Wind and solar are both affected by the weather, as well

No matter how good your power grid is there will always be dead spots with nothing but solar/wind power

Not to mention solar panels rarely (if ever) actually pay for themselves on a consumer scale

@ping No, I don't have a source, but the people whose panels have payed for themselves most likely live in very sunny areas that rarely have clouds

@GingaBomber Not to mention mining the materials for the batteries

Actually, I think the best argument for nuclear power is that The Simpsons, which has a track record of foreshadowing (if not outright predicting) future events, features Homer Simpson working at a nuclear power plant

@GingaBomber Yeah, the least efficient part of a car's engine is the combustion reaction

Grandstanding

Musk has been grandstanding

I think that's because he was going to concentrate funding on NASA, but it was still a *very* optimistic estimate

@ping I would argue that the moon is very worth going to because then we could build larger structures/ships in orbit due to the lower gravity

@ping No, you're not thinking large enough

I'm talking about things bigger than a mile

There's still a larger risk of it falling out of LEO than falling out of LLO (Low Lunar Orbit) though

@ping The same way anything falls out of any orbit. It gets too heavy for the speed it's moving

^

Yes, its orbit would degrade slower, but it would degrade even more slowly in low lunar orbit

It's more of a guarantee

The people building it may

Oh, another reason to go to the moon, as @Dionara just mentioned, is getting stuff to the orbit to whatever you're building

1/6th the gravity = less fuel to get materials up

@ping Would it be any harder than building a self-sustaining colony on Mars?

If so, then that's the only reason not to colonize the moon

Mars has a minimal atmosphere

We would still need some sort of covering for the colony

@Dionara Pretty sure the answer to that for all of us would be "No, I don't have a degree and I haven't taken classes on the subject"

Nuclear power I'm an armchair expert via my brother, who studied Nuclear Engineering for his B.S.

Now I'm becoming a bit less of an armchair expert in Materials Science via my brother since he's studying that for his Ph.D.

I find Mat.Sci. harder to understand than nuclear power

@CreativeRealms I believe NASA has proposed that for research expeditions

Basically, get out of Earth orbit, land on a comet, and use that to get closer to your objective before leaving again

@Grenade123 In theory, any comet should be structurally stable enough to ride. The only trick would be attaching to it for the ride

Oh, and picking one big enough

I think we need to get some more scientists in here too

That way we aren't just speculating on everything

About the only things I can speak with authority on are programming and nuclear power (again, thanks to my "armchair expert" status)

And even in programming, I acknowledge there are languages I know basically nothing about

The university I went to for Computer Science started with C and C++, then moved on to Java. Since graduating, I've worked mainly with Java and Javascript (I'm most qualified as a web developer nowadays)

I also know enough of the following to be "dangerous": Lisp, Erlang, Ada, FORTRAN

Oh, and Groovy and Kotlin

but those are just Java with nicer syntax

I've looked into C# on occasion, but the companies I've worked for haven't been that big into C#

@ping I know there's more to it than that, but they're both supersets of Java

Any valid Java code is also valid Groovy/Kotlin code

just like C++ is just a superset of C

Any valid C code is valid C++ code, ergo C++ is a superset of C

Give me one line of code that would compile under C but not under C++

Yes it does. It just has better syntax for those now, so people rarely use the old C pointer casts

I'm not well versed on struct initializers, so I can't speak to those

@ping But the compilers still have to support it

@GingaBomber Because ping and I disagree on the definition of "<Language B> is a superset of <Language A>"

@Grenade123 I think I read about that a few years ago, but I don't remember the context

@ping Okay, I'll concede that you're probably right in that C++ isn't a *perfect* superset of C, but as far as most programmers are concerned, it's close enough as to not make a difference

I dabbled in UE4 with a friend a few years ago, and it seemed bloated for what we were doing

What I'm getting from this is "There is no silver bullet [game engine] for game development"

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

@Grenade123 Visual Studio is often dumb, but it is still the best C/C++ IDE I've used

