My understanding from something I read months ago - its a new interpretation. Specifically the law instructs the gov to make as many pennies as is necessary, but does not define what that is or how to calculate it. If the government deems necessary = 0, then you dont need to make any more.
Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and production may restart at any moment.
Per Wiki's own article, there are many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#/media/File:Inte...) that disagree with the genocide distinction. Those countries are not just the US - they are large and small nations from all parts of the world. Is that not the definition of highly contested?
The point of the editors is that it is long standing precedent on Wikipedia that the statements of politicians have little factual relevance except for the statement itself, so they are normally not taken into account.
It's a weird article for me. On one side it is an interesting topic. On the other hand why are we explaining what a hex number is? Who is interested in this level of detail but doesn't know hex? Maybe I'm overanalyzing.
At the same time this doesn't address my biggest open question on the topic - how do we get from the physical push to the reset vector? Somehow that magic works in HW, physics and electronics - how?
HN is not just read by IT professionals. And they might be a bit curious about Linux startup without necessarily recalling what they know or never knew about hexadecimals.
It's fine to explain things to people that are not into that topic. But I also wonder what the target audience is. On one hand, he explains what a hexadecimal ist, but then jumps over essential information needed to understand the boot process. It's like: "Learning to swim: This is water, it is wet, if you jump in you sink and in water you cannot breath. Then you start moving your body parts and then you swim."
I kind of presumed that 'sex warfare' (aka seduction) was a standard aspect of espionage (even though no one openly acknowledges it), so this seems like nothing new
And the popular image of jewel thieves is that they universally drop down from the ceiling, instead of entering from a cherrypicker truck through a smashed window.
80% of gub'mnt stuff is in FedRAMP so you hit the IT nerds and have them talk to you all day about how they herd some sort of VM/container solution, and then drop a USB into their laptop while sleeping.
the actual Feds gets training about this but the contractors are made of swiss cheese and have tons of holes.
get on tinder near any military base and the number of attractive women of indeterminate russian/central asian/east asian extraction are far higher than you'd think for places like Yuma or Everett or Oklahoma
Chess is an abstract proxy for a wargame, but is not in itself a wargame.
'Abstract' is somewhere on the chess side of the spectrum between Go and moving miniature battle tanks around and flipping to page 237 of Appendix E to look up how much water the average Italian soldier needed to boil his pasta in the Tobruk campaign.
As an aside, I have a slightly masochistic desire to implement an online-playable version of Campaign for North Africa. It bothers me that they can credibly claim there is no documented case of someone finishing the game.
To me, when I think “abstract”, I think “no theme”. Games that aren’t abstract have a theme that helps make sense of the rules of the game.
There are also games with themes that don’t really help make sense of the rules — the theme is just pasted on. These are still considered abstract, despite technically having a theme.
The “ameritrash” genre are known for having strong themes that tie to the rules of the game. E.g. a lot of co-op games with plastic figures.
Old school euro games often have a pasted on theme, and are more abstract.
If you have to read things, roll things, or hide things, it's not an abstract.
(This fails to include backgammon and Parcheesi when maybe it should, and includes Zark City when somehow I feel it shouldn't, but it's not a bad starting point.)
Additionally: No dexterity (which is kind of a special case of "no chance").
The most important subjective criterion, IMO, and the one from which all other objective criteria are just approximations, is that the game be as rules simple and as strategically deep as possible. If there are any superficial criteria, it's that the theming be "austere" (which is what makes Zark City stand out slightly).
is there a game that is an abstract version of D&D?
i've always been curious about the gameplay, but have absolutely no interest in reading past words like "wizard", "mage", or "eldritch", and i won't look at anything where i have to see or imagine that somebody is wearing a cape, or even play with gamers who are willing to imagine they are wearing capes in other games.
Why do you have such an aversion to capes? There's no rule saying you have to play as a character in a cape.
If you're asking if there's a version of D&D that's pure math and no roleplay, the closest thing I can imagine would be Dragon Dice, or something with the mechanics of a very basic roguelike. The math in D&D itself such as in combat is affected by your character's stats and the encounters created by the DM, so the mechanics and the role playing are kind of tied together.
