Tangential, but if you haven't had your house tested for radon, I strongly recommend it. Radon is a radioactive decay product of uranium in rock and soil, naturally accumulates in houses, and is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the US after smoking.
I got a RadonEye meter to check the levels in my old place. It was around 4 pCi/l, which is apparently equivalent to smoking a pack a day in terms of relative cancer risk. After adding some ventilation, it dropped to lower than 1. Great.
The next place I moved into had a radon level of 14+ (!!) pCi/l. I couldn't believe the meter reading, so double-checked with another meter, which produced the same result. Got a radon mitigation system installed.
Seriously, check it out, especially if your place sits below grade or you live in a risk area. It could save your life.
Identical situation. In the hills of LA, bought a house, tested at 14+. Down below 2 most of the time after mitigation. Found out the hills of LA are one of the radon hotspots in California. I talked to many real estate agents, contractors, and neighbors and no one is aware of it, no one took me seriously, and generally no one wants to hear about it.
Definitely recommend. We were at around 14 (pCi/l) as well. Peaks up to 20. Got an active mitigation system installed last year for around $1k. Hasn’t exceeded 2 since.
Unforeseen benefit of no longer having to run my dehumidifier this summer. So it’ll end up paying for itself in electricity cost after maybe a decade hah.
This and the sibling comment boggle my mind. Around here, it seems like requesting a radon test is standard when looking at buying a house. Installing radon mitigation is likewise relatively straight forward.
Are basements less common out there? Maybe it's just because we tend to have basements that are made into livable space, where the risk of exposure is higher.
>Average radon levels in Australian homes are only a little larger than the radon levels in outside air and are of minimal concern to the health.
>The average concentration of radon in Australian homes is about 10 Bq m³. This is less than in many other countries and compares to a global average indoor value of 40 Bq m³.
I checked a Radon map and my area is only 5-10Bqm3.
Naturally, Americans do things the hard way and measure radon in pCi/L. According to Google,
> 1 pCi/L is equal to 37 Bq/m3
Our EPA recommends remediation if your home measures more than two, strongly so if it measures more than 4 pCi/L.
That 4 number is supposedly equivalent to smoking 8 cigarettes a day, in terms of cancer risk.
Here in the upper Midwest US, geology creating more radon buildup combined with cold winters mean that our basements are in a constant state of slightly negative air pressure, drawing it inside.
Not only can it enter through cracks in the concrete basement walls and floors, but many or most homes will have an opening in the floor somewhere for a sump pump to help move spring snow melt moisture away from the house.
Supposedly, between 1/3 and 2/5 homes in the US have or need radon remediation, and it supposedly is the second-leading cause of lung cancer here, after smoking tobacco.
I'm vaguely aware that radon testing is one of the things you should do when buying a house, but it's never really come up as an actual problem for anyone I know. My indoor air sensor claims that my apartment averages 0.6 (pCi/l), so it's very far from being an issue.
AIUI this was controversial, but not for the reasons you might think: people were concerned that the guy wasn't well and that encouraging him wasn't kind.
Nethack is one of the original "roguelikes," back when that meant a text-console game based on `rogue`. It's an RPG where your character kills monsters, picks up loot, and descends into the dungeon. If you die, that's it -- you can't just load a save; you have to start all over. It's legendarily unforgiving.
In Nethack, most (all?) roles start with a pet, e.g. a puppy or a kitten. In the early game, your pet is often stronger than you; it follows you, fights monsters, etc. It's useful in many ways beyond fighting: it won't walk over a cursed item, it can "fetch" items from stores without angering the proprietor, and so on. Your pet gains experience and levels up (puppy -> dog -> large dog), and after a certain point you're prompted to give your pet a name.
The message "You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes" is displayed when your pet dies while out of sight. It's pretty difficult to keep your pet alive all through the endgame, so much like any real-life pet owner, there will come a time where you have to say goodbye, one way or the other.
Oh, sure: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Save_scumming I wrote "nhsave" and "nhload" scripts when I was a kid and didn't know you weren't supposed to do this ("they didn't include a save/load function? how dumb").
