Scaling up a recipe for a massive gathering is a common holiday practice in my Italian American family. I tried showing Copilot a recipe for stuffed mushrooms from Sip and Feast. It acknowledged that to go from a serving size of six to 14 would require multiplying each ingredient by about 2.3 times, but it usually only did a couple calculations before expecting me to do the rest or trying to move on to another topic by asking me a question. When it noticed the site had options for scaling up the recipe, it mistook the “2x” and “3x” buttons for plus and minus ones that would let me dial in exactly 14 servings, and kept insisting that’s what those buttons are for. They aren’t. Then, as a last-ditch effort, I asked it to just calculate each ingredient and spell it out for me in a document. Copilot told me it would, and then did nothing.

I sometimes accidentally drag tabs rather than click them (touchpad sucks). I already have an extension that prevents them opening as separate windows. But recently new interesting things started happening: Sometimes they "group" together, I have no idea what the point of it is or how to undo that. Just now one of my tabs turned into a mini icon version???

Can't find the bloody thing.

It's just a line, black on white, segmented by round checkpoints. The line does a little angle at the checkpoints, but that's purely a visual thing. You can move left or right on it, that's all the possible inputs. You got HP and XP and levels. Totally automatic "random encounter" battles occur. There is no actual battle. When you run into a random encounter, the only thing that happens is that your XP gets higher, and your HP gets lower; there's not even an animation, just the XP and HP bars on screen change randomly.

The strategy of the game is to "grind" around the checkpoints, by moving left and right across them repeatedly, until you have leveled up enough to be able to make it to the next checkpoint.

It's some (J)RPG parody, making fun of the exponential XP grind mechanics of those games. I cannot remember what it's called and I'd like to show it to someone.

I probably spent somewhere between 100-200€ on EU4 back in the day over a couple of years. Still missing half the DLC. Still can't play any African nation without all my troops and advisors looking like Prussians. Still don't have access to some of the special mission trees and mechanics needed to do an interesting playthrough of many nations.

They apparently want another 212€ for me to get the full game, or pay a subscription of 8€/month.

Fuck them please pirate their games or don't play them at all.

I'm not high right now I swear I just had this thought going through my head for a while.

Imagine you had an Eve online (never played) style space game. There are 1000 servers, organized in a grid 10x10x10. Each server is simulating a region of space corresponding to their grid position, and connected via a network link only to the servers right next to it, so as to facilitate traveling between them.

The game is populated by a bunch of bots flying around shooting each other or whatever they're doing. If too many bots happen to be on the same server, it gets overwhelmed, everything on this one specific server slows down to slideshow levels.

I posit that, over time, the bots would tend to get stuck in this laggy region of space. If they fly around randomly, they'd encounter the laggy region of space eventually, and it would take them a lot longer to get out again.

Furthermore, the neighboring servers might also slow down, to a lesser degree, because they have to wait for the laggy server which is unable to respond quickly when handing over bots.

The observable result would be (a) clumping, like how matter clumps together in the universe due to gravity, and (b) time would seem to slow down in the clumped up area, like it does in the theory of relativity.

(a) At a sufficiently large scale, like trillions of servers and bots, this might look like a large scale attracting force. I can even imagine that two large bots swarms, flying past each other, might get stuck more towards their common center point, effectively creating a kind of orbital mechanic. Though maybe not, you'd have to simulate this to see if you could make this happen.

(b) The bots in the clumped up area, being bots simulated by the overwhelmed server, would not notice that time has slowed locally. But if you had two bots, one flies around the empty parts of space, while the other flies into the clump and then comes back out, it would seem like more time has passed for the bot that was in empty space the whole time.

I just bought an ice cream machine with a compressor for half price. I thought it would be easy (it isn't) but I am nerding out.

I will explain to you all, to my best understanding, some theory about frozen deserts.

First, about ice formation: Imagine some water-ice mixture. Liquid H₂O molecules will, with some probability pertaining to their low kinetic energy and being next an ice crystal, join the ice crystals, making the ice crystal grow. At the same time, water molecules on the surface of the ice crystal, will, with some probability related to their kinetic energy, break loose of the crystal structure and join the liquid water.

