The book is very similar, but has a few more events that the film cut for brevity, and some of the humour is delivered a little differently but no less effectively. Different jokes at the same points. That sort of thing.

I finished reading the book while on public transit to the cinema to watch the film, and I can definitely say they're both great.

Go read the book if you're interested in reading it! it's a great read.

You can think of a Game Engine as a framework of common things that are needed to build most games.

Before Engines were commonplace, any company that wanted to build a game would have to do things like learning to talk to the computer's graphics systems and writing huge swathes of code to make that work. Basic stuff. And they'd have to do that for every game they built, which was massively tedious and complex.

So any established company would probably have a whole load of engine code they re-used for every project to save time and effort.
Then some bright spark got the idea to market that engine-code to other companies.
Wrap it up in a nice user-interface, provide all sorts of tools, and now you have companies using Unreal or Unity or whatever other system they like. The complex deep-code is done, and rarely needs to be touched.

Nowadays very few games companies bother to roll their own engine-code, it's way easier to buy a licence for Unreal and just build off that well-established and understood framework.

Dream Team/Boss is a much more achievable goal than Dream Company.

I like my boss, he's a decent man who respects my time and skills and understands when something is unreasonable to ask for.

I like my team, they're a great bunch, good humour, no egos. We get on well.

The company? It's an automotive finance company.
It might not be changing the world or challenging my best skills, but it pays well and that's enough.

Generally silver-allergies are because of the nickel in the alloy. Pure silver is hypoallergenic. Source: My wife has this allergy and all her silver jewelry is sterling to avoid the problem.

So one can imagine the werewolf protagonist saying "Aww sorry babe, but I can't handle silver, I'm allergic", and their conscientous loving partner goes and does their due-dilligence and gets a pure-silver ring which shouldn't trigger the allergy..
Except it's not an allergy, it's a supernatural aversion to silver itself, and now they've got no explanation.

Lemons are yellow, poems are hard.

My mental image is a kind of horrific blend of centipede and Ent, with a centaur-style upper body, four humanoid arms and a face like a spider.

Needless to say.. their enemies are not ready for what they're going to face :P

Sure, if you're looking for that kind of signal I guess!

Though bear in mind that repeated radio signals like that also exist in nature in the form of things like spinning black holes and neutron stars.

If we were looking in the Cosmic Background Radiation for subtle repetition, we probably wouldn't be able to differentiate it from natural sources.

Also bear in mind that the other reason such signals get lost is also because they fall below the signal strength of the CBR, and get entirely overwhelmed, not just masked in the random noise.
I'm not expert on signals-analysis or radio-waves, but I don't think there's a way to extract meaningful data out of that.

There's also signal-attenuation to consider.

Radio signals disperse in open space and eventually become indistinguishable from the background radiation.
For all but our most powerful directed transmissions, this is in the realm of a couple hundred lightyears at most.

A world 2000 lightyears away wouldn't be able to understand or recognise the signal even when the radio waves start passing it by. At best it'd be a slight increase in radio complexity drowned out by the cosmic background noise.

Sure. In an obfuscated manner using keyboard shortcuts that relies on you knowing there's even a command, let alone remembering what four buttons you need to press at the same time to make it do it.

Right click, see the list of common tasks, choose the thing you're doing.

Trivial.

I'd rather use a mouse than waste brain-cycles on learning keyboard shortcuts that are unique to the IDE.

"That wish has been previously granted"
confused and frustrated screaming

Unexpected Dana Lyons :P

My family used to go camping in Washington with him, the campfire songs were pretty legendary.

it's not alone...

Star Traveller 2023 - Coming to a spooky cinema near you

Point to the one part of a cuckoo clock that knows what time it is.

The ISS is absolutely intended to be expandable, and moving it to a higher orbit is done routinely.

Basically the reason to put a bigger station in a higher orbit is to reduce the effects of atmospheric drag.

The ISS loses kilometers of altitude over a matter of months and has to be boosted regularly to compensate. A bigger station would have an even worse time of that. So putting it in a higher orbit would be worthwhile for that reason.

The ease of escaping earth's hill-sphere is a perk, but the reality is that half the work is achieving orbit. Once you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere. Higher or low orbit isn't a big difference compared to getting up there.

I had a pretty nice conversation yesterday with OpenAI while trying to make it slip up and say something that made it seem inhuman.

It was polite and conversational, and apart from the speed of responses, I'm still not entirely convinced there wasn't a human at the other end.
My personal turing-test has been passed.

On the other hand, talking to it about domain-knowledge stuff like code was eye-opening.
It sucked at writing code.

Like, technically laid out nicely, and it could give me commonly written stuff that students in university might write, but asking it for something unusual just gave me garbage that barely resembled the brief.

It was friendly, spoke like an educated human, but it was also confidently wrong when it came to facts, or analysis.
It presented me with circular logic when asked tough physics-questions (try asking it to explain the theory of relativity or faster-than-light signalling), but also gave a very thoughtful and decent answer when asked what the meaning of life was. (Basically that it's up to each of us to find meaning in our own lives)

Talking to OpenAI was like dreaming.
All the right style and feeling, but the details are wrong, and things are connected in ways that simply don't make logical sense.

There's an XKCD for this.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/

What if a rainstorm dropped all its water in one big droplet...

Spoiler-alert, The answer is somewhere on the order of a megaton-range nuclear blast for half a cubic kilometer of water.

A dinosaur-killing meteor a dozen times bigger turned into more-or-less-water would clear the soil down to the bedrock for tens of miles, and flatten everything for thousands of miles radius, flash-flood half a continent, move mountains..

And that's assuming it started at 0 velocity a few kilometers up.
If it keeps any of its momentum it's just going to be worse.

Okay, but I still haven't worked out Christmas gifts for my family

For a better picture, I did a little googling and came up with this one:

https://www.ripleys.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pigeon-vest.jpg