favorite bands. The guitarist, Daijiro, played with another small group, Uchu Conbini. They finally put their music on Spotify so I can continue to listen. https://youtu.be/XWqua6rsEmw?si=I5cJwe3kNJNzXHzw

Maybe this is more your speed? https://youtu.be/lSJrSxGfMgY?si=IlglJT_KRJczVnrp

siRNA and miRNA: Are we a joke to you?

Honestly, I started with an Ender 3 for less than $200 and it's just fine. You'll have to calibrate and fight with it for a bit, but once you get it running it's just fine.

I'm 75% sure bone meal doesn't work on sugar cane. Scaling up is the only option.