geosoco

Todd Howard agrees that it was a bit of a pain to get right, as he said in a recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. "[Space combat] was way harder than we thought … We see a lot of space games where you're gonna have like, derelict ships or other things to fly around, just to get a sense of motion, so the smallest thing like 'what does the dust in space look like?' so you feel like you're moving and it's not too much, not too little."

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For Bethesda, the snags started happening when it came to designing enemy AI: "It's very easy … to make the enemies really really smart, forever we were just jousting [with them]. It turns out you have to make the AI really stupid. You have to have them fly, then they need to turn, basically like 'hey player, why don't you just shoot me for a while?' … [once we'd] settled on our pace, and how the enemies are gonna move, that's where it came together."

The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing "hidden mines" in his future mods.

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In an interview with IGN, 'PureDark' has now commented on his mod being cracked, and has said that future "hidden" mines will cause future mods to sometimes work, fail, crash, and whatnot.

"It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it's done its job", the modder told IGN. "So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people. They might be able to find and bypass some of them, but they will never know if they have found all of them. The cracked mods will sometimes work, sometimes fail, sometimes work but [be] very wonky, sometimes even crash and they won't even know if it's a bug or just them using the cracked version, and they will never have the support I've been always providing to my subscribers."

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle has said it's "investigating" the possibility of adding proper online multiplayer co-op to its conspicuously vampire-free minimalist survival RPG, although there's no guarantee it'll actually happen.

That tiny nugget of information comes via a new Ask me Anything (AMA) Q&A session, held earlier today on Reddit, in which Poncle occasionally had the opportunity to answer questions that weren't variations on 'Where the bloody hell are the vampires anyway, please?'.

One such question inquired if there were any multiplayer plans for Vampire Survivors beyond the four-player couch co-op mode introduced alongside the Switch release last month, to which Poncle replied in the affirmative.

After six years of running Blue Origin, Bob Smith announced in a company-wide email on Monday that he will be "stepping aside" as chief executive of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos.

"It has been my privilege to be part of this great team, and I am confident that Blue Origin's greatest achievements are still ahead of us," Smith wrote in an email. "We've rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a large, prominent space business."

Shortly after Smith's email, a Blue Origin spokesperson said the company's new chief executive will be Dave Limp, who stepped down as Amazon's vice president of devices and services last month.

"Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset," the spokesperson said. "He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations, including leading Amazon’s Kuiper, Kindle, Alexa, Zoox, Fire TV, and many other businesses."

Limp will join Blue Origin in December and become chief executive of the company at that time.

“This is textbook compelled speech,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright ruled in halting enforcement of the law. Texas is appealing.

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OP NOTE: This is actually a week old, today 3 judge panel allowed the ban to go into effect. Here's the author's mastodon post about it. though there are few other details

BREAKING: A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit (Elrod, Haynes, Douglas) allows Texas’s book-ban law to go into effect, issuing an administrative stay of the district court ruling enjoining enforcement of the law.
The court gave no reasoning for its order, which is remarkable given that the law has never been allowed to go into effect, so the order — although posed as merely “administrative” — is a ruling, at least temporarily, changing the status of state law.

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On Monday, a federal judge ruled in favor of booksellers who argued that Texas’s new law banning some books from public school libraries and restricting others through an onerous and complicated regime is likely unconstitutional in an opinion that blasted the law and the arguments the state made in its defense.

“[T]his Court has found that READER likely violates the First Amendment by containing an unconstitutional prior restraint, compelled speech, and unconstitutional vagueness,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright — a Trump appointee to the federal bench — concluded in issuing a preliminary injunction halting state officials from enforcing the law. Texas already announced that it is appealing the decision.

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“To put the scale of the number of books that would need to be rated in perspective, a librarian in San Antonio for Northside ISD testified that six school districts alone had library collections totaling over six million items,“ Albright wrote. There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Albright cannot believe this law exists. He also cannot believe the arguments the state made in its defense.

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said Monday she thinks former first lady Michelle Obama will be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, adding that President Biden is “out.” …

A federal appeals court on Monday sided with the Biden administration against the state of Utah in a lawsuit over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “good neighbor” rule, which regulates the flow of air pollution across state lines.

In a single-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to stay the EPA rule, writing that the plaintiffs “have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review.” The ruling states that one of the three judges, Judge Justin Walker, would have granted a stay.

The good neighbor rule regulates the air pollution that 24 upwind states may produce. The state of Utah in June sued over the rule, arguing its regulations of Utah’s pollution would harm the state’s economy and cost millions of dollars in upgrades to its coal plants.

