I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.
>how do hybrid schemes work out: some home, some office, less commute overall?
I think it depends on the type of work. I work as a support engineer for business stakeholders. Business stakeholders don't work in "Sprints", and always want to get anything ASAP. In that sense, if I want to maximize my value to the company, in-office is the best.
But frankly, I don't like that, so working remote is the best for me, IN THAT PERSPECTIVE. However, I do love the snacks in office, and I want to keep my job, so hybrid works the best for me. The stakeholders get to bug me from time to time in 3 days per week, and I book as many meetings as I can in those 3 days, and bring a non-fiction just to breath a little better.
I just wish Toronto has cheaper housing though, so I can live closer to the office.
Art Deco has always been one of the best architectural styles, IMHO. I also like the pseudo-classical Greek design often found in American government buildings in small towns (city hall, the public library, and so on). They're very different styles, yet they complement each other nicely.
I had a wonderful retro futuristic dream about an automated Costco warehouse a few weeks ago. It was one of the less weird dreams so I still remember it clearly.
Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”.
In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s).
At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items.
Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4.
What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.
There were also automats, automated restaurants serving all food through a vending machine (or more accurately, wall). Classically all for a single fixed price (a nickle).
These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).
And what some of us might not have the context for, is that grocery stores at the time were usually clerk-serviced; Just like you don't pump your own gas in New Jersey, at the time the norm was that you handed the clerk a list of products and they fetched them from the shelves for you.
Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.
That kinda stuff is why I'm an incrementalist, as opposed to "Great Man" theories of civilization. A big impressive product or leap-forward is mostly luck and thousands of cascading preconditions on small improvements everywhere else, and often not even the first person to try.
It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.
I think that's kind of the point: there are no "genius ideas", at least not at the level and frequency popularly portrayed. If teleportation isn't feasible then the idea isn't genius. If teleportation is feasible, then using it for transporting humans isn't genius, it's incredibly obvious.
Or to give a real-world example: The Wright brothers did some great work on making aircraft steerable and doing wind-tunnel tests, but working planes were mostly a product of ICE engines finally reaching sufficient power-to-weight ratios, not of the Wright brothers being unique geniuses. In a long line of people trying to build heavier-than-air aircraft they were simply the first to have access to the necessary technology to make it work
Sounds like the old general store model, you didn’t browse yourself, the shop keep would bring out what you wanted, it was always behind the counter. I experienced this in China when I started visiting in 1999/early 2000s, it’s mostly not like that anymore though. You still have department stores where you need to buy things first before touching them, though.
Oh Service Merchandise was a thing in the USA also, where I was living at in Mississippi at least. It was basically catalog focused store with a showroom.
IKEA is kind of like that also, but you have to get everything yourself after picking it out upstairs. And Sears might have been like this at some point before I was born.
Argos in the UK was similar. You would go into the store and look up the product in a catalog. Then go to counter and order it, wait 2-5 minutes and they give you the product. I found it quite convenient.
Screwfix do this too. Just a counter with a handful of staff who go and get your items.
If you pre-order it's waiting at the desk. Very handy for people who can order from the job site on the account and send the lad round to grab it.
And a (relatively) unshittified website too because if jobbing tradies can't use the damn thing because it's too loaded down with ads and bullshit, they just won't.
They're still there. Was surprised to run into one recently when I was in London (they pulled out of Ireland a while back, and I'd assumed they'd just closed totally at that point, because it _does_ feel like an increasingly marginalised business model.)
They still exist. Tend to be pretty competitive on price, although they must be losing out to online shopping in a lot of places since they don't offer any showroom advantage.
In my experience because you're picking up from the Argos you can do an instant return if you realize you ordered wrong (or the item is rubbish). Not perfect but a good way to get your hands on the product with an easy refund option
Little bit more specialized, but Lee Valley Tools [https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca] stores seem to still operate this way. Showroom (and a few computer kiosks) and order forms up front, then line up for them to pull the items from the back.
Reading the history of Consumers (thanks, I never knew this existed):
>In the 1990s, Consumers Distributing struggled to compete with Zellers and then Walmart Canada. Consumers Distributing sought bankruptcy protection in 1996.
Yeah, that could be true. I'm not sure how many people are similar to me, who are allergic to "window shopping" and just want to buy, pay and exit. My Costco session is less than 30 minutes (from parking to back to car) in average.
I do research price, though, so if they show a big DISCOUNT sign and is more or less honest with it, I'll probably grab some, too.
In the dream customers just walk around and make orders. It’s actually old style I think, but with robots. Yeah it’s a bit like cash and carry, but customers didn’t move into the sections. They just get to browse the samples robots carried to them.
TBH, now that I think about it, the dream was way more vague than what I described in the reply. My brain probably reasoned about the idea subconsciously.
The only exception in warehouse was the cafeteria. I guess my brain wanted to make something retro futuristic so it made the cafeteria “retro” — manned by humans and cooked by humans too. There were even balloons inside now that I recall…
I remember those stores as I came from a similar background. One vital difference is that they all have workers who have a straight face and don’t give it a fuck about customer service.
Then in the 90s they were all washed away by the new ones.
I have figured that I’m going to get exactly one CS hobby that is not work, and 0 CS hobby if I can find a job that fits the hobby.
Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job.
So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
I heard that smaller (relative) earthquakes actually lower the prob of larger ones, so maybe it is a good thing? A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
On the one hand earthquakes remove tension from the earth’s crust and release energy that can’t be used in future shocks.
