5·
10 months agoThey’ve been making that push for a while now with all the chatbot integration. Good thing LibreWolf and IronFox are here
SmokeyDope
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Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: November 15th, 2025
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16·10 months ago“Dyson Spheres? Look, playing with sunlight and mirrors was a fun side project, but you want to know a much more advanced method of generating power?”
“Please dont…”
“Thats right! By hurling entire water worlds into a star, we then capture the released steam which powers our gravitationally locked dynamo network.”
8·10 months agoThe only reason the first one was any good was because they copied the homework of Unreal. All world building after the first has been shit and people only watched the first because of 3d which was a massive flex at the time.
Tap for spoiler
ontributed by Rúben Alvim (1) on 18.07.2004.
One of director James Cameron’s pet projects after Titanic was an epic sci-fi extravaganza called Avatar, much hyped in Hollywood circles at the time and poised to redefine the notion of a truly alien world on the big screen.
The project fell apart some years ago, but the scriptment (a hybrid between a script and a treatment ) by James Cameron still exists. Interestingly, you can find quite a few similarities between it and Unreal:
Both feature a basic plot premise where, by virtue of circumstances mostly beyond his control, a reluctant hero becomes the saviour of the native race of an alien planet forced to mine their land for ore of utmost importance to an invading race coming from the skies. In both cases the saviour is seen by the natives as someone who also came from the skies and is thus initially met with some alarm or distrust only to be later hailed as a pseudo-messiah.
The native race is called “Na’vi” in Avatar and “Nali” in Unreal. The physical description of the Na’vi by Cameron can be visualised as basically a cross between the Nalis’ tall, lean, slender bodies and the IceSkaarjs’ blueish skin colour patterns, facial features, ponytail-like dreadlocks and caudal appendages.
The Nali in Unreal worship goddess Vandora. The home planet of the Na’vi in Avatar (which the Na’vi worship as a goddess entity) is named Pandora.
In Avatar, one of the most dazzling alien settings described is a huge set of sky mountains, “like floating islands among the clouds”. One of the most memorable vistas in Unreal is Na Pali, thousands of miles up in the cloudy sky amidst a host of floating mountains. The main sky mountain range in Avatar is called “Hallelujah Mountains”. The main Unreal level set in Na Pali is called “Na Pali Haven”. Both include beautiful visual references to waterfalls streaming down the cliffs and dissolving into the clouds below.
The Earth ship in Avatar is called “ISV-Prometheus”. One of the levels in Unreal takes place in the wreck of a Terran ship called “ISV-Kran”. Even more striking, in the expansion pack Return to Na Pali, the crashed ship the player is asked to salvage is called “Prometheus”.
One of the deadly examples of local fauna in Unreal is the Manta, essentially a flying manta-ray. In Avatar, one of the most lethal aerial creatures is the Bansheeray, basically a flying manta-ray. The expansion Return to Na Pali even features a Giant Manta, while in Avatar one of the most formidable predators is a giant Bansheeray, which Cameron dubbed “Great Leonopteryx”.
In the two stories (especially Return to Na Pali, on Unreal’s end), a plot point arises from the fact the precious ore behind the invasion of the planet (“tarydium” in Unreal, “unobtanium” in Avatar) causes problems in the scanners.
Unreal was in development for several years before its release in 1998. The Avatar scriptment was probably finished as early as 1996-97. Bearing all the above in mind the temptation to start wondering about further suspicious parallels may be quite strong, but in spite of these similarities both titles have few else in common and many aspects actually veer off in wildly different directions. Even so, the coinciding factors can make for an interesting minutia comparison.
The electrical fire thing is mostly because there are people in this world who will absolutely try running two 1500w space heaters on a single multiplug extension. Its not the quantity of the plugs its how much power is flowing through them as well as what quality of cabling is used. From the image it looks like a couple phone chargers which isnt the worst thing in the world.
19·11 months agoOkay but what the fuck is up with the first un-highlighted part?
1·11 months agoHi there Blaze! I hope all your non-human extended family are doing well. Im a cat hoarder, and the kids have two hermit crabs. All my cats except for one are old seniors so they have some minor health stuff. I could go into all the little details but I think it suffices to say that they’re all still here with me, I love them all (even the stupid crabs) im very grateful for that.
7·11 months agoHi, hope you don’t mind me giving my two cents.
Local models are at their m9st useful in daily life when they scrape data from a reliable factual database or from the internet and then present/discuss that data to you through natural language conversation.
Think about searching for things on the internet now a days. Every search provider stuffs ads in top results and intentionally ofsucates the links your looking for especially if its a no-no term like pirating torrent sites.
Local llms can act as an advanced generalized RSS reader that automatically fetches articles and sources, send STEM based queries to wolfram alpha llm api and retrieve answers, fetch the weather directly from openweatherAPI, retrieve definitions and meanings from local dictionary, retrieve Wikipedia article pages from a local kiwix server, search ArXiv directly for prior searching. One of Claude’s big selling points is the research mode toolcall that scrapes hundreds of sites to collect up to date data on the thing your researching and presenting its finins in a neat structured way with cited sources. It does in minutes what would traditionally take a human hours or days of manual googling.
There are genuine uses for llms if your a nerdy computer homelab type of person familiar databases, data handling and can code up/integrate some basic api pipelines. The main challenge is selling these kinds of functions in an easy to understand and use way for the tech illiterate who already think bad of llms and similar due to generative slop. A positive future for llms integrated into Firefox would be something trained to fetch from your favorite sources and sift out the crap based on your preferences/keywords. More sites would have APIs for direct scraping and the key adding process would be one click button
Inferior rehash version of the OG
Thats the judaochristian concept of God with all the “all knowing all controlling Lord Father King that will punish you forever if you infringe their arbitrary rules”
Its a shame that western teenagers and disillusioned adults tend to rather reach for satanism as an edgey reactionary “dont actually believe it but want to visibly show I’m against the church” instead of breaking open eastern philosophy books and learning about concepts from things like Daoism or bhuddism. Not all concepts of the Divine are so super controlling arbiters of morality like what our popular religions over here try to sell us on.
I’m only a hobbyist no skin in the game but as an engineer first programmer second I feel like how you design the architecture of your logic and how you choose to prioritize computational optimization or feature implementation have a much bigger impact than language. Obviously theres a time and place like using luajit instead of lua if you really need that speed boost, but in big complex programs I’m willing to bet lazy programmers skip optimization steps and copy paste thousands of lines to ship quickly regardless how performance optimized the underlying language is.
I make a module that does a specific thing for version 1, after initial bug patches and maybe a feature addition theres usually an epithany that the logic can be generalized into an api type registry structure that allows the code to be reused and configured as needed on per item basis. Along the way you do stuff like ask what the not expensive calls are, add accumulator timers to reduce unneeded CPU usage , ensure early returns are up top when it makes sense, choosing to render a cleverly crafted sprite instead of a full 3d entity.
A conditional if then logic loop Is a logic loop no matter what Turing complete language its written in. What really matters is how you use the loop not which syntax its written in.