#engine-driven

[cerise-on-top]

Hey! It's me again, I've been a little needy these days and I'd like to make a request, something really cute.

Valeria, Farah and Kate.

Like, they spent the night with you having fun at home, but in the morning they had to leave for work without even having time to say goodbye, but before leaving there was a noticeable mess that remained in the house, a tremendous mess. But when they arrive late from work, they find the house shining completely clean, and soon they find the reader sleeping in the living room with the TV on, but still sleeping peacefully, because her tiredness does not allow her to stay awake to receive them.

(I would love to be spoiled by Valéria in exchange for being her housewife)

I think this scenario is so cute and I love your writing, and sorry if something is wrong, I'm using the translator again. Kisses and have a great day. <3

Hey! That's a really cute idea! Sorry this is short, I'm just really tired again tonight!

Valeria, Farah and Laswell Finding Reader Asleep

Valeria: She’s not particularly surprised to find you asleep, she usually comes home extremely late at night. However, the sight warms her heart every time. Stands in the doorway for a few seconds, watching your chest rise and fall as you sleep, a small smile on her face. It’s only afterwards that she realizes you’ve cleaned your shared home. Valeria will sigh a bit, the home was in complete disarray when she left, so it must have taken a while for you to clean it all up. No wonder you’re asleep. Although she may not be the tallest person, Valeria is strong, so she’ll pick you up and carry you to your bedroom, giving you a kiss on your forehead. During these moments she loves nothing more than to hold you, even if she normally isn’t a very touchy feely person. But something about you being asleep in her arms as she carries you, completely vulnerable, just gets to her. However, it won’t be long before Valeria goes to bed herself, getting ready for such a thing, she’s tired as well. The day after she’ll spoil you rotten, though. You’ve earned a nice reward for being such a good spouse for her, and so she’ll take you on a fancy date. Or maybe, since you’ve cleaned your home so nicely, she’ll just stay home with you to cook a good meal together. The choice can wait, she’ll just ask you later.

Farah: She’d be ecstatic to see you’ve cleaned your home. It must have been a long and boring task, but she truly does appreciate it. Like Valeria, she watches you for a few moments, thinking about whether or not she should wake you up. In the end she decides against it since you truly must have been tired. However, she will drape a blanket over you and give you a small kiss on your cheek, hoping to not rouse you too much in the process. Farah makes herself a small snack so she has had something to eat before she finally goes to bed herself. However, she doesn’t go to bed, she joins you on the couch, holding you close and nuzzling into your hair. While she may be extremely tired herself, she still daydreams a bit about how she could possibly repay you for doing that Sisyphean task. Anything from ordering takeout and paying to going on a walk during the sunset sounds good to her as long as she can show you her appreciation. Since she’s feeling very content around you, she might also start humming a bit, knowing fully well that you can’t hear her. But it’s just something she does when she feels comfortable around someone. Plus it helps her fall asleep too. In the end she’ll likely settle for something calm like staying at home and just cuddling the day away while thanking you. Or just doing whatever you say so she can feel like you’re getting enough rest and she did something for the household as well.

Laswell: By the time she’s home the sun has probably almost risen anyway given her line of work. Laswell would be dead tired, so I’m not even sure she’d notice you having cleaned right away. However, she would see you having decluttered the desk in the living room and be grateful. Although she may almost fall asleep herself, standing in the doorway and barely noticing her surroundings, she will see you sleeping on the couch and immediately think about sleeping next to you. Granted, Laswell isn’t a very cuddly person either, and she can’t sleep particularly well holding someone either, but she thinks it would be unfair if you slept on the couch while she slept in the bed. At least that’s her logic at the moment. She won’t even try to carry you to bed, she just wants to head to bed. Gets changed and stands still in front of the couch for a few moments before draping a blanket over you. Naturally, she’ll turn off the TV, but afterwards she gets some shut eye for a few hours as well. Only in the morning does she notice that everything is spic and span. Laswell will feel bad if you woke up before her and made some breakfast. However, she will make it up to you as well. If there’s anything you ever need from her, she’ll do it. She’ll have done it before as well, but she doesn’t want to be indebted to you. Gives you a kiss before promising you that she’ll clean up next time. Either on her own or with you. You did such a good job, she’ll likely get you some cake to show her thanks in the meantime.