The thing is that dragons and magic and Harry Potter all become irrelevant at some point in life. Power fantasies do have an expiration date.
Now, the genre itself, all the storytelling involved, can easily be adapted to more serious, or even abstract, thinking.
In fact, it was, and there are plenty of alternative rpg universes. But, similar to how serious non-marvel movies are a niche, serious rpgs are also less popular.
I understand where you are coming from, but I hope you realize this is very subjective. The things you mentioned and other elements of the fantasy genre do not become irrelevant for many people through their life, well into adult life as well. In fact, they may become irrelevant and become relevant again.
Just to make it clear (and perhaps to state the obvious), you are not believing in these when you play these games or read these books, you are voluntarily suspending disbelief.
They're all games. They're all escapist power fantasies. No one wants to role play a character who doesn't matter to the story, regardless of the genre.
I am also past the age of wanting to believe in magic. And also past the age of having time for long plays. Most of my friends are busy doing serious adult stuff.
So outside of baroque dnd-like systems, my personal favourite right now is a subgenre called journalling solo RPG, which are often minimalist, but covering all kinds of themes and topics.
I mean, the most important part of a role-playing game like D&D is... the role-playing. You're basically telling a shared story, with each player controlling one character, and the DM controlling everyone else. The fighting mechanics are sort of a mini-game inside the larger game.
If that's all you want, there are loads of combat games with miniatures. I've never played Warhammer, but that's obviously the biggest one; I've enjoyed the Star Wars X-wing combat game as well.
Despite Elon's perpetual over promises, starship is the closest thing humanity has to getting to Mars, and it is an impressive feat of engineering. Elon can be an asshole and also own the best piece of space hardware out there
There is also a big difference between cant get orbital and won't (yet) get orbital. They pretty clearly can get orbital because their current route gets 99% of the way they. They actively choose not to because it's a test vehicle and if something goes wrong they don't want to have uncontrolled reentry.
Also the hydrocarbons you mention are not even a rounding error in any sort of count that matters, so there is no real destruction of ecosystems
I think greekrich92 when talking about "destroying the South TX ecosystem" meant their huge rocket production and launch site right next to some protected ecologically valuable areas in south Texas. The extent of the damage is debatable, they are of course legally required to minimize impacts, and even to do things like monitoring the state of the wildlife in the area, and they passed environmental reviews under both Biden's and Trump's administrations. Anyway, if anyone would want to build a new launch site, it must be on the coast, as near the equator as possible (for launch efficiency because of Earth's rotation), and as far from populated areas as possible, and that correlates with ecologically valuable regions. So that's the cost of progress.
Pretty much everybody know that launch site and exclusion zones for human are great for wildlife. Turns out, what is destroying the environment is humans living in places, large areas with few humans usually do pretty well.
But instead of focusing on that, we need to test if dolphins get hearing damage from rockets.
> So that's the cost of progress
Its actually the benefit of progress. The cost of progress is having to close the beach and having to relocate a small village.
It's obvious that before SpaceX moved in, 6 permanent residents of that little village weren't damaging that environment more than today's thousands of people working on a huge industrial site built in place of that village (and now 500 people are actually living in Starbase). SpaceX activity in that area obviously has some environmental costs, like every other industrial activity or any human settlement. The cost of human progress.
Was the falcon 9 that much faster? They also had issues with the initial launches of falcon 1 and 9. Plus they did not start with reusable rockets like they are here - it took years and many landing failures to get there. And of course the scale is a totally separate ballpark - falcon was in a scale that was well known, starship is in a scale rarely worked with.
Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship would be the N1, and that never successfully flew
By the third flight they were delivering to the ISS
Starship .. it's a bit unclear when they started designing it b/c they kept changing the design. But It's been in design for ~10 years.
> As of August 26, 2025, Starship has launched 10 times, with 5 successful flights and 5 failures.
10 launches.. and not even in orbit. Not to speak of ISS. I'm sure they'll make it work eventually, but I would expect with experience the design time would decrease, not increase. Starting from zero, making the first rocket engine has got to be much much harder than making an improved iteration (even if more complex)
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