Well that's a double edged sword. There's so much fluctuation in part because it's such a ubiquitous commodity, availability is high and margins are low.

If branding mattered more (like with groceries) then prices would be more stable (but higher).

But as it is, nobody cares that much what brand of gas they get, it's just gas. A name brand can't demand a higher price just because it's a name brand, nobody cares.

Society would collectively say get your shit together on pricing! And we'd never buy bread again.

I mean, prices at the pump aren't fluctuating that much, but I do get your meaning. That said, in general people don't really have much of a choice when it comes to food, we have to eat. I mean, do you remember how eggs surged in price during the pandemic years? People still bought them, it just sucked. Oh we complained about it alright! But we as a society didn't do anything

After defeat and capture was certain. I'd argue that it was certainly not Hitler who defeated Hitler.

I'm not sure this is a great policy. You can tell the difference between using ai for debugging and a whole game made of ai slop. Nobody in that second category will be just sneaking by unnoticed.

But using ai in the final stretch to squash some bugs, that's pretty hard to notice from the outside. If you outlaw the use of ai entirely, what do you get? People still use it for the little things, but don't admit to it. Is that better?

As a scam, it would be the worst scam in history; you're supposed to run away with the money, not actually spend it making a game.

I think you nailed it right there. That's the thing.

They are making a game. And as long as people keep supporting that effort, they're gonna keep doing it. I think that's pretty straight forward!

I really don't see it as a scam. I think I paid $30 for the game and they're continuing to develop it. I've played it a bit and while it definitely feels unfinished, I'd say they're certainly onto something, it has serious potential to turn into something cool.

such as procedural world-building

So no longer “it takes time to build planets”? Just slap on some algorithmic generation and call it a day?

So one thing to mention here, these planets exist at a nearly realistic scale, most a have about a 2000 km diameter, which puts their surface area around 12,600,000 square km. You can't sculpt every inch of that by hand and make it look good, you just can't. At some point you need to leverage procedural methods to fill in the space between crafted areas.

That certainly appears to be the situation. So by "virtual floppy", they mean that this device adds a USB port and that drives inserted into that port are interpreted by the machine as floppies.

Heh, it's just funny to me that you would call the idea of orbital datacenters nonsensical compared to lunar datacenters. I mean, like I laid out earlier, orbital datacenters may well be a bad idea, but at the moment (in 2026) lunar datacenters are technically and logistically impossible and economically ludicrous. The launch costs alone make the project a non-starter.

And all for what? What are the advantages of putting this hardware on the moon? Possibly using lunar regolith as a heat sink? We don't need heat sinks, radiators work fine. Possibly avoiding ionizing radiation by building underground? That's just so much more work... Shipping in excavating equipment... Just no.

And there really isn't all that much ionizing radiation in low earth orbit, you still have the earth's magnetic field protecting you and the earth itself blocking all particles from one side. You get exposed to a little bit more than you do on the surface because you don't have the atmosphere's protection as well. But if nothing else, the existence of telacom satellite constellations proves that we've figured out how to overcome those obstacles, and many of those satellites aren't even in LEO some are all the way out in geostationary orbit without any of those protections, and they're still working fine. The ionizing radiation just isn't a big deal.

Again, I'm not saying orbital datacenters are a good idea, but I am saying it's doable today, right now, at a relatively affordable price. If to be realistic a lunar datacenter requires the kind of moon colony that won't exist for another 50-100 years at the very soonest, that seems like a worse plan.

Ugh...

The back panel is a screen... Talk about not getting the point. What a stupid design.

Honestly, hardware on Kickstarter has a bad track record. Manufacturing is hard, people always run into unexpected setbacks, every time. And you really can't blame people for this, they always have the best of intentions, but it turns out they didn't know the right people, or the factory they contracted with put them on the back burner, or a crucial material is suddenly unavailable, etc...

But it also means you didn't get your hardware when you expected it.

Well, you do need to consider things in context, right?

Captain_solanum is right about how math works. The thing to consider is the safety of these delivery bots relative to the alternatives. How often do delivery drivers get into/cause accidents? It's not never, but without the actual numbers we can't really say if these bots are more problematic.

It's difficult to compare these two delivery methods because they're inherently quite different, but ultimately that is what we have to do if we want to figure out which is actually more of a danger.

But accountability is really important here. If companies want to keep using tech this way, they need to be accountable for the actions of their technology. Because these devices exist in a physical world with real consequences. You cannot be allowed to get off the hook by saying "oops, just a glitch, it won't happen again".

Also, you called him an idiot, but you may have also missed his point. We could just not outright insult each other.

Look, parents are cautious about who they let interact with their kids. The truth is, you wouldn't leave your kid to hang out with a rando. And an LLM isn't even a rando. It doesn't have the reasoning, the common sense or the decency of any random human being. You should not let your kid just talk to an LLM, no matter how well designed it is, no matter what safeguards are in place. That LLM is not a person you trust, it has no accountability.

That toy probably shouldn't be on the market, but the parent definitely should not have bought it, that was the most significant example of poor judgment here.

Well it's a drop in solution. You could remove the floppy reader from a computer, slap this in, and as far as the old computer is concerned, whenever you insert a flash drive in the front, it sees a really big floppy disk.

This is nice because usb is more compact, widely compatible and flash media is more stable, floppy disks can become corrupted pretty quickly.