• 6 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • Sure, it’s conventional explosive with radioactive markers to test the detection capabilities of their equipment. I was being polite with my earlier comment, in case I had missed something in the article, but I guess I didn’t.

    The Wikipedia page on Explosives gives some reading on the differences between the two. Suffice it to say, chemical and nuclear explosions are fundamentally different things; breaking/reforming of molecular bonds to produce heat and energy, compared to splitting or fusing atoms themselves, which releases FAR more energy than those molecular reactions since the bonds holding atomic nuclei together are so much stronger. If we say that a nuclear explosion is literally any explosion + radioisotopes, then you could buy some uranium online, tape it to a brick of plastic explosive, and say you’ve got yourself a nuke. Maybe someone should tell Iran they don’t need to waste all that money on centrifuges.

    You’re half right though, in that this probably is a response to Russia, but demonstrating your ability to detect underground nuclear tests is not at all the same thing as actually conducting one.











  • When I was a player, my DM would print out whatever battle maps he needed and laminate them for the dry erase marker. An even more adaptable version of that would be a clear plastic sleeve or cover placed over the paper, so you could have a variety of maps handy and swap them out as needed.

    Now as a DM myself I use my iPad and the procreate app, which works fairly well. I can have a ton of maps ready to go for both battle and exploration, and a bonus is that I also have an easy way to hide and reveal parts of the map using layers. There’s an iPad app called encounter+ that’s specifically for running combats off of an iPad, but it has some features locked behind a paywall and a bit of a learning curve, so I haven’t used it myself.






  • Honestly micro lithography and chip design in and of themselves have been moving towards only a few big players in the space. TSMC is more advanced than any other manufacturer, and NVIDIA’s chip designs at the top end just have no competition for raw performance and capability, even aside from their software/AI work. Don’t get me wrong, all the major chip manufacturers have their respective anticompetitive bullshit, but traditional silicon is such a hard space to even keep up in, never mind break into.




  • I wonder how much sense that would actually make for them. All the major console makers subsidize their products through game sales and online subscriptions. Valve already does the former, but that’s because they’re a game marketplace and it’s how they make money to begin with. I’m not sure what a steam subscription service (that’s not a game pass) would look like, since Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo offer online play and cloud saves for the cost of a subscription, whereas Valve makes those available for free.