Edit: If you really want this, you can always enter explore mode (e.g. with `nethack -X`), which makes death optional. It doesn't make the rest of the game any easier, though.
Nethack is notoriously unfair with the player, and not a really winnable game. The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move. If I think that the game was cheating, I act accordingly.
The other option is the exploring mode (X), when you can't be killed, but I find that is boring.
Oh it is a winnable game, I ascended several times after reading a lot of detailed spoilers. You just need a lot of strategy (and spoilers) or an early wand of wishing. Preferably both.
Neutral Wizard
blessed PYEC, blessed Orb of Fate, blessed magic marker, +3 blessed greased SDSM, BoH, +3 fireproof speedboots, +3 greased fireproof cloak of magic resistance, write out +ID, ?charging, get your Magicbane or better Greyswandir, etc.
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this yeti corpse? stop eating?"
No
> "You choke on your food and die after 20200 moves"
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this dragon corpse? stop eating?"
Hum... yes?
"You choke on your food and die after 40678789 moves"
Well, this is simply ridiculous.
In the last 20 years playing nethack, consulting the oracle, reading the wiki, and learning, I reached gehennon... once. This is like the 30% of the game or so. Don't even
reached a quest. After a while, solving sokoban and gnome mines by the 800 time is just... meh; Wesnoth is better.
The game would greatly benefit of something like: You lose 70 of your 71 points just descending the stairs into a bones level and become stressed, unable to move and surrounded by enemies. This is your last point, do you want to try something?
If that's what is killing you every time, then get a blessed tinning kit and stop eating random corpses like that. Or at least wear an amulet of magical breathing while you eat.
Or if you want to be really fun, polymorph into a Xorn or whatever and eat a few amulets of magical breathing to gain it as an intrinsic.
Generally just go through your death list and find what is killing you then look at how to avoid that. Eating random corpses late game is pretty much always a mistake, you should have normal food to rely on in your bag of holding and a blessed tinning kit from the mines for intrinsic granting corpses.
Yes, there are a ton of ways to die. Part of making an ascension kit is checking them off one by one. You can see that my wizard would have reflection, MR, grease to avoid mindflayers and drowning monsters (though blessed ?geno on LhV; makes life much easier), etc. Naturally I'd use that blessed magic marker to write every spellbook, the PYEC can recharge all the things and I take half damage. If I get Greswandir from sacrificing, I can get up to basic proficiency, otherwise I'd best stick with magicbane which is easy to get.
Get your levels up, your stats up, your resists covered and it's mostly just a slog at the end because turns take forever when 30 monsters want a piece of you.
Wizard just has perhaps the easiest endgame, but that part tends to be easy enough with any class for a well-spoiled player. Wizards have a relatively hard early game.
Um, it's quite winnable. It's much easier to win once you've been thoroughly spoiled (either via investing a large amount of playtime or reading spoilers), but it's quite possible to Ascend (win) through extensive preparation and brute force. The number of truly unavoidable, single-move deaths, particularly in the mid-to-late game is a very tiny part of the whole gamespace (as witnessed by the many, many players who win without anything more than knowledge of the game). And wearing an Amulet of Life Protection will save you from most of those.
Veteran players (at least, back when there was Usenet), would regularly refer to Yet Another Stupid Death (YASD), called such not because it was unavoidable, but because it was avoidable if the player had not made an easily avoidable mistake.
It’s totally winnable! The player almost always has a chance to avoid death. Deaths are usually due to missing knowledge or laziness/impatience. The knowledge is really really hard to gain without wikis, and I absolutely wouldn’t have ascended without wikis, but reading them added another layer of fun for me.
Huh? I've ascended quite a few times, and I am soo far from being the best player.
It's totally winnable. It's your job as a player to avoid getting into situations where you don't have 'a single defensive move'.
(It's not the best game ever, nor is it the most fair game ever. True. But almost all games of Nethack are winnable, if you are careful enough and learned enough about the game.)
