Shapez 2 is a very worthy sequel, IMO. Adding logistics beyond conveyor belts is quite nice, and 3 levels of height give quite a bit more options when building. You do often benefit from a build staying at one level since it makes platform blueprints that consume 12n belts of input to make 12 belts of output quite a bit easier, but several buildings are intentionally impossible to do that with for challenge.

The difficulty levels are also pretty well done - I got some fun learning moments out of Insane in particular. Hexagonal mode is also interesting.

I very much lean towards the microfactory approach - locate a cluster of resources within reasonable belting/piping distances, design a factory which can consume the cluster’s entire production of the limiting resource (clocking others to match) to make 1 output or maybe 2, then provide that output to the rail network. Some production chains make it easier to have certain inputs taken from the rail network.

Within one of these factories, items are refined further for each floor they ascend but I rarely enforce a 1 product/floor rule - in particular I find it convenient with many Assembler/Manufacturer recipes to have an input that is directly fed from a single Constructor using clock speed to match production with consumption. This usually means each microfactory underclocks its most power hungry buildings a fair bit which keeps their consumption moderate. Each microfactory ideally has a single priority power switch to turn off its entire production chain if its consumption is becoming a problem and I set up a priority sequence for them.

Federal election times are set by 2 U.S. Code § 7 as 1 day after the 1st Monday in November (of even numbered years). The law is from 1875 and from what I can tell is indeed nominally motivated by the voters’ need to first observe rest day on Sunday and then travel to their polling place. Keeping it and not having a federal holiday coinciding with it is largely aimed at keeping voter turnout low.

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.

Nobody ever considers Eve’s side.

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

• Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
• People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
• People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

Interesting. I guess for me the “trans” bit just isn’t as strongly coupled to the person - that it’s natural to use “man” for such a person in general, and it’s a context (e.g. healthcare or the politics of it) that can make the subcategory be relevant.

If I describe someone as a “tall man” or “clever man”, do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a “man”?
If they don’t, I’m genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a “trans man”.

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn’t much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

I’d say the key insight with quantum computing is that its algorithms are about choreographing interference patterns among qubits such that wrong answers cancel each other out but right answers reinforce one another. It’s not just a matter of trying possibilities in parallel or “running different probabilities simultaneously” - the qubits’ states are complex combinations of 0 and 1 states, and they interact with and change one another. Simulating those interactions on a classical computer requires exponentially growing amounts of memory space and time as the quantum computation gets bigger. Trying to divide-and-conquer this simulation over multiple classical computers runs into the need for different parts of the circuit to know about each others’ state, limiting how much work can be sectioned off to be done by each computer in the group.

I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you there, as my time with Skyrim is getting to be long ago. Hope someone else has a ballpark figure for you.

The extreme version of this is called the Alchemy/Enchantment loop where you feed two skill-improving skills into one another. But be aware, this is the kind of thing that can end up taking the fun out of a game for some people.

Also, it’s worth being aware that because of the way later Elder Scrolls games scale enemies, any time you’re working on a noncombat skill the draugr are training.