Ntrails's comments

On: A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't

[Ntrails]

Bat tunnel is real, it cost millions. The others riffs on the theme I expect

[tomatocracy → Ntrails]

The "fish disco" for the Hinckley Point C nuclear power project is also real and cost millions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_Disco

[reaperducer → tomatocracy]

Seems like a good idea, since smacks of jellyfish have been known to shut down power plants.

[akoboldfrying → tomatocracy]

This page started with an amusing name, and just kept getting wilder. 182 million fish per year were expected to die without any protection -- an incredible number, almost 6 fish per second. So now I think "Yes! By all means add some ultrasonic speakers to keep them out!" And then I learn that these speakers will cost £50m... As a part of £700m in total fish protection measures! And that somehow Natural England finds that to be be insufficient!?

I feel like every fish on the Welsh coast could have its own personal concierge for that price.

[cowlevel → akoboldfrying]

What probably happened is that £699.993M got spent on corruption and then £7000 on fish protection measures. Capitalism isn't immune to Goodhart's law.

[yardstick → akoboldfrying]

We should just tell the French they can send their fishing boats outside the plant. Two birds one stone :)

On: OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information"

[Ntrails]

Sam started wearing an earring lately - some wearable tech prototype. I'm told it is never wrong.

[nasmorn → Ntrails]

And it whispers in his ear like the slave behind the triumphant.

Remember YOU are only a man.

[ngc248 → nasmorn]

Plot of the movie upgrade (2018)

On: Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

[Ntrails]

I toast, therefore I am.

On: We ported the original Doom to SQL

[Ntrails]

> There are very few things I would want to do less than complicated logic in SQL.

Would you change your mind if I told you it would be giant strings with a bunch of `+ @database_name +` scattered around? Syntax highlighting is a crutch imo

(yes I refactored it to be parameterised yada, but for years those 2000 lines had grown and grown)

On: Infidel goes wild

[Ntrails]

The risk, I imagine, is that they open up unintended avenues of gameplay as they generously interpret options

On: How Singapore's government-run dating service works

[Ntrails]

I think it still had a lot of fairly abhorrent experiences for female users, and suffered from the inability to screen messages at all.

On: September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

[Ntrails]

> And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.

At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)

[traceroute66 → Ntrails]

> At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)

Maybe the only possible bit of credit we can give the guy is he said no when the Israelis wanted to use theirs.

Isn't it after all supposedly the world's worst kept secret that they have some too ?

But I'm also kind of concerned what happens in the unlikely event he does well in the mid-terms, and the same after the Israeli elections ....

[galangalalgol → Ntrails]

The more likely hyperbolic step would be to blow up outgoing pipelines and apply secondary sanctions. Or, as threatened, blow up power and water treatment plants killing large swaths of the civilian population. Nukes wouldn't be necessary to cause mass death.

[Ntrails → galangalalgol]

Oh yes, I was primarily referring to the metaphorical - hundreds of abhorrent non nuclear "wrath of god" options exist.

On: Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

[Ntrails]

I still don't think I understand the actual events. Is it that he got 1/4 of the shares as he expected after a year and did not chase for years 2/3/4 (and they never offered them)?

On: SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today

[Ntrails]

> This is ballistics weapons technology

It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!

On: What even is an OS now?

[Ntrails]

> you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way

Having chat gpt one write me a powershell script took a 3 hour manual task using software and made it a 10 minute task which I can repeat any time I fancy should I need to.

Writing something similar would've taken me an hour+ just to dig out the key pieces of information I needed to start in a language I am proficient in. Why would I waste my time?