[rickybaby]

Daniel with his Renault engine that would go pop every two races during the merc domination era has the same number of podiums as Sergio in the most dominant red bull car with scary Honda reliability 🔥

[bsptourist]

nippers_opus

created by NIPPER

[minweber]

Musings on Custodes: Nobilitas Terra

Ah, the now famous “all Custodians begin their lives as the infant sons of the noble houses of Terra” line from the 8th edition codex (not reproduced in the 9th one, btw). It has now experienced the kind meteoric rise in quotation previously enjoyed only by biblical verses in times of major church schisms. Let’s talk about the part of it that’s actually interesting though.

So Custodians are drawn from the children of Terra’s nobility. It is apparently not exclusive and other sources are allowed on Custodes’ own discretion, but this is both the traditional and the main one. It seems that originally the Emperor was doing something of a mamluk/janissaries thing with them, taking infant children from the families of his potential rivals as both hostages and soldiers that could be raised loyal only to him. Later, when his power grew to so far outstrip that of Terra’s aristocracy as to make any internal challenge of it inconceivable, it instead became prestigious to submit a child of a family to this service - not conscription, but an offering to the golden idol of humanity instead.

So surely, in 42nd millennium, with the Emperor’s eclipsing presence… changed, if not gone, there must be some sort of interesting dynamic between the Custodians and the bloodlines that spawned them? Well, the codex seems to dismiss the idea out of hand, stating that there is no real way for nobles of Terra to recognize their scions once they become Custodians - which presumably means that there is no grounds for interaction? And sure, I can recognize why the official lore in its current state isn't interested in that: Custodians are fixated on the Emperor to the exclusion of everything else, and the Terran nobility itself is a fairly faceless thing in the lore, one of which we don't really know enough about to build any kind of investment from their perspective.

But here we are all about the things that could yet be, rather than the things that just are! And I honestly think a bit of lore expansion in this direction could be pretty interesting!

Between the origins of the Rogue Traders and the Custodians themselves it seems that, much like the priesthood of Mars, some clans on Terra were indeed once powerful enough to make the newly ascendant Emperor deal with them in terms other than total subjugation or destruction. Would the meteoric rise of the Imperium during the Great Crusade grow or diminish their powers? On one hand - the previously mentioned growth of the Emperor's power in relation to them and the whole new "breed" of imperial elite he was literally creating (I know that in modern lore there is some speculation about what were actually his plans for the Astartes and the primarchs post-Crusade, but however things would have turned out for them, had he his way, I doubt it would have resulted in even a modicum of power returning to the hands of his once-rivals)... But on the other - during times of obscene growth and expansion rich and powerful tend to grow even more so, and I doubt that grimdark future avoids this tendency. So I will go out on a limb a little and say that while during the rise of the Imperium the power of Terran nobility may have waned in relative terms, it probably grew in the absolute ones.

And the following ten thousand years of sitting at the top of a stupidly expansive feudal confederacy probably did not hurt them either!

In the days of the Era Indomitus, then, these vague "noble houses of Terra" must be some sort of force to be reckoned with - politically, culturally, and probably even militarily. Likely on a galactic scale. And the personal guard of the Emperor, the supposedly most advanced beings in the entire Imperium, the living symbol of his power - are staffed almost exclusively by the scions of those houses. Do you see my vision? Do you agree that something simply must be there?!

Custodians are the Emperor's representatives and envoys, the single most powerful military force on Terra and the organization in full undisputed control of access to the most holy site in the entire Imperium, a place from which, technically, ALL authority within its borders is derived. Even without the bloodline connection there should be some kind of a relationship between them and the other powers of the throneworld! Even if we look at the pre-codex, fully palace-bound version of Custodes that care for absolutely nothing other than the Emperor's corpse physical safety - they still recognized that the events on larger Terra influence this safety and need to be at least reacted upon. And in the modern version they have never even been that shut-off. Even before the lifting of the Edict of Restraint, Solar Watch patrolled the Sol system entire, Aquilan Shield departed on their mysterious protector missions and the Emissaries Imperatus were busy being a diplomatic corps, for fuck's sake. I find it hard to believe that they would simply ignore Terra's political players, leaving them to do whatever unless someone rolled up armed to the Imperial Palace. So there definitely would be interactions - and once that hook is in, the fun begins.