If more molecules go from liquid to ice, more ice will form. If more molecules go from ice to liquid, the ice melts. What effect dominates depends on the average kinetic energy of the water molecules aka the temperature. Above 0 °C, more ice melts than freezes onto crystals; below, more freezes than melts.

Now, if, instead of pure water, you dissolve sugar (or salt or ethanol or whatever) into the water, that will make it less likely for liquid water molecules to join the ice crystals, because the sugar is in the way of the water molecules wanting to join the ice. It makes the liquid-to-solid transition less common, less probable, because there are just less liquid water molecules next to the ice surface. Because the sugar doesn't join the ice crystals itself, the ice is is just pure water, and the opposite ice-to-liquid transition is not affected by the sugar.

So, in a sugar-in-water solution, for the same temperature, less H₂O molecules will join the ice, while the same amount will melt as in the pure water case. This effectively depresses the freezing point. You now will need a lower temperature than 0 °C to form ice in order to make up for this. You can approximately calculate this temperature quite easily because the drop in freezing point is proportional to the amount of sugar (or salt ...) molecules in the solution.

Interestingly, the mass of the sugar doesn't matter, only the number of molecules does: If you dissolve a certain amount of sucrose (a double sugar) molecules, it will affect the freezing point the same way as adding the same amount of glucose molecules, even though glucose is half the mass. The same goes for salt: One NaCl, because it splits up when dissolved in water, will depress the freezing point approximately like two sugar molecules.

The second important point: The concentration of sugar in the water increases as ice forms. The sugar stays in the liquid solution; the ice is pure water. So more ice means a higher sugar concentration in the liquid that remains, depressing the freezing point of the remaining liquid. This means that for any specific temperature, sugar-water will freeze only partially to a certain percentage. You can calculate (for example), if you have 500 g of sucrose dissolved in 1 l of water, and you freeze that to -18 °C, about 79% of the water will be in ice form.

you can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there i-i-is
you can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there i-i-is

• Today's Self-Werewolves might be limited, but we're only 14 months away from Full-Self-Werewolf.
• We need to be very concerned about the existential threat of General Werewolves.
• What effect will Werewolves have on the Economy?
• It's important that we loosen copyright protection to support the development of Werewolves.
• Will a Werewolf take your job?
• Can a Werewolf Assistant make you more productive?

I bought some very cheap enameled steel (not cast iron, stamped steel) pots, for cooking pasta and potatoes and such.

Background: After I dropped my decades old stainless steel pasta pot and the plastic handle broke off, I got some cheap IKEA so-called "stainless steel", which is chrome-free, and it rusted (do not recommend). So I'm trying enameled steel since it's cheap and cannot rust (well except the rims which just have some chromed steel crimped on I guess). Only 40 € for four pots in different sizes.

I can boil water on the electric stove at full blast, and that hasn't broken them, but I also have a super powerful mini induction hob, and that's like 10x faster and I'm afraid to try that in case it might shatter or warp.

Theoretically they're great for cooking liquids because they're not reactive, thin, light and good on induction but I'm kind of afraid of breaking them. Enameled steel used to be a thing here in Germany but pretty rare now. It seems to be almost unheard of in the US, but maybe some people on here from around the world have some experience about what sort of abuse these pots should be able to take.

You all know and love debunking. But have you heard of pre-bunking?

One approach is so-called “pre-bunking” - the targeted presentation of other perspectives and fact-based information. This involves being proactive instead of just reacting. In other words, not just trying to refute disinformation after the fact.

Check out the big brain on Mr. Osintguy. I spent way too much time looking at their sponsors. You can find the funniest shit in their mission statements:

PulseOfEurope: Defend the heart of Europe – with your vote.

iac Berlin: Understanding and developing relational approaches in the field of philanthropy

Relational approaches are increasingly recognized for their potential to support sustainable solutions and to nurture greater resilience while navigating complex challenges.

The good Lobby: We democratise lobbying

Toguna Leadership:

What do we see as the art of leading people? To be an invested sparring partner as those we lead wrestle with the most fundamental questions, we all bring to work and life: Does my contribution matter? Do I belong (here)? Will I stay relevant and have a future (here)?

Front Europjeski: Literally just "European Front", I guess Eastern Front was too on the nose?