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Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

artificial gestation

The word “matrix” literally means “womb” in its older sense.

What upside down thing with a banana??

There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I’ve seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I’m guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily – it’s easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the “bottom” myself.)

What back bit?

There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

Also…veins?

I’m not sure what they mean either.

Frames Per Stratum

You can’t really, as others have pointed out, but I like Philip K Dick’s definition of reality: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Hopefully both dishes come out great!

I’ve never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I’d probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can’t get that), plus your meat – served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I’d sear it first but I’m not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I’ve seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork – like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you’d do better to get advice from someone who’s actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn’t appeal, but again, I’ve never tried that with duck either.

And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)

The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.

The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)

I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.

I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.

Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.

I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?

I wish communities could be grouped in some way.

You can do that on kbin now. We just got “Collections” that allow you to gather posts from multiple communities/magazines sort of like a multi-reddit. You can either publicly list them for others to explore or just keep them to yourself if you want. We’ve also had cross-post grouping for a while which helps reduce the annoyance of “posts four times in a row (or more)” a little bit by collapsing the threads into one block with multiple links and vote counters. It’s really useful though if you want to come back to the discussion later and find the other thread(s) – e.g. check out last week’s regular anime discussion threads which got 17 comments on ani.social and 5 comments on lemmy.ml. Jumping back and forth is easy. Hopefully lemmy gets something like that too eventually!

The attached picture says 133 qubits, so whatever that chip is (edit: Heron) it’s not this thing.

IBM’s post (that the article links) says:

Breaking the 1,000-qubit barrier with Condor

We have introduced IBM Condor, a 1,121 superconducting qubit quantum processor based on our cross-resonance gate technology. Condor pushes the limits of scale and yield in chip design with a 50% increase in qubit density, advances in qubit fabrication and laminate size, and includes over a mile of high-density cryogenic flex IO wiring within a single dilution refigerator.

So, it sounds like this is actually another fridge sized system.

It looks like this is the pre-print of the paper (“The Impact of Imperfect Timekeeping on Quantum Control”) in the journal the article links: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10767

Possibly also relevant from some of the same researchers: Fundamental accuracy-resolution trade-off for timekeeping devices

Interesting. The code format doesn’t work on Kbin.

Indent the lines of the code block with four spaces on each line. The backtick version is for short inline snippets. It’s a Markdown thing that’s not well communicated yet in the editor.

This story may be amusing, but it’s actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone’s photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example – or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.

Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.

A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)

Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.

I also played a lot of Sim<Whatever> games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p

I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.

My understanding is that Lemmy bot accounts generally do not federate over to kbin. If you want to see an example of a bot making regular posts, you can check out [email protected]. Prior to the lemmy.ml/ani.social defederation it posted in [email protected] – i.e. go to https://lemmy.ml/c/anime sort by new and look like 10-ish pages back (currently) and you should see a bunch of bot posts (sometimes drowning out posts from real people). You can see it posting to https://ani.social/c/episode_discussion currently as well; there are a lot of bot threads and very few comments. When the bot had an outage a while ago (prior to the defederation) there was a discussion with various opinions on the bot and how/if it should operate. I think I’ve also seen another thread about it as well with more discussion, but I’m having trouble finding it again.

Edit: Just remembered another example. @ITNbot is a kbin bot (on a non kbin.social instance); you can see its behavior here – https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] – I blocked it a while back since seeing all its threads in new was bugging me at the time.

For what it’s worth, even though I don’t agree with you, I think this is an interesting post and discussion, so I’ve upvoted it. Thank you.

most people hate ai

I don’t think that’s true. There’s a lot of concern about it – particularly regarding companies scraping the everloving shit out of the internet and then reselling what they got for free; with it upending the apple cart on difficulty of production (and what that means for various professions); with people using it idiotically in inflexible, unauditable, bureaucratic ways (though they were already doing that “computer says ‘No’” thing even without the new AI techniques; it’s a broader social challenge that involves any computerized processing of people in 2023); etc. – but people are using it as a tool to do really neat things too, and a lot of the results from that are just fun.

Here’s a few examples of fun AI visual art from threads I’ve seen over the last few weeks:

• What have you DONE?! – https://feddit.de/post/4778843
• (Somewhat disturbing) Elvis performing a circumcision on a sentient hotdog – https://lemmy.ca/post/6735764
• (Mild NSFW) Sexy Anthropomorphic Plane – https://lemmy.ml/post/7072314
• When a Ninja Turtle’s Addiction Has Gone Too Far – https://lemmy.world/post/7522233
• Banana-Whale – https://lemmy.ml/post/7598841
• Storing Linux Commands as Bottled Spells in a Sorcerer’s Library – https://lemmy.world/post/7463201
• Doughy Desert Colossus – https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/7336600
• Spiderman providing therapy to Batman – https://lemmy.world/post/7520721
• Hot Spaghetti 3 – https://lemmy.world/post/8035624
• Back to work – https://lemmy.world/post/7539961
• This entire thread is fun if you want more: Your username is the prompt, what did you get?

For some of these, something similar might have been made eventually (the spiderman one, in particular, I could see actually existing), but for most of them? Nah. Without AI gen they probably just never would’ve been made, and that’d be a shame!

• “To hell with wearing your heart on your sleeve – bare it all!”

• “Opinions are like assholes – and here’s mine!”

• “…and now, for a real hot take!”

You could crawl the Fediverse looking for instances and communities of the sort that your instance understands, but new servers and communities can show up whenever, so you’d have to keep looking continuously. Stuff also gets interesting because different servers have different views of content.

I’ve seen posts from users on two different servers talking in a thread on a 3rd server asking other users to help proxy messages manually between them because one of the servers was defederated from another and the messages were only going one way between the two users… I’m not sure in that case what the communication pattern was between the three servers (never mind me on kbin.social – which isn’t a Lemmy server at all – also able to see the conversation), but it seemed like a big headache.

I’ve manually gone to different instances to make sure my posts show up when I make them; kbin is often pretty bad at getting new photo threads to federate out and sometimes needs a bit of coaxing… Looking at my profile on those instances though shows wildly different thread and comment counts sometimes. As of the time of writing this (before posting this comment) I have 30 threads and 85 comments listed in my profile on kbin.social. lemmy.world shows me as having 30 “posts” (threads) and 78 comments. lemmy.mindoki.com (your instance) shows 0 posts and just 10 comments!

There’s also users on Mastodon and Misskey which show up for me as part of the regular experience of using kbin but which are a bit more awkward to interact with from Lemmy, I think? If I manually put in a mastodon.social user’s account into lemmy.world’s user lookup, for example, I can see some of their posts, but I’m not sure if they would ever actually show up anywhere on Lemmy without manually looking for a user?

Nevermind the other parts of the Fediverse like Peertube and AP-enabled Wordpress blogs and whatever else is out there… You can probably get a decent view of most of the Lemmy/kbin-like communities if you have a good list of servers to scrape community lists from and subscribe to everything you find regularly, but I think you’ll still have some problems in practice.