Hi, I’m Cleo! (he/they) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)

  • 16 Posts
  • 446 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.

    Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.

    That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.

    I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.

    I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.

    And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.

    All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.





  • What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.

    Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.

    Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price…

    Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.


  • I think it’s more likely that Sonic is just a very large children’s franchise and the dude is fine acting in them for that reason. I think what I’ve gotten from his stance on “retirement” is just that he’s tired of doing it for the money and experiencing the awfulness of Hollywood in general. But if it were me, yeah I’d come back for a beloved children’s franchise.




  • I don’t necessarily view the limiting factor as being the ultimate nutrient density per unit UV light.

    Some compounding factors if you’d like to think about this more: UV light is not a monolith and so if you’re using artificial light you may be able to select for plants that still have high calorie yields but can accept a lower wavelength of UV that would lower power costs.

    The same goes for water costs and just the general suitability for these vertical towers as well as what fertilizers work best for them.

    The amount of optimization is one of the reasons I’m not hopeful for this type of project. There’s a ton of variables, you’re essentially making an entirely new form of farming and it’s a harder version of it. Meaning that it won’t experience the explosion of industry around it probably.







  • They’re great thoughts though I’d like to point out that most human made structures do no make use of the sun and so their complaint about having solar panels take up the same space is somewhat dubious.

    The other comment I’d make is that they chose to highlight an experiment utilizing wheat. Mostly because we use a lot of it. However, humans could modify their diets to consume less wheat if we wanted to. There is nothing mandatory about consuming wheat and so we could focus on plants that need less light to grow.

    I’d also like to note that the vertical farming stuff has very little innovation going on in the space because there is no demand for it at all currently. If there were demand, you may see alternative technologies taken up.

    Alternative technologies like using mirrors to harvest the UV light and transport it without electrical costs and losses in reproducing it. Or mutating the plants in some ways. Or making better use of UV light by only targeting the leaves or such. Plenty could be done to innovate.

    That all being said, I think vertical farming has absolutely no future. Mostly because the alternatives are so good. We could redo an entire farming setup. Or we could cut down on food waste. And cut down on meat consumption. And invest in lab grown meats. Lab grown meats that have a large potential to turn food waste into usable food. All of those are far better tech and this is a dead end concept I’m afraid.



  • Another “fun” fact about that nerve is that many abdominal surgeries will move it around and the healing can make it sensitive. Had that happen to me and when I would move, it would send a very slight shooting pain through my groin and would be amplified in the genitalia region to become actual pain.

    I personally found this somewhat charming and hilarious but if it hurt any worse it wouldve been my worst enemy.