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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • Baldur’s Gate 3 (~600 hours), BeamNG.drive (~550), Cities Skylines (~300), Space Engineers (~300), 7 Days to Die (~250) and Satisfactory (~230).

    These are all stats from Steam and probably not fully representative. Satisfactory for example I used to play on Epic when I got it as a free game over there, probably logged at least another 500 hours or so on that platform.

    My most played game of all time is most likely TES: Oblivion, which I started playing at release back when I was a teenager and had almost infinite free time. I’m not sure if I still have my oldest save to confirm, but I suspect it would be at least 1,500 hours, probably more across several characters.




  • In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

    The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

    spoiler

    The entire ECH subroutine was created as the result of The Doctor’s daydreaming, so the visualisation of a rank appearing out of thin air makes sense in that context.

    The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.


  • There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

    spoiler

    Moriarty was reactivated by mistake, and took the ship hostage, demanding to be able to leave the holodeck.

    Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

    spoiler

    Their transporter turned out to be a holographic fake (and so was Geordi), so who knows if the results were valid.


  • Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

    If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.


  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.








  • Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.

    Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.

    That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.

    Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.