• 139 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Iran's Parliament Votes to Close Strait of Hormuz After US AttacksEnglish
    42·
    15 hours ago

    US naval vessels themselves will become targets

    They already have been the target of missiles launched by the Houthis provided by Iran. Thus far, missile defenses have stopped them.

    I suppose that Iran probably has some ability to ramp up how many anti-ship missiles they’re throwing, but the US also has the ability to drastically ramp up the number of bombs being dropped on Iran; I doubt that climbing the escalation ladder is going to be advantageous to Iran.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•People With Severe Diabetes Are Cured in Small Trial of New DrugEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    The problem with this is that there’s currently no way to target immune-suppressing drugs to say: “Hey, just stop attacking your own cells, but continue doing everything else an immune system is supposed to do

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergen_immunotherapy

    Allergen immunotherapy, also known as desensitization or hypo-sensitization, is a medical treatment for environmental allergies (such as insect bites) and asthma.[1][2] Immunotherapy involves exposing people to larger and larger amounts of allergens in an attempt to change the immune system’s response.[1]

    We do have some limited ability to “train” at least some aspects of the immune system not to attack certain things. I’ve no idea whether that approach can be used for something like this.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your favorite games that you never see mentioned anywhere?English
    3·
    3 days ago

    Escape Velocity also had a sequel or two done by Ambrosia Software themselves. I remember playing and enjoying them.

    kagis

    Escape Velocity Override and Escape Velocity Nova.

    It looks like Ambrosia Software’s website is now down, so I assume that one can’t legally purchase it any more.

    It looks like Escape Velocity was never ported to anything outside of classic MacOS, so playing it today probably entails obtaining a classic MacOS emulator and abandonware copies of the binaries.

    While Endless Sky is neat and last I looked still getting expanded, it also didn’t have as much story content as the Escape Velocity series either (again, at least last I looked).

    The image of each planet in Escape Velocity series (not really worth keeping IMHO, as they were saved at 8-bit depth) were done with KPT Bryce, a now out-of-print terrain generation and rendering software package. Probably one of the better-suited applications for it, as it was pretty good at letting one quickly turn out alien-looking landscapes. While there are newer terrain generation software packages, I have to say that Bryce did a lot of neat stuff and I don’t feel that there’s something that quite fills its “exploration” role in modeling and rendering software today. For example, procedural generation of textures using slope and altitude (so, for example, you could get rocky faces where generated terain was steep, or snow at high altitude on mountains).

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your favorite games that you never see mentioned anywhere?English
    6·
    3 days ago

    I definitely enjoyed the original Syndicate. While I like the aesthetic and the music, it isn’t an incredibly deep game, but I did like the thing. I could go for playing the thing in HD, 24-bit color, maybe upscaled graphics, and at a high framerate.

    IIRC, Syndicate Wars didn’t review as well. I can’t recall whether I ever got around to trying it.

    For anyone who hasn’t tried Syndicate, the game is a cyberpunk, squad-based isometric-view pixel-art game where one has to perform various missions to gain control of territory; might be assassinating someone, capturing someone, clearing enemies from an area, etc. Doesn’t have destructable terrain, though vehicles are destructable. Late game missions tend to have so many very-durable bionically-enhanced enemy agents charging at one’s squad that one has to keep the squad pretty much bunched up and using either rocket launchers or miniguns just spewing out a ton of firepower in their direction.

    In its time, Syndicate was pretty well-known, though I dunno how many people born later would be familiar with it today.