• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

help-circle


    • X series - most complicated spacesims in existence (nothing realistic though)
    • Stellaris
    • Imperium Galactica 1 - a super-complicated 4x space DOS game - think Stellaris + SimCity + Command & Conquer
    • An obscure unpopular old game - Battle Isle: the Andosia War - or as one reviewer roughly said: “they must have had a board where everyone who came up with an idea got a golden piggie - it would work as 3 games: Battle Isle, Economy Isle, and Energypipe Isle, but this is just too much”. Basically a turn-based but real-time strategy game (unit movement is turn-based, you can end your turn at any time but… resource extraction is real-time and if you run out of energy and water simultaneously you can’t cool your power plant and you can’t power your pumps). Also maintaining a supply-line behind your advancing army.

  • Daedalus@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orgquestions about climate change
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that source - though this seems - incomplete (I am aware this is probably outside of their control)

    EDIT: I’m being intentionally pessimistic because I assume a lot of industrial growth - still powered by coal (at least one China’s worth) and I basically expect every target to be not met (which so far has mostly been the case).


  • There is no single ‘extinction point’ other than becoming self-sustaining.

    We will survive 3C alive and (sort of) well, just all of humanity affected, unless it triggers something like the clathrate gun - that one seems to have been mostly ruled out recently, fortunately, but there are other positive feedback loops (e.g. water vapor is a major greenhouse gas).

    8C would be a major extinction event, but at that point what’s left of humanity would be fully mobilized mitigating the problem (at that point you probably couldn’t avoid geoengineering).

    I don’t like the ‘temperature threshold’, ‘time limit’, etc. rhetoric - it comes mostly from politicians and it leads to ‘we can’t do anything anyway’ kind of thinking. When we’ve gone past 2C (which I’m almost certain we will), ‘we’re all going to die’ is not going to help - the problem is still there and still needs to be solved.

    Note - current-ish projections aren’t that bad: but 2C is the very optimistic scenario and I’m not sure the ongoing industrial rise of India and eventually Nigeria (and other large developing countries) is well estimated there.


    1. Not really ‘anxiety’ yet, more of ‘concern’ and ‘interest’. There may be anxiety later if we turn into tornado country.
    2. Yes. I don’t have and will never have a car, I don’t replace appliances until they are destroyed/unrepairable, I avoid stuff that looks nice if I can’t justify it.
    3. No. But I live in one of the more ‘resilient’ areas. May change in future.
    4. We’re still increasing the rate we’re adding CO2 (though this will change soon), so no, we’ll not limit it below 2C. There is no political will for a drastic WW2-style effort to go carbon-zero in a short time (even if it’s technically achievable). Temperatures will keep rising until CO2 levels actually start decreasing, and there may be more positive feedback effects (methane, water) that will make them rise beyond that point. I don’t think we’ll level off below 4C. If positive feedbacks kick in, the limit is unpredictable, may even be 8C. We will be able to reverse either of those (unless we go full Venus), but at an extreme human cost in the latter case.
    5. Absolutely useful, as a part of the solution. People often say we shouldn’t do this, we should do that, (solar, nuclear, reforestation, carbon capture, less cows, geoengineering etc.) - you can’t have everyone do one thing and you shouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket - we need to do everything at once (well, I don’t think geoengineering is a good idea anytime soon). Of course CCS should not be used as an excuse to emit carbon elsewhere (see also: biomass, biofuels). If we get hit by positive feedback effects, we will need to be drastically carbon negative - and for that, CCS (or geoengineering) is needed (reforestation only works until you, uh, reforest everything).
    6. Yes, but not as described on said post - we need support for worst-hit countries, and refugees from those countries (this may include moving entire populations in case of small island nations). I don’t support giving money to large semi-fascist regimes like China (and increasingly India) unless it involves directly supporting ways to replace their carbon-based economies. It will not happen and we will pay for the consequences. I.e. I don’t support ‘climate justice’ here, I support ‘stopping climate change’.

  • As another steam deck user (~1 year of 1-4h daily usage):

    performance/compatibility:

    • modern AAA games can be played but expect low settings and 30FPS. I don’t play many of those so it’s not a problem
    • indies work, with good battery life
    • old PC games work well, e.g. Fallout 2 on Steam out of the box - the trackpads are important here to replace mouse. Don’t expect to play a micro-heavy RTS though.
    • AAA games from 2012-2020 (~PS4 generation) work with good enough battery life for my commute (~1+1h)
    • setup of emulators is trivial with EmuDeck
    • switch emulation works (a recent yuzu update bumped performance to ‘as good as switch’ for almost everything.
    • PS2, PSP, Wii (and everything older) emulation works, but don’t expect PS3 to work
    • most multiplayer games with anticheat don’t work
    • modding windows games (outside those with Steam Workshop support) is impractical, you need to go into desktop mode and mess with the particular proton ‘bottle’ for that game
    • adding third-party games is easy (add the game’s binary to steam and tell it which Proton to use)

    ergonomics/size:

    • it’s big, not laptop big, but a backpack is the most practical way to carry it (I carry it with my work laptop)
    • It’s really comfortable to hold - personally it’s more comfortable than my Logitech F710 (controller) - but I have big hands

    reliability/stability:

    • no SW issues so far, good cadence of updates
    • no analog stick drift so far
    • no measurable battery degradation so far

    hardware:

    • not the easiest device to take apart (e.g. if you want to upgrade the SSD)

    other:

    • a good big uSD card may be preferable to buying the most expensive model, I have e.g. Witcher 3 on an uSD card and loading is (subjectively) fast enough.
    • steam has per-game controller schemes which you can download from other users, this is especially convenient for strategy games where there’s no ‘common scheme’
    • you can set screen refresh rate and FPS limit per-game, e.g. for turn-based games I go way down with FPS (~20) to save battery
    • people complain about the screen, IMO it’s comparable with any ‘normal’, non-OLED monitor

    There’s also a considerable dev community around Steam Deck, e.g. decky-loader for plugins, and already mentioned EmuDeck.



  • I’m probably missing some games, but:

    • Homeworld and sequels (especially Cataclysm!) - one of the few and still the best 3D strategy game.
    • Deus Ex - you can do anything and the game will react to it. You can run from bosses and they will follow you later (or you can kill them in advance!), you can stack all the crates to get to that roof, you can be in the middle of what in any other RPG would be the heartwrenching scripted sequence motivating the main character and start shooting. There are still no other games allowing freedom to such degree.
    • Planescape: Torment - where dialogue actually feels like gameplay.
    • Xenogears and to a lesser degree, newer Xeno games. Goes outside of the mold for japanese RPGs similar to Planescape:Torment in the west.
    • Battle for Wesnoth - the best turn-based strategy, with a whole series worth of quality campaigns, and with some of the unofficial campaigns surpassing the main game. Also the best open source game.

    There are many others (XCOM:UFO Defense, Sacrifice, Final Fantasy series, Command & Conquer TS/RA2 and their mods, Fallout 2, Stellaris, Dishonored, Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament, Operation Flashpoint…)


  • I think we’re soon going to get to the point when anything other than solar/wind gets rejected on the financial basis, except cases not covered by solar/wind (still need some baseload).

    As solar gets cheaper, even baseload/heating should be viable - there are many energy storage methods that are ‘inefficient’ but scale better than li-ion - thermal storage, various ‘heavy’ battery chemistries, even making hydrogen or synfuels - you can have 50% energy loss if it costs 50% of the alternatives and you’d be unable to use it on peak sunlight anyway.