It just goes to show you, there's none more gullible than the paranoid.

IMHO, the most interesting thing they did was with the palette. They were obsessed with getting not just images snapped by the satellite as the sky, but having them actually look good, and even a "smart" mapping algorithm to the in-game palette wasn't good enough for them. So they wrote an algo to simultaneously choose a palette for both the colours in the satellite image and the colours in the game's graphical assets so it would pick colours best for both of them, and then remapped both the satellite image and the game's assets to this new palette. Also, normally satellite images are denoised on the ground, but a partner had gotten a machine learning denoising algo running on the satellite.

One thing they weren't able to deal with was that the game tiles the sky background, which is fine because it's a tileable image, but obviously random pictures of Earth aren't (except the nighttime images, which are all black!). If they had had more time, I imagine they would have set up something like heal selection to merge the edges, but one of the problems was that in order to take images of Earth, the satellite had to be oriented in a way that increased its drag and accelerated its deentry... so ironically, playing DOOM was accelerating the satellite's doom.

Here's a presentation from Ólafur.

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

And that attitude is why you are going to lose.

They cant get their own designs manufactured on EUV machines built by a Dutch company, due to export restrictions placed on those machines by the US...

Which just means that China will develop its own independent capability.

And yes, that might take 10-20 years, but to China thats not a long time, thats just the time it takes - while other countries think about timescales in 5-10 year spurts, China has plans set out 50 years ahead. And China accepts that things take time.

So it really depends on what you mean by "fast".

Ahh no, services and software are not included in the trade deficit calculations for some reason...

So the fact that the world uses American cloud services, financial services and other things - yeah, not important, and you should definitely ignore the fact that those things alone flip deficits on their heads for most countries.

The US: "You arent buying enough from us! You need to buy more from us!"

Also the US: "You cant buy basically anything that you actually need, we forbid it - buy more cheap bulk goods that you can get from anywhere rather than the technology goods you actually want perhaps?"

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

It *is* the equivalent of a visa because it dictates whether or not you can travel to the US. If you cannot travel to the US, you cannot use your visa waiver privilege.

They can call it whatever they want, and you can fixate on the name if you want to bury your head in the sand.

There is literally no way to travel to the US currently without either an ESTA or a visa. At this point, visa waiver doesnt matter because its been nullified by the ESTA requirement.

"Hey, you no longer need prior permission to travel to the US, how cool is that!!! Oh, but you need to ask permission to travel to the US before you can use that privilege..."

Sorry but I disagree - an ESTA dictates whether you can travel at all, it does not fill the same role as an arrivals card because you are already in transit at that point, and arrivals cards also cover things like bio security, customs requirements etc.

With the expansion of ESTA to entry by land in 2022, you literally cannot present at any US entry point without having been approved first by the US government - if you do not have that permission, you cant use your visa waiver privilege at all, and the point of that privilege was that you did not need prior permission!

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late