If ascended a tourist and a healer and an archaeologist and quite a few of the easier classes, too.
> The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move.
Technically true, but there are always moves you could have done prior to avoid being in that situation. Part of the game is knowing what protections you need to have before advancing deeper into the dungeon.
Had a hunter with a blue crab named Seafood in World of Warcraft for years.
He was somewhat famous on the server at the time. Eventually got rid of him because he had no benefits compared to other pets. No logical reason to keep him.
Huge regret. I grieved for that damn crab for months. Finally stopped playing that class all together.
As a fellow WoWer, I always opted for aesthetics, writ large, over optimization. I get that folks seek out competition, either vs environment or other players. But adhering to a personal aesthetic Code is another option.
See also, I suppose, conduct runs in many roguelikes.
Pets also feature strongly in the late game. Two of the best items in the game are a scroll of taming (converts nearby monsters to pets) and a magic whistle (summons your pets). Eventually there's no point in fighting yourself; blow your whistle and let your pet dragon army clear the room.
I love the family dragon army! But why bother using taming scrolls when you can polymorph control yourself into a dragon (taking off your armor first!) and then sitting to make eggs where they are actual family! Blood may be thicker than water, but dragon scales even thicker than blood!
Purple worms also make magnificent pets. Genning up a fleet of pet purple worms and teleporting them away can make life a lot easier on the Astral Plane.
Eh, depends on what class you have. Pets are a bit of a hassle to get up and down the stairs. If you do enough damage yourself, it's usually less annoying to do the fighting yourself.
What's worse, your pet can die while you're blind and you attack it without realising who it is. Thankfully this will only happen once in the game. You learn the lesson afterwards. Hopefully.
I remember the first time I played, my dog walked into a trap and died within the first 10 moves. It can avoid cursed items but was clearly helpless against my cursed gamer "skills".
It blew me away how much attachment I had for what essentially amounted to a letter on a screen controlled by algorithms. I wrote a blog post about it 10 years ago:
Are three still text based roguelikes being made? For me these were one of the most endearing features of the games back in the day. I was a big ADOM fan and it captured my imagination in an almost book like way because everything in the world was rendered only symbolically.
ADOM had a fancy re-release on Steam recently! It just showed up in my Steam queue.
Check out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Feels like a much more modern Nethack, with convenience features (`o` autoexplore, `tab` autofight, etc.) and less of a focus on one-and-done intrinsic immunities in favor of tradeoffs ("this armor comes with cold resistance but vulnerability to fire").
For more of an "explore the world" feeling, Caves of Qud is on Steam and has a ton of depth.
Dwarf Fortress has Adventurer mode, which, although less developed than the more famous Fortress mode, is still really deep, under slow but active development, and has the unique value prop that you can build a fortress, leave it on autopilot, create an adventurer, go visit the same fortress, chat with the locals, maybe go kill some monsters in the caverns. You can retire an adventurer, switch back to fort mode, see your old character become one of your citizens, and so on.
I had a go at adventure mode, but I must admit I found it hard to create a narrative for myself. It was fun wandering around and hearing what monks thought life was a bout, but I wasn't quite sure where the adventure was.
Block-letter Roman-alphabet writing existed long before the printing press: consider e.g. ancient Roman monuments. Arguably, cursive was the anomaly: a form of writing optimized for a device capable of relatively continuous writing, in contrast to stone carving, clay tablets, brush writing, etc.
Some BenQ projectors, including the just-released X3000i I recently picked up, consign the "smart" portion to an Android TV HDMI+USB stick that plugs in inside the body of the projector. I just never plugged mine in and the projector works fine.
Slack is a great product/company, but as Parker Conrad of Rippling explains in this podcast [1] (about 13 minutes in), Microsoft has been able to fend off Slack with an arguably inferior product, just by having an ecosystem that so many companies/orgs are already fully bought into.
I think it's less about the "ecosystem" they the bought into but rather the bean counters saying "Hey, we have free access to Teams, why are we wasting our money on Slack?" (That might have been what you were saying but it read more like "We love all things MS, why not move our chat to that too?")
