Incredible. All throughout my studies the “bitter lesson”, so to speak, was that analogue circuits just couldn’t hold a candle to digital ones in terms of reliability when operating on small currents, to the point that no one bothered to miniaturize in analogue anymore. Even guitar pedals are almost all transistor-based, because it’s so much more feasible to to manipulate small currents through binary, quantized signals than analogue ones (even though the analogue ones are theoretically infinitely more precise).

Here’s the publication in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

Here is either the pre-print or an accompanying paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05853

I’m trying to figure out how they get around the compounding imprecision that is inherent to multiple analogue steps and actually manage to rival digital circuit’s precision; seems like a big part come from how they have managed to squash all of the useful “work” down into almost a single step thanks to clever use of operational amplifiers on the “edges” of their resistive random access memory array.

Time for some more word of mouth (potentially): have you tried Beyond all Reason? It’s more or less a modern open source remake of Total Annihilation. Runs like a dream even with tens of AI players and tens of thousands of units in-game.

Compared to SupCom I would say there is more unit diversity but less wacky experimentals, and the commander unit cannot be upgraded. There are currently only 2 factions, that basically map to UEF and Cybran from SupCom (or rather SupCom derived those two from the 2 in Total Annihilation). The dev team is currently working on a third faction that, from the previews, seems to me to be a mashup of the Aeon and Seraphim from SupCom: Forged Alliance.

According to my father, who is an absolute Epic Wizard level computer programmer consultant, Factorio teaches you the basics of computer programming.

Someone wrote a whole article riffing off of that idea (checks date) 4 (!) years ago: https://erikmcclure.com/blog/factorio-is-best-interview-we-have/

(Apologies for replying to a 6-month old thread)

Sorry for necroposting, but OP linked your reply in a recent post and I wanted to directly respond to it.

You might enjoy The Ellimist Chronicles, a companion book to the Animorphs series. The novel’s protagonist has a similar interest in getting things done with the minimum of direct intervention.

I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.

Reminds me of the beginning of the book The Ellimist Chronicles.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

I watched a few playthroughs earlier this year, and was struck by the games’ vibes. Maybe I’ve become jaded, maybe 2013 was just a different time, but the over-the-top-bombastic, gratuitous-yet-totally-sincere meditation on power, violence, and humanity feels incredibly relevant, not to mention a breath of fresh air compared to the games I see coming out today.

It’s also very similar to the type of video game I’d like to make someday, so it counts as homework as well!

Not to mention it feels like half of the media/art that I love from the past 10 years has been heavily influenced by this game, so playing it could give me a fuller appreciation for them.

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.

My reading of the article is also that the anode is bonding with the protons (aka hydrogen nuclei) as part of the redox process to generate current.

Good luck and don’t forget to bring heat pipes!

(More realistically, given you posted this 11 hours ago; hope y’all weren’t stranded!)

Also, just with Mario alone Nintendo has long had a heavy jazz influence.

Pretty good review!

I’ve not yet been to all the new planets. What I have seen lines up well with the characterization of Wube strategically disabling the things in the base game / on the starting planet (“Nauvis”) that I grew accustomed to. Instead of simply adding ever more lengthy production line recipes, they have forced us to approach many existing production lines in a drastically different way.

In the base game, you can play around with ratios and targeted throughput, but you almost always will have the same machines crafting the same recipes, in the same order. The most significant decision when designing a production line is often whether to bring an item in by belt or instead bring its components and craft it adjacently.

Space Age shakes that up by introducing several new choices/decisions to make. There are alternate recipes to be unlocked (similar in function to Satisfactory, without needing to hunt for hard drives on a map). There are now multiple “looping” recipes (the input items can be part of the output). Most notably, which recipes are available to you depends on where you are building - not only planetside vs in-orbit, but planetside vs in-orbit across all planets. The planets have different resources on them, and their orbits contain different ratios of resource-laden asteroids. Same goes for the routes between planets!

I was very afraid that the extension would feel like “more of the same, just longer and more tedious”. That’s the experience I’ve had with most overhaul mods I’ve tried, and notably why I never bothered paying Space Exploration (whose author ended up working with Wube on the Space Age extension). So far my experience has been the exact opposite. It really feels like every single new “thing” feeds back into the core gameplay by “rejuvenating” it in new ways.

There’s a scene in the game where the character is taking a shower. The shower stall is glass, and the glass is frosted from around ankle height to neck height.

I haven’t played the game myself, just came across the scene on YouTube several years ago, so I don’t know how justifiable the choice of the scene is in the first place. At least, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to me that they modeled the full nude body so that the frosted glass would blur what we “see” in a realistic way. It’s a lot easier to model something and then have the glass blur it, instead of directly modelling the blurred version for example.

Personally I think most of the creep factor comes from the fact that this character is explicitly modeled after a live human being who presumably didn’t sign up for that.

We also added the ability to pin the resource patch, and the count of remaining ore will update as the patch is mined. You can use this to keep an eye on how things are going, and be aware when a patch is running dry.

Yet another great mod transcending its mod status to be assimilated into the base game!

This is why I’m very pleased by how small in scope the upcoming Factorio expansion is compared to some of the mods that inspired/preceded it (notably Space Exploration).

This seems right up my alley, as a fan of the Micromachines games and RTS in general.

I’ll try to give it a go when I regain a decent internet landline.

Art might not be about thinking while you are experiencing it, but it most definitely is about thinking about the experience afterwards, as much as experiencing it in the first place.

Not to mention that books are often art.