The only alternative I know of for C/C++ is Eclipse, and I don't even use Eclipse for Java, which is what it was designed for

I suppose there's Xcode for macs, but I'm not an Apple fanboi, so I've never used it

Maybe I didn't have problems with that because the only external projects I referenced were through NuGet

which, for some reason, I always read as "New Get" until just now when I realized I could read it as "nug(g)et"

Ah, the plight of working on a "mature" code base. You want to say it's good because it's "mature", but at the same time it's got so much cruft in it that you can't really say that and sleep well at night

At my first job after graduating there was a project they wrote nearly 15 years before I started there, and everybody was so afraid to touch the code for fear of breaking it that we never added features. At the same time, though, nobody was willing to write a new solution

The main discernable feature of the project was an XML parser that took a configuration file and turned it into a query engine, but poorly

The guitar/drum synchronization reminds me of Dragonforce, but I've listened to enough music that I'm not surprised they can pull this off live as well

Apparently early on Dragonforce sounded terrible because they didn't have monitors on the stage with them, so they couldn't hear what they sounded like

The song starts out slow, and it never gets as fast as what you linked to, but this is Dream Theater performing "The Dance of Eternity" live https://youtu.be/8Ik9qECIWgc?t=18s

The song is notable for a few reasons: 1) there are 108 time signature changes, 2) there are several segments where different instruments are playing synchronized segments

I'll have to check them out one of these days, the videos you linked intrigue me

Figures. That typically happens after a really good album.

Damn, I was 5 seconds into LCD and I was already impressed

That happened to the old drummer (and founder) of Dream Theater 3 albums ago. He wanted to take a break, everybody else was like "Nah, we're good recording more albums right now"

Oh, that doesn't bother me

I tend to listen to entire albums at once

Hang on, I still have 3 minutes left of LCD

lol, I just looked up what genre Vektor is. I didn't even realize there was a *Progressive* subcategory of Thrash Metal

From what you've linked me to, I think I'm going to greatly enjoy their music

_listens to mostly Prog Rock & Prog Metal_

Yeah, except for a few notable exceptions I'm largely the same in terms of music preference

At any rate, I should have gone to sleep about two hours ago now... got work in the morning

Been nice talking to you though

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep it in mind if I ever pick up the Serious Sam remakes

Timcats 2024

The end of that URL almost looks like "Who's on 8", which of course made me think of the "Who's on 1st" skit

From what I've read, there have already been real studies disproving it, but the people pushing the gender wage gap completely ignore them

No, they've read the studies. They just discount the findings by saying that the authors are sexist/racist/etc. and their study was biased from the start.

Maybe we need a separate channel for so-called "conspiracy" theories?

Eh, I feel like this deserves its own channel instead of just being lumped in with general shitposting

Otherwise, possibly relevant information could be lost in the general flood

Eh, still better than Cthulu

@Madoc Valanor My 2 cents:

1. This is Tim's server
2. This channel is marked as being NSFW
3. The only reason Discord would crack down on this server would be if somebody who's on it reports it to Discord

@Madoc Valanor

1. He's spoken out against the far left as well. He's more of a centrist than anything else. That said, he very vocally supports free speech.
2. It doesn't excuse it, but it does serve as a warning that you should expect to see things you may not like/agree with/want to see

I can't really refute point 3.

On an unrelated note, if you want to put line breaks in your messages (for formatting's sake), you can use "Shift+Enter"

@RyeNorth The only "appropriate" response to the question you just posed can only be properly posted in the hate speech room

:P

Yeah, too bad the 787 isn't rated for Mach

@i509VCB Mach is relative to the pressure surrounding you, though. The 787 is faster, but it flies at a higher altitude, ergo its typical speed as measured in Mach is lower

In theory, once AI becomes advanced enough, we could use them as impartial editors/curators for news

The problem is, by the time AI becomes advanced enough to do that, the people creating them will have ways of making the AI think it's unbiased even though it is

Maybe not in our lifetime

It will eventually though