Are custodians willing to "stoop down" and play nobility's games with them? Do they even have aversion to doing so? Surely, with all the talk about their talents beyond head-chopping, they are capable of scheming with the best of them? And if doing so is the most efficient way to get the job done - why would they object? And if they are no strangers to political manipulation and the noble families desperately want the prestige that comes with having produced a Custodian - why wouldn't the demigods indulge them and use it as a tool? Especially since they - if we keep the codex idea of it being impossible to recognize surrendered infants as the Custodians they become - hold all the cards and can basically present any of their number as a scion of this or that family? And while we are at it - do they themselves actually know? I imagine it must be not that important to them, but are there any records kept? Could you be a 200 hundred year old Custodian fresh out of training (a random example - like so many things, it is not known how long the creation and training of a Custodian takes) and be suddenly told that the aging matron of a noble house with whom you have to go and negotiate is actually your biological mother? Would that stir something? Curiosity, at least? Or is the Emperor’s light so absolute that it can blind one to even the most deep-nested human impulses?

Do Custodians remember sins and glories forgotten by the tapestries of gold and jewels? Do they watch some relatively minor and unimportant house with baffling prejudice - all because someone from it almost outdid the Emperor in something more than ten thousand years ago? Do some bloodlines enjoy unseen protection due to secret deals that have passed out of all human memory?

What about the internal politics of the organization? Millenia of drafting from a relatively closed pool of families means that some Custodians are related to each other - does that matter to them in any way? Even if the golden demigods are completely free of prejudice and superstition - which their history of paranoia kinda tells me they are not - genetics do play an objectively huge part in their existence. Is more expected of those drafted from families that produce more Custodians than others, or have spawned some especially renowned heroes? Once again - is it even public knowledge amidst the Custodes?

And what about the nobles themselves? Do they seek favor of the Adeptus Custodes? Is such a thing even possible? Do they view them as another player in their political games, or are they more of a force of nature, a condition that everyone has to deal with and adapt to? How does the process of submitting children even work nowadays? Is it compulsory? How many are taken from each family/genertaion? Do any struggle against this harvest, or has the honor of the thing completely overshadowed any resentment that they might have had?

Basically what I am saying is that, for the purposes of worldbuilding, interaction between systems is always better than the lack of thereof. And if one were looking for the ways to expand Custodes' lore - this one feels like a great source of characterization for them.

[the-lord-of-the-things]

Riding the Rails

[nikkisticki]

There's probably not many people talking about Deep Rock on here, but DRG is being put into a freezer filled with meaty tendrils for 8 months (or more) so they can slamjam out a standalone roguelike version of the game.

I think a lot of people were already pretty confused by them having that secondary team making a Vampire Survivors clone, and the board game, but now we're looking at the game that few people are satisfied with the state of as the games best time is long past most dwarves. The best grinds are for Overclocks which quickly run out and leave you with nothing but grinding for cosmetics (90% of which are slightly different versions of beards). Add on that the game is being left on an event which I've regularly heard people say they'd prefer having the robots back (and everybody fucking hated the robots)

The general issue is that rockpox demands specific build types to overcome which ruin players desires as they need pinpoint damage, which then requires more attention and drags down the experience. Robots required heat, but heat was easy to obtain on many builds.

Not a good choice for several reasons, mainly that heavy combat wasn't the main draw of this game and ultimately will fracture it's own playerbase, rendering DRG drained of its more combat focused players on top of the slow entropy of players leaving due to BEING FUCKED BY ROCKPOX for 8 months.

Add on the fact that they are acting as if the ALPHA of this new game won't need continued effort applied to it, which means the main game will slow down even further, thus leading to the same problem of players leaving faster then they'll join.

