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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • For what it’s worth, Vantablack isn’t a pigment, it’s a process for applying carbon nanotubes that absorb light. They don’t sell the “paint” part by itself because it requires special equipment and it finicky. They don’t sell it because then a bunch of social media influencers would try to spray their bathrooms with the stuff and make a bunch of videos about how it doesn’t live up to the hype.

    The owner might be a douche who uses the licensing to make himself feel powerful, but there is a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.





  • No, I’m sorry, the answe is “profit.” The US has a lot of natural gas, and the people who force it out of the ground bought enough politicians to build pipelines everywherr so we could sell gas to more people. Electric and heat pumps are far more efficient, but the cost per btu of heat is so cheap for natural gas that it doesn’t make sense to switch to electric even when the energy costs are low, and the cost to install a heatpump or geothermal might reduce monthly costs, but it would be decades before it pays for itself. Most people don’t expect to live in a house long enough to reap the benefits of more efficient investments.


  • “Effective” is a relative term. Going meatless won’t fix the underlying problems that allowed factory farming to destroy the world. Why aren’t electric cars mandated? Why do we pipe natural gas into homes? The same shortsighted, profit-motivated decision processes will still exist even if we make better personal choices.











  • Three things have changed.

    First, GameFaqs put all of it online for free. Why would you buy a book? It’s now a relic of the old web, but it’s still there, filled with cheat codes and guides for all your games. Strategies evolve as players learn new things, so forums have replaced prescriptive guidebooks to accommodate new ideas.

    Second, game development has changed. Cheat codes were originally tools for developers to function test. To test a particular level or feature, devs would have to play the actual game. Modern games are not as linear, and modern developers can throw together a test environment on the fly. Game components are more like isolated microservices, so modifying the game to test features does not need to be baked into the code.

    The third thing is that everything has an online multiplayer now. Cheats are fun when it’s just you against the machine, but online competitive play is ruined when your opponent has infinite health. Online cheaters still exist, ruining multiplayer for entire communities, but their aimbots and shit cannot be officially sanctioned or promoted in a guidebook.