No doubt several factors/motivations were/are at play, but I think what Parker is talking about is that for companies/orgs (particularly big corporates and government bodies) who already had a Microsoft operating environment and who weren't already using Slack, they would be much more comfortable adopting Teams, for reasons of cost, interoperability and (perceived) security, than adopting Slack, even if Slack was superior as a standalone group chat app.
That’s fair, I was more-so talking to the companies that have dropped Slack and moved to Teams (I have a number of friends who have experienced this first-hand).
At one point a company I used to work for tried to get us to move to Hangouts (or whatever Google was calling it that week) since we already paid for Google Workspace accounts for everyone. Thankfully there was enough pushback to kill that idea early.
Wanting to switch into an ecosystem because of cost is different from wanting to switch because it integrates better with other products. For myself, when I hear "ecosystem", I think more of the latter which is why I commented. Cost might be a factor but it's not the first thing that comes to mind for me when using that word.
I agree with you. There is something about Salesforce in particular I feel people don't trust to be a good steward of acquired products.
I don't feel it's deserved even though I worked for an acquired company that certainly did fail because of their leadership—I think we were the exception though. For Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip: I don't think it's clear these would be successful companies on their own.
They paid a ton of money for Slack and need to protect that investment.
Is there a clear example of Salesforce failing at an acquisition? Or do people see the examples I gave above differently than I do?
Salesforce is the rich guy at the table eating off of other people's plates and making people uneasy. Bloated, bald, disgusting, but just enough money to keep being relevant.
The confusion here is between throttle-by-wire (which, as you point out, is now ubiquitous) and steer-by-wire, which Teslas still aren't. There was some hope that the newest yoke-equipped Model S would be, but my understanding is that it's still a direct mechanical link, i.e. wheels still turn if you move the steering wheel when the car is off. The driver-assist functions use motors to move the steering linkage.
Wouldn't steer-by-wire that reduce steering feedback even more? Compared to my old (somewhat unreliable) Jetta with hydraulic power steering, every electric steering-assist car I've driven has terrible steering feel, like I'm driving an RC car. I feel so disconnected from the road, as if I'm merely aiming the car rather than actually driving it.
Right; the whole conversation re: "what is drive by wire anyways?" is a massive red herring. That's really my bad. The operative question is just "what happens if the primary chip fails?"
If the answer is "nothing bad, yet, but maybe something bad when we ship FSD" then Tesla's approach here seems reasonable (modulo not informing customers, which will probably catch them a fine in at least some of these jurisdictions, but in my book is more like a "mild breach of commercial contract" issue than a "fundamental consumer rights" issue).
If the answer is "something bad" then this is a big deal and could be bad news for Tesla.
And do their concerns get addressed somewhere up the chain? Do they even have ways to express their concerns?
I've heard there's a similar contingent within Microsoft complaining about all the ads and shady privacy stuff in Windows and they're just left to fester in the echo-chamber of internal Yammer.
Complete outsider here, but the Goomics series shed light on Google's internal culture and one of the recurring themes is the tone deafness of management towards internal dissent.
For technical things I still find google better, mostly because the manage to get the most recent relevant version of a library, while DDG that was my default often returned out of date versions.
It’s a long road from “dont be evil” to illegal wage fixing, mass ad fraud, omnipresent dragnet surveillance, and cooperation with totalitarian nation states; all of those with compunctions are long gone, the rest are like you.
If you have an electric car, you can get PG&E's EV time of use rate. Schedule charging during off-peak hours (past midnight) and it's on the order of $0.13/kWh.
I got a RadonEye meter to check the levels in my old place. It was around 4 pCi/l, which is apparently equivalent to smoking a pack a day in terms of relative cancer risk. After adding some ventilation, it dropped to lower than 1. Great.
The next place I moved into had a radon level of 14+ (!!) pCi/l. I couldn't believe the meter reading, so double-checked with another meter, which produced the same result. Got a radon mitigation system installed.
Seriously, check it out, especially if your place sits below grade or you live in a risk area. It could save your life.