This is not the way forward to keeping this brand growing, this is how you get elongated YouTuber videos talking about the good ol days. You don't want that.

[mivolasvivi]

I’ve been Julia-pilled, move over MATLAB/numpy 😍

[topnotchquark]

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain

This article by Kate Wagner on her INEOS sponsored trip to the Austin GP at COTA last year was commissioned by Road and Track magazine and then taken down. Presumably because Kate has was pretty staunch in her opinions about what was essentially a paid trip.

It is exactly the kind of thing I have wanted to read about the felt experience of the money business of F1. It doesn't get into technicalities and does not produce any spreadsheets for reference. It's just, her experience of the presence of wealth in the sport.

She starts off by talking about how she has been covering cycling and NASCAR for a while now and both of those, in comparison, are scrappier sports with smaller sponsors and cheaper tickets.

What I also especially loved was how fascinated she was with the cars themselves, and how they seem like a true marvel of human engineering. She almost described the cars like these alien beasts that came into this dimension out of nowhere and were being constantly monitored and dueled with to furnish wins and glory (and shareholder value for sponsors).

I think I always had an understanding of the weird myth making surrounding F1 and the kind of media attention it attracts, but someone like Kate (who I have loved reading for a while now) putting it into perspective really made it click for me. This sport thrives off of the kind of cocoon it has built around it and understands exactly the certain exclusiveness it needs to maintain to keep the story alive.

Anyway, give it a read, especially because Road and Track is trying to bury it to not piss off sponsors.

[beastsovrevelation]

In case someone stumbles across this, mind lending a hand to a girl who's on the verge of banging her head against a wall?..

What do you think Anathema and Newt's daughter would do as a career? And, what would she have studied, or be studying, at Oxford?.. She kind of strikes me as someone who'd be interested in journalism. But, I've thought, maybe she studied English Literature, or, Hell... Mathematics. I'm struggling to catch that particular thread, yet it comes up immediately as other characters are interacting with her.

Maybe, a vibe comes to your head. Which is... Very odd of me to ask, because all the information about the character is in my head, not yours. Her name's Agnes (obviously). She's a witch. She's a lesbian. Her favorite gemstone is amethyst. She likes scarves and shawls... She's anxious to meet her familiar. Her faceclaim's probably Alba Baptista. I don't know what else to say about her right now.

[steakout-05]

wait how much of the original Robo Barry do you think they were able to salvage after he got blown up. like in the short he first appears in, you see a little bit of broken metal Barry picks up when he grieves Robo Barry's death but there had to be more of him left right. do you think some of his memory was salvagable. do you think he remembers dying. holy shit. imagine being able to remember your own death in full or partial clarity. do you think he lies awake at night thinking about it over and over. do you think he's the only one who actually has to grapple with his own mortality even as a mechanical being. Barry and Betty can easily just revive themselves with as many hearts as they need, but Robo Barry probably has to work harder to maintain himself. he's stronger than both his human counterparts but he's also more fragile than them at the same time. getting repairs has to be harder than a simple revive, surely. and eventually his parts would begin to wear down. he has to rely on other people more to maintain his body and when those people aren't around anymore, what is he supposed to do then? i think that would actually be such an interesting thing to explore and there's a lot of irony to a robotic metallic person who is weaker than his human peers despite how strong he is. damn. maybe Brains made Robo Barry a little too much like Barry Steakfries. dude gave him his own mortality crisis lmaoooo

[postcard-from-the-past]

Lockheed Constellation "Connie", a propeller-driven, four-engined airliner

French vintage postcard

[chimaerakitten]

You’ve seen “chi notices when food is wrong in fic because she remembers the columbian exchange” and “Chi gets frustrated when people misunderstand pre-printing press books” and “Chi is bothered by all these modern undergarments in period pieces” but NOW get ready for the grand finale: “Chi notices when a fic writer has never in their life driven a Prius because that is NOT what it’s like”

[bahadurislam011444]

Unveiling the Best SEO Worker in Bangladesh: Driving Digital Success

[linuxgamenews]