The DC Circuit in March dismissed a utility-backed lawsuit against the rule, but in May, another court, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a request for a stay by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R). Another court, the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, stayed the EPA’s rejection of Texas and Louisiana’s plans. In response, the agency postponed implementation in those three states as well as Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.

A Times analysis shows that increasingly complex oil and gas wells now require astonishing volumes of water to fracture the bedrock and release fossil fuels, threatening America’s fragile aquifers.

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Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it.

The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock.

It was a reminder that to strike oil in America, you need water. Plenty of it.

Today, the insatiable search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to the country’s endangered aquifers, a critical national resource that is already being drained at alarming rates by industrial farming and cities in search of drinking water.

The amount of water consumed by the oil industry, revealed in a New York Times investigation, has soared to record levels. Fracking wells have increased their water usage sevenfold since 2011 as operators have adopted new techniques to first drill downward and then horizontally for thousands of feet. The process extracts more fossil fuels but requires enormous amounts of water.

Together, oil and gas operators reported using about 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011, much of it from aquifers, the Times found. Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more.

These mega fracking projects, called “monster fracks” by researchers, have become the industry norm. They barely existed a decade ago. Now they account for almost two out of every three fracking wells in Texas, the Times analysis found.

Since 2015, Be My Eyes has worked to connect our 6.9 million volunteers to users to assist them with everyday tasks. Our mission is to make the world more accessible for people who are blind or have low vision, which is why, seven months ago, our team began working with the blind community to incorporate AI into the existing Be My Eyes platform. Since then, over 19,000 blind and low-vision beta testers contributed to the design and function of our new AI feature.

Today we are thrilled to announce that Be My AI is officially entering an open beta phase for iOS users and in coming weeks will be available for hundreds of thousands of Be My Eyes users worldwide.

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Using Be My AI in your everyday life is quick and simple. Once you have access, open the Be My Eyes app, click on the ‘Be My AI’ tab, and take a picture. Be My AI will give you a detailed description about it, and you can chat and ask Be My AI further questions to get more information. If you like what Be My AI described, you can send its response and photo to others, or use its description in social media.

And don’t worry - if Be My AI can’t answer all your questions, if you want to check its results, or if you just need a little more description than Be My AI can provide or crave the magic and humanity of working with people, you still can easily reach one of our dedicated volunteers, just like before. They will always be there, in 150 languages all across the globe.

If you want to learn more about Be My AI and how to use it at its best, we have collected the most common questions (and answers!) in our Help Center. Make sure to check them out!

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A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.

The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour.

404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.

The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, combined with a cultural belief that anything public is fair game to exploit for clout, now means that all it takes is one random person on the internet to target you and lead a crowd in your direction.

One target told me he felt violated after the TikTok account using facial recognition tech targeted him. Another said they initially felt flattered before “that promptly gave way to worry.” All of the victims I spoke to echoed one general point—this behavior showed them just how exposed we all potentially are simply by existing in public.

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The A. hitleri beetle has been collected to near-extinction by neo-Nazis, sparking a fierce debate among taxonomists over whether to change offensive species names.

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In 1933, amateur entomologist Oskar Scheibel added an unusual insect to his collection. The specimen turned out to be a previously unknown and rare blind cave beetle from Slovenia. The Austrian engineer named it Anophthalmus hitleri. The first word derived from the Greek for “without eyes,” the second from the leader of Nazi Germany at the time, Adolf Hitler.

Over the ensuing decades, many in the taxonomy community objected to using nomenclature linked to the man largely responsible for the Holocaust. Now that name could be changed – but not for the reason you might think.

Some scientists are proposing the change to protect the beetle. They point out that the tiny blind bug has been driven to near extinction by neo-Nazis unlawfully collecting it because of its infamous scientific title.

“It’s an innocent insect,” a Canadian anthropologist wrote last year in the Economist. “Why not end this illegal trade by changing its name?”

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The practice of using objectionable identifications for fauna and flora has been argued over for years by taxonomists – those responsible for naming new species. Some are asking why these identifications are still in use. Others are defending the nomenclature process, saying that making retroactive changes based on personal sentiment would upset the stability of science communication.

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Two years ago, the metaverse was billed as the next big thing - but many in the tech world have already moved on.

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But almost two years on, Zuckerberg has been forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.

"A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse," he told investors in April. "So I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate."

On Wednesday the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.

It's a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.

How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.

Reality Labs - which as the name suggests is Meta's virtual and augmented reality branch - has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.

Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn't expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.

Horizon Worlds, a game published by Meta, is about as close as the company has got to creating a metaverse.

Users can hop into different settings - cafes, comedy clubs, night clubs, basketball courts - to hang out and play games.

Meta claims it has 300,000 monthly users: tiny when compared to the billions of people on Facebook and Instagram.

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