Totally agreed. The GM solution of using g-force is interesting. And the Ioniq solution of letter-of-the-law, showing nothing even during intense regen deceleration is clearly not safe.
While we're re-thinking brake lights, it would be nice to add some other affordances too. It would be nice to have an indicator of intensity of braking/deceleration, not just a binary feedback.
For example, why not add some strobing lights to extremely hard braking (like the sort of braking you might do if you're on the highway and there's a massive collision right in front of you). Something that unambiguously signals "extreme danger, prepare to react" to the people behind you.
Or a brake light color or shape that indicates you're at a complete stop.
Or more generally, perhaps brake light intensity should be a graduated, dimmer brake lights for gentle braking and intense ones for rapid braking.
Tech enables a lot more options and information these days, it'd be nice to explore making some improvements. EV transition is a good time considering some of our expectations are changing anyways.
San Junipero and some others mentioned are definitely gems. But I've gotta defend one of the episodes that the piece was picking on: "Playtest." Playtest is the horror episode where the guy demoing the VR implant ends up living a perceived nightmare fusing his life experiences with the horror video game.
That episode really stuck with me.
I always figured that technologies like VR implants, cognitive enhancement implants, consciousness upload, etc would come to exist. My general opinion about that was excited and positive. But this episode emphasizes the loss of control that comes with that. Once your cognition has been interfaced with or uploaded/simulated, you can no longer trust reality. You have no way to be able to definitively prove whether you're experiencing the real world or a simulation or modification again. Freaky stuff.
That other episode, "Hang the DJ" has some of that same existential dread in it, though it's played off more bittersweet. The characters are completely simulated and are "killed" at the end of the episode. Their entire existence was essentially for the purposes of a dating app genetic algorithm to determine matchmaking compatibility for the real people equivalents in the actual world.
Westworld S2 and beyond dabbled a lot with these topics too.
It can all really hamper your enthusiasm to participate in digital consciousness. San Junipero was a rare example of it being portrayed positively in Black Mirror. Who knows, perhaps we're already in such a simulated reality?
Perhaps. This was one of the details I really enjoyed in the recent sci-fi/drama anthology "Extrapolations" (on AppleTV+): things are just on fire, everywhere, all the time, right from the first episode. And it just gets worse as the series progresses.
For those who don't know it, the show is a little bit Black Mirror-esque in that it's a dystopian anthology. But while black mirror uses technology's effect on people and society as its lens for driving plot and conflict, Extrapolations uses climate change.
There's a wildfire in the Adirondacks at the end of the first episode (a little prescient considering the smoke over NY recently). References to wildfires (or imagery of them) are nearly continuous; Israel, Russia, US, India, South America... everywhere. Scene after scene of smoke-choked skies.
I heard a lot of people filing this under "unrealistic" or "alarmist" when the series first debuted, especially since it was like that even in the near-future early episodes. But having lived through a lot of west coast wildfires and blood-red Blade Runner skies myself, I thought that we're already kinda there, and it's just gonna get more common. And here we are, just a few months later with hundreds of fires all over Canada. At 10.6 million acres, it's already the worst wildfire season in Canadian history, and the 4th largest wildfire outbreak of the 21st century anywhere, meanwhile it's still the beginning of the wildfire season before the west coast has even really begun.
Sounds good. I haven't tried yet, but I will eventually. Sometimes it really does pay off to be a patient gamer... wait for the price to fall and the bugs and weirdness to get sorted out.
I just started No Man's Sky, from what I hear, it has improved a lot over the years.
I hope they change their minds in light of the new porting toolkit. It's also a bit weird considering how Mac-friendly Paradox published games tend to be, and that CS1 runs on Macs.
I'm similarly saddened that Hades II is currently listed as Windows-only, when Hades runs beautifully on MacOS.
And Frontpunk 2.
And Homeworld 3, though it's been a while since Mac-friendly HW2.
Agreed. My bigger issue is with the logic for compiling listings. If you are subscribed to a magazine that is much more active than the others, the big magazine completely dominates and you never see anything else. That's a tricky sort of algorithm to fine-tune, but in the meantime I may have to unsubscribe from this meta mag if I ever want to see any other content on my front page.
I believe it. I was a backend engineer for a different large tech site. The queries and sorting for large, heavily accessed data sets can be expensive, especially with complicating factors like privacy, hierarchy, or Reddit's various hotness/best/rising/etc sorting logic involved. This stuff relies on a whole lot of different layers of caching to function.
Every time a subreddit went dark, there were a whole lot of caches being made stale, getting flushed, or being regenerated.
Funny enough, I bet the way the going-dark process progressed (a steady trickle) was much more taxing on their infrastructure than if the subreddits had coordinated a unified going-dark all at the same time, say at midnight GMT. Easier to regenerate everything all at once than it is to have to repeatedly invalidate caches again and again.