The Thaumaturge: Immerse Yourself in 1905 Warsaw with Polish Localization

The Thaumaturge the story-driven RPG game brings Polish to Linux and Steam Deck via Windows PC. Thanks to the creative talents of developer Fool's Theory. Available on Steam, GOG, and Humble Store with 84% Very Positive reviews. If the only Polish words you know are the famous swears, I’ve got some exciting news from Fool’s Theory and 11 bit studios. Starting now, you can enjoy The Thaumaturge with Polish voice-over. While this story-driven RPG takes you back to 1905 Warsaw, and now, it’s even deeper with its native language. Also playable on Steam Deck and Linux. Back in the early 20th century, Warsaw was under foreign control, and the Polish language was banned from schools and public life. But the Polish spirit never gave up, so the devs wanted to honor that by adding Polish voice-over. Fans have been asking for this since day one, and it’s finally here.

The Thaumaturge | Polish Dubbing Now Available

To also keep the Slavic vibe, the same actors who did the English voices recorded the Polish ones too. They’ve nailed the period vocabulary and expressions, making the game feel true to its 1905 Warsaw setting. Since playing with the Polish voice-over gives you a real sense of the time and place. The Thaumaturge is an isometric RPG packed with a gripping story, tough choices, and deep themes. Created by Fool’s Theory and published by 11 bit studios, it puts you in the shoes of Wiktor Szulski, a talented but troubled thaumaturge, exploring the intricate world of early 20th-century Warsaw.

What features you can look forward to:

Shape your story – Your choices matter. Decide your path and deal with the consequences.

Develop your character – Customize your thaumaturge to handle situations your way.

Unique turn-based combat – Use a mix of human skills and psychic powers from your salutors to take down enemies.

Influence others – Manipulate characters to bend them to your will.

Master salutors – Harness their unique abilities to explore and conquer.

Explore 1905 Warsaw – Dive into a well-researched historic setting where crime and luxury coexist. Meet real historical figures and see how they fit into your adventure.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, The Thaumaturge looks stunning and detailed. Plus, you will also see that it's Steam Deck Verified and also playable on Linux via Windows PC. To celebrate the Polish voice-over patch, there’s also a 25% discount on Steam right now. Dropping the price to $26.24 USD / £22.12 / 26,24€. It's also available on both GOG and Humble Store at regular price. Get ready for an epic story-driven RPG game taking place in a unique period in history, now with an authentic Polish touch.

[jcmarchi]

Scientists use generative AI to answer complex questions in physics

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/scientists-use-generative-ai-to-answer-complex-questions-in-physics/

Scientists use generative AI to answer complex questions in physics

When water freezes, it transitions from a liquid phase to a solid phase, resulting in a drastic change in properties like density and volume. Phase transitions in water are so common most of us probably don’t even think about them, but phase transitions in novel materials or complex physical systems are an important area of study.

To fully understand these systems, scientists must be able to recognize phases and detect the transitions between. But how to quantify phase changes in an unknown system is often unclear, especially when data are scarce.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Basel in Switzerland applied generative artificial intelligence models to this problem, developing a new machine-learning framework that can automatically map out phase diagrams for novel physical systems.

Their physics-informed machine-learning approach is more efficient than laborious, manual techniques which rely on theoretical expertise. Importantly, because their approach leverages generative models, it does not require huge, labeled training datasets used in other machine-learning techniques.

Such a framework could help scientists investigate the thermodynamic properties of novel materials or detect entanglement in quantum systems, for instance. Ultimately, this technique could make it possible for scientists to discover unknown phases of matter autonomously.

“If you have a new system with fully unknown properties, how would you choose which observable quantity to study? The hope, at least with data-driven tools, is that you could scan large new systems in an automated way, and it will point you to important changes in the system. This might be a tool in the pipeline of automated scientific discovery of new, exotic properties of phases,” says Frank Schäfer, a postdoc in the Julia Lab in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-author of a paper on this approach.