On the other hand, if a shock doesn’t release all energy it may come to rest in a relatively weak spot that will soon give away again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm: “The Matsushiro swarm lasted from 1965 to 1967 and generated about 1 million earthquakes. This swarm had the peculiarity of being sited just under a seismological observatory installed in 1947 in a decommissioned military tunnel. It began in August 1965 with three earthquakes too weak to be felt, but three months later, a hundred earthquakes could be felt daily. On 17 April 1966, the observatory counted 6,780 earthquakes, with 585 of them having a magnitude great enough to be felt, which means that an earthquake could be felt, on average, every two and a half minutes.”)
Because of that, I think an earthquake will increase the probability of one occurring again soon, but decrease its strength.
> A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
New Zealand’s 5th most deadly disaster was Christchurch’s 6.2 which killed 185 people. It was a shallow aftershock from a larger, less destructive quake.
Almost all energy released in earthquakes is released in the biggest ones. No realistic number of smaller quakes is ever going to add up to even the single biggest earthquake ever recorded.
That's correct, if relatively small earthquakes would stop that could be the precursor to a much bigger one. It's like releasing tension gradually rather than all at once.
I think you intended this to be a validation of the idea that small quakes relieve stress and therefore lower the chance of a large quake.
The above link does not answer that question. It is relating stress release to "fault strength", or the maximum shear stress that can be withstood by the fault. There is an incidental relationship with depth that plays a role.
The video linked nearby (on criticality) also does not address the question at issue.
I'm only replying because I work adjacent to this area, and my understanding is that the idea that small EQ's release stress is a myth. Here [1] is another link, listed as #1 in the "Myths" category. And you can dig up quotes from none other than Lucy Jones [2] saying that this is a myth.
I don't work directly in this area, so I'm not willing to say absolutely no. But I'd really like to see a head-on reference supporting the claim that it's not a myth.
EQs are a release of energy. That energy is stored as stress prior to release. There is a finite amount of stored energy at any given time.
So the statement "EQs release stress" is true and it follows that adding the modifier "small" to the front doesn't change this.
It should also be immediately apparent that it would be very surprising if there were not statistical implications as a result of this. So surprising in fact that I would suggest that the burden of evidence should fall on those claiming that any such statistical effects are unexpected.
This part is unquestionably true. But since we don't have a direct measurement of the stored energy at a given time, the occurrence of an earthquake acts as both an indicator of release of stored energy but also, potentially, evidence of increasing stored energy.
Like how buying a Porsche costs money, and leaves you poorer than before you bought it, but when you see stranger buy a Porsche, you update towards believing that they're wealthy rather than poor.
Fair enough. I'm also not a geoscientist, and to clarify I didn't mean to imply any specific statistical effect there. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a series of EQs might tend to increase in intensity.
In reality I think (layman's impression) that there's rough (post hoc) evidence for both things. Foreshocks followed by noticably larger EQs as well as trains of progressively smaller EQs.
Precisely, and the 'myth' is worded in such a way that the effect of stress relieving pre-quakes is set to a big fat zero and that seems to be a thing more related to the composition of what is underground than the fact that it does not happen at all, and if it happens at what magnitude you would expect the effect to show up.
To me a myth is something that isn't true at all, not something that we do not have data on to be able to rule it out completely or that may be an influence just not a capital one. I think the most generous reading of the 'myth' claim would be that the energy available in the smaller quakes is too low to have a meaningful effect on releasing energy from a larger quake and I'll buy that. But at the same time an absence of such fore-shocks in an area where earthquakes are known to happen indicates that stress may be been building up over a longer time and that stress would be released in the next bigger quake if and when it happens.
This too may not be a big enough difference due to the immense increase in energy present in larger events (the scale is logarithmic). But its effect is quite probably still non-zero and for it to be a myth it would have to be zero.
Myth = the sun rotates around the earth
Myth = unicorns exist
Myth = the earth is 6000 years old
Those are directly falsifiable, and we know all of these to be categorical falsehoods.
Smaller earthquakes can - depending on local crust composition and other environmental factors - affect the amount of energy released in a larger one following, is not necessarily a significant effect (though even this would be tricky to establish) but I find it hard to believe they are completely unrelated though the effect may not be large.
GP is correct; I'm not sure why CA gov is calling that a myth (it's not). However keep in mind that it's not necessarily true 100% of the time. Or at least the things it might seem to imply at first glance aren't true - the presence or absence of small quakes in a given period doesn't necessarily tell you anything useful about the future.
Indeed. But I get why people are confused because it is a subtle difference between 'stress relieved through small earthquakes is stress expended' vs 'stress relieved through small earth quakes is not indicative of the magnitude of future events'.
The long term absence of stress relief small quakes on a known fault line might be bad news, or no news at all, statistics are where the difference is here, not in particular events. See also, 'the big one' and various theories around it.
This type of argument is kind of logical but not so immediately useful. Earthquakes just happen and no one is involved in that process. There could still be the big one coming, or that one might have been defused by this one. No one knows.
(stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
I think you've summed it up correctly. It's not proof and some scientists claiming some things isn't the same as studies/evidence. However, is there evidence that it's not true? The fact is we do have these smaller movements and earthquakes quite regularly, so we don't really know what would happen after a long absence of them (do we? I suppose there are simulations perhaps that could be run? But I don't know that that's proof either way). To me though it makes a lot of sense that it would/could spur a huge event.
I think we had a good run with computer technology since the 50s and accelerated by the 80s when micro computers made history.
My view of technical climate change is: it's usually good for the ordinary, educated people in the first few decades, because diversity and competition make the old caste difficult to keep up so they need to adjust and wait until the whole movement slows down. And then they swallow the whole thing down.
We have had a good run and now it is time for them to reap the fruits.
The other thing that I'm a bit more worried is, each technological advance first IMPROVES but eventually REDUCES the rate of success of violent revolutions. And violent revolution is the antidote for human societies.
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