Hi, I’m Cleo! (he/they) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)

  • 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 25th, 2023

help-circle


  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlDear iPhone users:
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    19 days ago

    In my opinion apple doesn’t provide great value for the hardware and they’re lacking on the repair front. But when it comes to software, it’s so far and away better that I can’t justify staying on android. I mean forget about iMessage but go watch apples recent event and ask yourself how many of those features have parity on android. Very very few of them do. And androids watch OS is a joke and always has been.

    Like yes the apple ecosystem sucks to be stuck in, but it’s also a strength if you embrace it. Nothing like those interactions between devices exist elsewhere. And the only other thing is configuration but it’s a minor pain point, not something I’d decide an OS on. It’s not that iPhone just works, it’s that it works at all. Many features on android aren’t widely supported and often get abandoned. Android just adds and adds more useless things every year without the refinement they need to focus on imo.




  • Theres some cool reasons behind that and I encourage you to look into it but the summary is that a lot of our rovers use those oversized wheels so they don’t sink and instead spread their weight over the top of it. The regolith does get more compact as you go down, so that also helps prevent sinking all the way to the bottom.

    The other part is that both for rovers and astronauts we map out areas of high risk and avoid them. The Apollo astronauts landed in a specific spot and had certain areas to explore for that exact reason.

    Then when it comes to the LRV (the moon buggy) that we brought up there, that thing has very lightweight tires that are essentially just mesh wire. Helps to spread the load and they deform easily to get better traction in the loose rock.

    I had the pleasure of handling engineering replicas of the tires on the LRV and also newer generation martian rover tires. Including another engineering sample of the wheels on perseverance. NASA has a giant soil bin with a material that mimics the regolith that they use to test those wheels to prevent the rovers from sinking. Basically just attaching the wheels to a fake rover rig, loading it with weights, and then they drive it and track it in real time 3D space to measure slip and sinkage and all that.


  • The glass just has high angularity like the other particles it comes from so while in and of itself it isn’t useful, highly angular particles make for better interlocking when made into cements.

    And I don’t think they’re as worried about the depth of the dust in the highlands but it definitely makes exploring craters on foot impossible with the regolith present. You could absolutely get buried in it if the depth of the dust is 10m deep in some spots. We have a lot of concerns with the dust and how we can make long term survivable hardware which is part of what I worked on.


  • Not sure what will blow your mind but here’s some fun facts I feel like people don’t commonly know:

    1. Lunar regolith isn’t shallow, in many areas the regolith is 5m deep in the highlands and in craters and other areas it can be as much as 15m deep
    2. The regolith contains agglutinates, particles of rock that have been melted together by meteor impacts. They’re basically rock glass that contributes to the high abrasion of the regolith. We don’t have much of that stuff on earth and it’s very hard to make ourselves.
    3. Due to the lack of atmosphere, much of the dust is charged statically and will cling to astronauts and machines. I knew teams working on a sort of pulsing electricity in a grid of wires to repel the dust off of panels and suits.

  • Well, yes we’re getting a better one. I worked on Artemis adjacent projects and NASA isn’t just dreaming, they have plans for an actual moon base. It might take a decade or two, but it represents much more sustainable research and more beneficial research than what we have now in the ISS.

    For those interested, I worked as an intern on a few lunar soil related projects and the plan is to actually build stuff with it. If you’re interested, AMA


  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlpriorities
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    3 months ago

    So awhile back I tried this by having my system SSD be a smaller 500GB drive and I had another 1 TB SSD for games but turns out I was doing it all wrong.

    Seriously just invest in a 1 or 2TB M.2 SSD and thank me later, especially if you’re on windows. Then have a hard drive for programs you care less about and for data storage. My current config has even kept the 1TB SSD as an auxiliary gaming drive that I use for games of lesser importance or demand.

    I just wouldn’t ever put a windows install onto a drive that’s slower than any of your other drives and also you have to be very careful about the size of that drive. I tried to do this on a 100GB SSD like a decade ago and it didn’t go very well


  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldfin
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 months ago

    I really wanted to prove myself wrong because you sound like you know what you’re talking about. So I went and looked it up, turns out I was right to say what I said. Most of the major games out there report that more than half of their revenue comes from whales and those whales make up around 5% of their paying playerbase, sometimes more sometimes less. And in some games, that revenue is 60-70% of the total.

