Got it - thanks for the info.

X11: even regardless of whatever non-Linux takes the forker holds, forking X11 seems to be such a bad idea. The X11→Wayland migration is being painful, and now we see the light at the end of the tunnel might as well improve Wayland instead. Cue to the next piece of news (Ubuntu and Manjaro ditching X11).

I wonder if Denmark ditching Microsoft is directly related to Schleswig-Holstein doing it. Specially given they’re neighbours.

Google ditching Android: may I be honest? I think smartphones are wrong the grounds up. They should be more like miniature PCs; in this case, meaning “if you’re able to run an OS in a PC, you should be able to run it in a phone, and vice versa”. But of course hardware vendors give no fucks, right? PC-isation of smartphones means people replacing parts too, and noooo, you can’t have people not ditching their whole phone after few years!

I hope this research leads to the replacement of some oil-based polymers. And, additionally, I think we should decrease our reliance on industrial polymers, my balls already have enough microplastics; even if they come from a cleaner source, their presence in nature is problematic.

I think the main difference is that you’re probably focusing on a longer term than I am.

I do think we [humankind] need to get rid of our reliance on petrochemicals, but that process might take centuries; in the meantime, if the tech in the OP gets well developed, we might see the benefits already in our lifetimes. One thing doesn’t exclude the other, so I think we should be chasing both.

With that in mind:

All of the alternatives are not being used today because it’s more expensive. And they’re more expensive because they don’t have a century of research dedicated to make them cheaper like oil has.

Kind of.

Hydrogen from electrolysis is expensive because it relies on huge amounts of electricity; and unless the electricity itself is “clean”, we’re simply shifting the problem elsewhere (e.g. burning natural gas for electricity for hydrogen, instead of simply reacting that natural gas with water). So we actually need to wait until clean electricity becomes even cheaper to solve this.

IMO we should rely more on legumes for nitrogen fixation, but I don’t think it’ll fix (eh) the issue completely. Also note that ammonia isn’t just fertilisers, it’s also everywhere in the industry, from cleaning agents to cooling systems. (It sucks in comparison with CFC, but at least it doesn’t leave a hole in the ozone layer.)

People used to mine sulphur. It costs more, it’s hell for the workers, and deposits aren’t that common.

Ethylene is used almost everywhere in the industry. Not just for fruit ripening and polymers; pharmaceuticals, solvents, even detergent uses it. It’s one of those building blocks in organic chemistry, alongside benzene and inorg junk. Industrially it’s also used to produce ethanol; and while you can produce ethanol from biomass instead, you’ll either need to

1. Rely even more on big sugarcane farms, like the ones responsible for the initial desertification of the Brazilian Northeast. (Sugarcane fucks the environment.)
2. Produce it from maize and other grains. Supply and demand, again - it makes them even more expensive.

Also note how this interacts with the ammonia issue. Like any other plant-based solution; they’re still encouraging monoculture.

We don’t NEED oil. It’s just more convenient, it allows us not to change the status quo, to not think about different ways we should live. With oil, we can put our head in the sand and pretend we’re not careening to our own demise.

Currently we need it to keep our current life standards, and I don’t think most people are willing to give up. And while I do think we [humans] should stop pretending we’re digging our own collective grave, some things are only practical in the long run, but we still need to do things to help out in the short run.

(And by “we” I don’t even mean those parasites wasting resources so they can say “I’m an astronaut now!” or to build memecoin “mining” rigs. We’d solve a lot of the issue if we got rid of them first.)

Hydrogen from syngas (thus ammonia), sulphur (thus sulphuric acid), ethylene, benzene, and so many others, they’re used for absolutely everything: fertilisers, medication, explosives, solvents, detergent, dyes. Even a good chunk of the industrial ethanol comes from ethylene.

And as you hinted, plastics. We still need them for water tubes, computers, and everything else.

So even in a future where we stop doing stupid shit like literally burning old dino juice, and we reduce the amount of plastics to reasonable levels, we’re still going to need petrochemicals.

I’m aware some energy is recycled, and I do think we (humankind as a whole) need to phase fossil fuels out. But even then, we’ll still need petrochemicals - and I’m hoping this sort of membrane eventually makes them cheaper, when used instead or alongside fractioning columns.

Last time I heard about reverse osmosis it was about water purification, exploiting that water molecules are tiny and ions + organic molecules are bulky. I’m glad to see the tech finding its way into other processes though - specially oil refining, the current solution (fractional distillation) is basically “use lots of energy to boil it, then use even more energy to condensate it”.

They achieve this using membranes produced by interfacial polymerisation. This technique, which traditionally involves dissolving the two monomers – one in water and one in an organic solvent – to form a crosslinked polymer at the interface, is therefore highly attractive for scalable production of hydrocarbon-separation membranes.

That’s quite smart.

I’d say go for it.

