> The defining element of a LAN party, however, is the social factor. Playing a game with others in the same physical space, sometimes huddled side-by-side on the same large table, is an intimate affair. Cries of joy and frustration fill the air.
That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord.
It also forces you to compromise when choosing games and maps, because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people. You end up playing games you're not as familiar with (and not as dominant in), so your friends will play your game with you later. This brings you into situations, where the person next to you frantically gives you the crash course in rush build orders while building their own base, making the payoff so much better when it actually works out.
> because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people.
Probably depends on the size, but even our tiny LANs we had some groups preferring some games, other's preferring others, and plenty of other activities others were doing throughout the LAN. The group that managed the LAN I was familiar with was really into medieval costumes, events and roleplaying, so bunch of chainmail making, clothes making and what not going on at the same time while others play BFV or Starcraft, or people sleeping under the tables.
There's two LAN parties - the small group of friends (4 to 10, say) where you'd mostly be playing the same game, but as it progressed people would drop off or split up (we ended up with one small group playing a Heroes III comp-stomp on hotseat, another watching someone playing HalfLife).
Then there's the larger parties that are closer to gaming conventions, which have so many people that you basically have to have multiple gaming sessions, if not multiple games.
The Prius (and all subsequent Synergy Drive cars) were widely known - from the very beginning - to be extremely fuel efficient ICE cars. As time went on, they universally became known to be both fuel efficient and also absolutely bomb proof.
Both of those things surprised basically no-one, since the direct successors (Camry, Corolla, 4Runner, Tacoma, Hilux) were also already known for being fuel efficient and reliable cars.
The only people who really care about why and how exactly they got so fuel efficient and reliable are engineering nerds - and many of those already knew, the planetary gear set + atkinson cycle engine are a pretty legendary design. They hit it out of the park on the first try, after all.
And as this video shows, explaining the why and how to non-engineering nerds takes a good part of an hour anyway. How do you do marketing with that?
It does to me. I was operating under the misconception that hybrids combined the meant more parts and more maintenance. I said this out loud as a complaint many times in discussions about them and everyone let it drop or conceded the point. Reading this thread it appears I was ignorant that it was more hybrid than I imagined.
I used to think the same before I bought a hybrid (Honda CRV). It is different from Toyota but also a very simple setup (generator + ev at low to medium speeds and direct drive at high speeds). It technically doesn't even have a gear box and no alternator. It has less maintenance items than its ICE equivalent. (Not taking into account the battery replacement in long term)
No, it's already 130M (out of the ~450M in the EU). Wero's predecessor (iDeal, Bizum, Paylib, Giropay) systems are already widely adapted in their countries of origin and will be fully compatible with it, and Wero itself has had a bit of time to pick up new users on its own by now.
I wonder what the hell the problem with naming things is in the AI space. They pretty much all suck at it.
OpenAI came up with GPT 4o, o4, 4.5, 4.1 (which came out later than 4.5 and had a completely different purpose), Microsoft just calls everything a copilot (Github Copilot, Azure Copilot, Microsoft Copilot - all from the same company, completely different things), and Google apparently just picks random words from the comments.
There's a third way: in-roof or roof integrated photovoltaics. Normal panels, but integrated into the roof. Those look amazing. Very popular in Switzerland where some villages have strict aesthetic rules for buildings.
Next best thing aesthetically are full-roof racks, where one face of the roof is 100% covered in panels. Nowadays you just have to select the right panel and you can make it tile the plane perfectly.
The previous owner own my house installed these (it was mandated by law here at the time). About 90% of the time they leak after about 10 years, and mine did. I had to have the installation re-done over the roof.
Building codes on that are going to vary locally. They are doable in most of Switzerland if you plan for it: no sky lights, no chimney (there's setbacks and fire codes for those), ect.
I thought the IFC International Fire Codes were a bit more ubiquitous than they are. Apparently whole roof is possible in a few EU countries. Probably not a good idea for the stick-built houses prevalent in US though
curl had ~15 CVEs in 2026 so far. You surely don't think those (and the one Mythos found) were the last security bugs still left in the code base? There certainly will be more, in fact Daniel predicts ~50 CVEs for the entire year.
That's not the argument. Yes, curl is insanely hardened. But still, they currently have a new CVE every couple of weeks. Mythos didn't accelerate this much, no more than all the other AI-assisted security analysis they've been doing anyway.
Which either means that, tragically for Mythos, it only got to analyze the code base just after ALL the bugs where finally ironed out and now curl is bug free forever after - or Mythos isn't really all that good, dozens/hundreds more bugs remain and will be found in the next months and years.
> This is the way. I use printed maps when on vacation.
Come on, then you know their limits. Get to your destination city? Better hope your road atlas comes with a city map, and the road you're going to is large enough to have its name printed. Otherwise, you're shopping at the next gas station. Have the city map? Better hope the outer borrows are on it, too. Found your destination on the map? Better hope you have a competent navigator riding shotgun, because otherwise you'll have to stop and park 15 times to consult your map while navigating an unfamiliar jungle of a city.
I think much of the software written over the last 20 years is very close to worthless. A significant fraction has negative worth.
The jumps are pretty impressive, this thing has some power. I'd be very curious how fast you could get this dog with some reinforcement learning for a proper transverse gallop gait - and if it converges towards a gallop naturally, or if it discovers some other fast gait patterns during learning.
Depending on the max speed of the motors/legs, giving it longer foot pads might be necessary for a good gallop. Intuitively, it looks a bit... "low gear" in the videos.
I wonder how accurate a virtual model could be made of this, which could be iterated on millions of times faster.
My first project as a research assistant in AI was doing evolutionary algorithms on Khepera robots, which had a virtual Java implementation. We were able to evolve some pretty cool behaviors, although I don't know what would have happened if we had uploaded them into a physical Khepera robot.
I'd expect pretty good results from simulation until you start bending/deforming the limbs or until the foot pads start slipping.
I also wonder if you can read the impact force from the legs with the ground from the motor controllers (should be able to infer that from motor current + leg displacement). Learning to gallop without "feeling" the legs impacting sounds extremely difficult.
I was waiting for Google to pull a local LLM onto Chrome/Android devices. It opens up some revenue streams that weren't easily possible before: for example the often memed "I was talking about cigars with my wife one single time and now all I see are adsense ads for cigars" gets much easier with a local model doing speech to text and topic classification.
No, but mostly for economic reasons. You can farm a whole lot of fish in aquaculture - it's just more expensive than importing wild caught fish.
The numbers look pretty insane, you can raise many tons of fish in relatively small volumes of water (several hundred kg of fish per year per cubic meter). You just gotta build the ponds/tanks/cages, and the infrastructure to filter the water, supply the oxygen and deliver the feed.
That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord.
It also forces you to compromise when choosing games and maps, because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people. You end up playing games you're not as familiar with (and not as dominant in), so your friends will play your game with you later. This brings you into situations, where the person next to you frantically gives you the crash course in rush build orders while building their own base, making the payoff so much better when it actually works out.
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