    So that’s why there are 17,000 levels which that vast majority of players wont ever see. It’s because they’re chasing 5% or less of their audience.

    But when it comes to games that are much smaller, I wasn’t really exaggerating to say that a small handful of players can outspend everyone else. When you have a player base in the hundreds and there’s like 20 people spending 50% or more in revenue for you, it’s going to affect your road map. In a larger game though, that percent will still mean tens of thousands of whale players.

    And maybe your experience was different, maybe the games you worked on didn’t operate that way. But the industry absolutely does. It doesn’t mean you can ignore the 50% of revenue coming from regular players by the way, I’m just saying that the percent that spends enormously has almost the same weight in changing the games road map as the majority of players sometimes. Which is crazy to me.

    Here’s the relevant Reddit post that was one of the sources I found.


  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldfin
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    Candy Crush Saga now has nearly 17,000 levels in it, so you’d be very wrong about that. Your average player might get into the hundreds, above average maybe thousands, but 17,000? They’re fishing for whales and not even that many of them.

    This problem is way worse than people think and most mobile games on the store have the sole entire purpose of only hooking a small handful of whales. Then once they do, they mold entire games around just a few people. These companies that run apps like Candy Crush actively change the price of lives per player and watch the statistics of what they’re buying and when. It’s so sinister and the entire industry survives off of gaming addictions and whaling.



  • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlUncanny Valley
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    4 months ago

    Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.

    The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.


  • You’re close. The real truth is that most average people do not like to date too high above their perceived range of attractiveness. This bears out in many studies but people are attracted to 8’s and 9’s but won’t date them and instead mostly date people that are more normal 5,6,7’s.

    Then we look at the opposite side of the coin, 9’s and 10’s don’t even want to date each other. And for good reason. Extremely attractive people often cross a line into narcissism or being too busy to hold a relationship.

    So two factors: 1. Most people aren’t extremely fit and so don’t want to date people whose lifestyle does not match their own, we’re all also slightly insecure. 2. Extremely attractive partners tend not to be good partners. The more people that are attracted to you, the less that date you. Also that’s out of fear of competition and effort so it’s not worth it.



  • It’s not for everyone but mildly shaken is not how I would describe it for me. They would be hard pressed to shake you or move you any faster without a seatbelt. The movie also doesn’t shake you for the entire time, but I’d say it’s on for a good 1/3rd of the movie. I was at my limit with it by the end for sure but that was fine. But maybe it varies from theater to theater.

    You’re correct though, they usually are more expensive. I went on a discounted day, my ticket was $14, but they are usually $20 which is double normal rate.

    So my advice is: If your movie is available in IMAX, go see it in the room adjacent. Or on a regular screen. Have your soda, popcorn, hotdog, whatever. Be comfortable. Then on another day, preferably discount night, come back to 4DX and don’t get a lot of food and drink. It will make you spill it.

    4DX isn’t meant to be comfy and relaxing. It’s an intense experience and isn’t for everyone. It was my second time with the movie though and if you’re going in expecting to be on a rollercoaster the entire time, it’s super fun if you already know the movie. Also, pick your movie carefully. They only do a dozen 4DX movies a year. Horror would be amazing with it but the more action packed, the more shaking. So choose wisely. And if you have kids, this is a must at least one time. They’ll have so much fun.


  • This is a PSA but there are a handful of theaters that do 4D called 4DX theaters and you might have one near you if you live in the US. Regal theaters specifically usually have them.

    Went and saw Dune Pt2 in theaters and it was actually super fun. Shaking during the fight scenes, wind on your face when out on the dunes, lots of movement riding the sand worm, and water blasts and more.

    They’re super fun, look them up and maybe travel to one sometime.


  • In my dreams of bettering consumerism, I often think a lot about refills. We waste so so so so so much money on packaging and it’s all waste. You could get one plastic cereal box and refill it 100x at Walmart with a dispenser. What blows my mind is that you can do all of this with exchange programs. We already do this with the big plastic water jugs. We used to do it with glass milk bottles. It’s insanity to keep buying shampoo that comes in the same bottle but get extra trash with it every time.