As usual for Latin America, law enforcement is abysmal in Brazil, specially in matters that don’t involve violent crimes. If the amount of money is small, a police report is toilet paper; if the amount of money is big, the process might take a literal decade to go through. (That is not a bug of the system - it’s a feature against the population.)

For small amounts you’re also “encouraged” to use the pequenas causas (small litigations) system. That basically means you, a literal nobody with zero law expertise, against a team of lawyers of the corporation/mafia/business you’re suing.

So in practice the law does not benefit customers whatsoever here. At most, it’ll give corporations an easy way out, when it’s proven they’re stealing your data: “Mr. Judge, I’ll throw some money on that thing’s snout in exchange for its data. It should be enough, right?” “Okay, justice has been served. Next case.”

I’m completely opposed to that - privacy should be seen as an inalienable right, not a commodity.

Wow, the analysis is great - thanks for sharing it! For me Stickerbush Symphony always evoked some sort of loneliness or melancholy…

And yes, the whole series has great music. I agree DKC2 is the best in this regard; not just because the tracks are great on their own, but because they fit really well the mood of each level. Disco Train is on its own a rollercoaster, Mining Melancholy’s “mmhmm mmhmm” evoking winds and machinery, Bayou Boogie making the level sound m… mois… swampy. From other games of the series DKC1 Forest Frenzy and DKC3 Nuts and Bolts are also great. (Now thinking, the DKC3 soundtrack as a whole is a bit more industrial.)

Hard level with all the wasps

So all of them? …sorry, I couldn’t resist. (This reminds me world 4, Krazy Kremland. The hive levels are awesome!)

I remember being completely entranced by it and being unable to put it down (even though it was very difficult for me at the time).

That’s something I find great on so many old games: they were hard, and yet they encouraged you to keep on trying.

found it [DKC2] to difficult and didn’t really like the new protagonist as much

Playing with Dixie is easier, so perhaps both things are related.

Donkey Kong Country was my favourite childhood game series.

The first game was a blast: fun gameplay, full of secrets and things to collect, good music, gorgeous graphics even for 2025 standards, the difficulty was just right. (A bit too hard for me back then, too easy nowadays.)

I remember when DKC3 was released in '98, I’d go to the cartridge rental shop once a week to ask the guy if they had it already. (He was extremely patient with me. That guy was a bro.) Once I finally got to play it, it didn’t disappoint me at all, I loved those puzzles and it was amazing to explore the map freely. Kiddy was a bit odd, but really fun to play with, and I loved how Dixie throwing Kiddy had different mechanics than Kiddy throwing Dixie.

But by far my favourite was DKC2. Everything was perfect - they picked the formula from DKC1 and expanded it: more collectibles! Better music! Better looks! The bonuses now aren’t just “find all bonuses in the level for +1%”, now you got something to find in them! I can literally play the first level of that game with a blindfold, it’s itched in my brain. (Fuck Bramble Blast, though. I had a hard time finding one bonus and the DK coin there. And by then my English was a bit too awful to get what Cranky said.)

Then… well, DK64. It killed the series for me. I didn’t get why it wasn’t fun, but nowadays I see what happened - early 3D games had clunky controls and camera, plus the whole “gotta remake the whole thing five times to get to 100%” was meh.

If the hybrid population is fertile, it has at least as much survival fitness as the “best” of the parents. But probably more because it can couple advantageous traits from both for that environment.

So, in this case, it’s better to be pessimistic: they’ll be probably fast breeders, massive colony makers and rapid spreaders, since all those traits would help them to spread further.

So, just for show? It sounds possible but implausible IMO; I don’t think YouTube cares about that cesspool of its own comments, not even enough to set a smoke screen up.

So do I, but plenty people want MP.

However adding MP to a game is never as simple as those people claim it is. Now your game has to handle the connection, data sharing, making sure all MP players are seeing the exact same thing. And it needs to do it with good performance, because laggy MP is hell. It’ll probably need a server too, either external or one of the players - the later having performance costs. Balance is often thrown out of the window and needs adjustments, because as soon as you add another player into the game they gather resources 2x faster together.

“just add multyplaier lol how hard is that lmao” - spammed in every bloody community about every SP game ever.

Disgusting.

This would be sad and highly unethical if coming from some small, relatively new company, struggling to keep up. But since it’s coming from a large, monopolistic and 30yo old corporation it becomes way worse.

I’m glad I stopped buying their cards. My last one is an AMD, and I’m going Chinese for the next one (a decade or so from now).

Probably not because that 30% is an average of different resources.

For example. Let’s say you have two resources:

• A - 10% of the current production of A is enough for the current pops
• B - 50% of the current production of B is enough for the current pops

Both average to 30%. If you multiply the population by 3, you still have a surplus of A, but now there isn’t enough B.

Another concern is that increasing the population so much would force unsustainable approaches to resource extraction. In other words: 30 billion people living fine and dandy for a generation or two, and then their descendants living in a hellhole.