You would write in known lengths such as "each number will be 8 bits," as well as extra numbers here and there that might say things like "the first number X is how long the list is, the next X numbers are the list, the number Y after that is how many letters there are, followed by Y number of letters."

The programmer gets to determine all of these things and make up the rules. It's what makes things like reverse engineering file formats difficult, since the file could be laid out in any format.

If you want to see this being done in real time, check out the Metroid Prime Modding Discord. They've been reverse engineering the original GameCube game for years, and recently the remastered dropped so they're currently in the process of tearing that apart and figuring out how the data is laid out so they can read it.

>We’re pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment

Was Dolphin a secret before?

If there was a correct answer, this would be it

Outer Wilds. It's my "Buy it now, trust me later," game recommendation. There are a few bits that might be a little more than "low stress," but in general it's a pretty relaxing game, where dying is basically part of the puzzle, so it's not like you're being punished.

Wow, finally the first website that has tools like this where I don't feel like my computer will stop working just by viewing the website!

Picture a 3x3 grid of pixels like this:

O O O
O O O
O O O

How would you color in those pixels to draw a complex shape like the letter "P"? You really can't. No matter which way you choose to draw it, you'll either be missing the bottom of the stem, the hole in the middle, or something else. Similarly if we were to try and draw a diagonal line "\" it would have to be stair-stepped.

Computers try to get around this by doing something called "anti-aliasing," which adds translucent pixels around the edges, but it's more of a bandaid for the problem since it relies on the computer trying to guess about missing information, and often results it trade offs like smoother edges but tiny details vanish since they are too small to be rendered in the first place. By rendering at a higher resolution and then scaling down, we can render all the extra detail that needs to be there, and then scale down to get an "accurate," image.

I've seem him in some interviews and he's funny AF. Now that he's older and can't do quite as much action, I'd love to see him in some comedy movies!

Again, not necessarily. If humans had the ability to space out children throughout their longer lifetimes, I think the population would remain pretty stable.

In the hypothetical scenario where we were able to drastically slow down aging, having technology to also extend the length of human fertility would be fantastic.

Without it, someone living until 500 would still feel pressure to have kids when they're 20-40. However, with it they could easily space out any kids they have over their longer lifespan, likely leading to a healthier population.

I think it might be the opposite. Having the choice to wait longer to have kids could actually remove any rush people might have since they don't have to worry about "missing out," because they waited too long.

Heat is the kinetic energy of particles. The more they move, they more they bump into other particles and knock them around as well, "heating," them up.

What's the difference then with something like a metal bar, where if you bend it far enough it does actually stay bent, but if you bend it less it goes back?

After being raised to believe Carter was basically the devil, it's crazy how much I've been learning recently how not-horrible he was.

Immediately what my mind went to!

The CPU is really smart, but each "core," can only do one thing at once. 4 cores, means you can process 4 things at the same time.

A GPU has thousands of cores, but each core is really dumb (basic math, and that's about it), and is actually slower than a CPU core. Having thousands of them though means that certain operations which can be split up into thousands of simple math calculations can be done much faster than on a CPU, for example doing millions of calculations to calculate every pixel on your screen.

It's like having 4 college professors and 1000 second graders. If you need calculus done, you give it to the professors, but if you need a million simple addition problems done you give it to the army of second graders and even though each one does it slower than a professor, doing it 1000 at a time is faster in the long run.

Basically:

1. Make your game look way better than it is
2. Advertise to millions
3. Hope thousands download
4. Even if those thousands quit almost immediately, you still got to show them 1 or 2 ads.

Here's a video of two people talking about how their pretty hilarious journey of how they did something similar as a joke and accidentally ended up making quite a bit of money: https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk (seriously worth the watch)

Game can be great for a lot of reasons. Sometimes simple repetitive gameplay is zen and nice to relax to, sometimes you want to get a glimpse into a character's world, and sometimes immersing yourself in a unique game environment is a reward in it's own.

Personally I just love when people get weird with the stuff they make and just create things purely out of their own mind. Directors like David Lynch and Panos Cosmatos come to mind. It always just feels wholly unique in a way that nothing else does, and I wish more studios would give people like that real budgets to make more cool stuff we've never seen/played before.

Yes and no. "Music Sharing," as it was called in the day was pretty popular, and most people just saw it as no different then burning CDs or making mix cassette tapes for your friends. In the same way people would record movies to VHS when they came on TV and share them with friends as well, and nobody really thought about it as "piracy." So when the internet became good enough to share large amounts of songs, everyone just kind of continued doing the same things, just on a larger scale.

So it wasn't necessarily that people thought "Finally! A device all my pirate music!" but more that they already had a library of music acquired from "multiple different sources," such as ripped CDs, friends CDs, and yeah, some they downloaded online. The iPod just gave them a device that let them easily carry around that library, no matter where the songs came from, even if piracy helped make those libraries large in the first place.

The end of First Love still kills me 😂

Mr. Robot is great, just be warned it's not happy in the slightest, as in "we'll give you a puppy dog, shoot it in front of you, and then immediately move on like it never happened to rob you of the grieving process," type not happy. Not to mention all characters are fundamentally lonely and/or desperate to their core which doesn't make things any better. As a work of art and as a story the show is amazing, but just make sure you're in a good space before watching it.

I made the mistake of watching it right when the pandemic started. I was like "Wow, the school I work is closed down, now I have time to catch up on all the shows I've been wanting to watch," and it really didn't do much good for my emotional state during that time.

Could still be, basically "fuck that guy, he's smitten with Biden."

Imaginary numbers become useful when working with a lot of advanced mathematics, and make equations work nicely.

A simple example though, is square rooting a negative number as you mentioned, but there's a little more to it. square_root(-1) = i, but that doesn't mean "no solution possible," it means that it's not possible at that moment. For example, if I plug that result into the function "f(x)=2+x^(2)" it now becomes a valid answer, because I am squaring the "impossible," answer of square_root(-1), cancelling out the square root

She has a bright future as a blood splatter analyst 😅

Most types of media come with what's called a "license." It basically outlines what you are, and aren't allowed to do with it i.e. "You're allowed to watch this DVD, but you are not allowed to copy it." Things get a little trickier when the thing that has the license allows you to make things with it. Software like Photoshop has a license saying "You can use this software, you can't copy it, but anything you make with it is yours."

Some videogames don't allow you to make anything using the game, so things like machinima and Let's Plays are technically against the rules. Nintendo used to have super tight restrictions on what content could be made using their games, but I think they might have loosened up in recent years.

This is where D&D's license comes in. When it was released, it was released with a "Do whatever the fuck you want," license, which was great for players and content creators both since there were basically no restrictions on the stories you could tell, or how you wanted to release those stories. Recently though, the company that makes D&D tried to change that license to basically restrict what people could do with the game and try to put the company in control (especially financial control) over what content people made with it. They backpedaled soon after though, so it's hopefully water under the bridge at this point.

My first thought as well