Joining Schäfer on the paper are first author Julian Arnold, a graduate student at the University of Basel; Alan Edelman, applied mathematics professor in the Department of Mathematics and leader of the Julia Lab; and senior author Christoph Bruder, professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Basel. The research is published today in Physical Review Letters.

Detecting phase transitions using AI

While water transitioning to ice might be among the most obvious examples of a phase change, more exotic phase changes, like when a material transitions from being a normal conductor to a superconductor, are of keen interest to scientists.

These transitions can be detected by identifying an “order parameter,” a quantity that is important and expected to change. For instance, water freezes and transitions to a solid phase (ice) when its temperature drops below 0 degrees Celsius. In this case, an appropriate order parameter could be defined in terms of the proportion of water molecules that are part of the crystalline lattice versus those that remain in a disordered state.

In the past, researchers have relied on physics expertise to build phase diagrams manually, drawing on theoretical understanding to know which order parameters are important. Not only is this tedious for complex systems, and perhaps impossible for unknown systems with new behaviors, but it also introduces human bias into the solution.

More recently, researchers have begun using machine learning to build discriminative classifiers that can solve this task by learning to classify a measurement statistic as coming from a particular phase of the physical system, the same way such models classify an image as a cat or dog.

The MIT researchers demonstrated how generative models can be used to solve this classification task much more efficiently, and in a physics-informed manner.

The Julia Programming Language, a popular language for scientific computing that is also used in MIT’s introductory linear algebra classes, offers many tools that make it invaluable for constructing such generative models, Schäfer adds.

Generative models, like those that underlie ChatGPT and Dall-E, typically work by estimating the probability distribution of some data, which they use to generate new data points that fit the distribution (such as new cat images that are similar to existing cat images).

However, when simulations of a physical system using tried-and-true scientific techniques are available, researchers get a model of its probability distribution for free. This distribution describes the measurement statistics of the physical system.

A more knowledgeable model

The MIT team’s insight is that this probability distribution also defines a generative model upon which a classifier can be constructed. They plug the generative model into standard statistical formulas to directly construct a classifier instead of learning it from samples, as was done with discriminative approaches.

“This is a really nice way of incorporating something you know about your physical system deep inside your machine-learning scheme. It goes far beyond just performing feature engineering on your data samples or simple inductive biases,” Schäfer says.

This generative classifier can determine what phase the system is in given some parameter, like temperature or pressure. And because the researchers directly approximate the probability distributions underlying measurements from the physical system, the classifier has system knowledge.

This enables their method to perform better than other machine-learning techniques. And because it can work automatically without the need for extensive training, their approach significantly enhances the computational efficiency of identifying phase transitions.

At the end of the day, similar to how one might ask ChatGPT to solve a math problem, the researchers can ask the generative classifier questions like “does this sample belong to phase I or phase II?” or “was this sample generated at high temperature or low temperature?”

Scientists could also use this approach to solve different binary classification tasks in physical systems, possibly to detect entanglement in quantum systems (Is the state entangled or not?) or determine whether theory A or B is best suited to solve a particular problem. They could also use this approach to better understand and improve large language models like ChatGPT by identifying how certain parameters should be tuned so the chatbot gives the best outputs.

In the future, the researchers also want to study theoretical guarantees regarding how many measurements they would need to effectively detect phase transitions and estimate the amount of computation that would require.

This work was funded, in part, by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the MIT-Switzerland Lockheed Martin Seed Fund, and MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives.

[meanscarletdeceiver]

Hi! Huge fan of your fics, kinda new to Tumblr. Do you ship any of the engines (if you don’t mind me asking?) 

Hey, thanks for dropping a line!

I was a non-shipper for quite a while, then I started dabbling. I'm open to lots of different (and conflicting) ships but some of the ones that I'm most committed to are:

Thomas/Bertie

Edward/BoCo

Henry/Bear

Percy/Harold

Duck/Donald

Douglas/Toad/Oliver

Mavis/Salty

Also, if you trawl my archives long enough, you’ll see occasional references to Toby/Diesel and James/Porter. And you might wonder: Wait, are they f***in' serious? The official answer is that the former is just for a lark (specifically, for a dare)… but the latter I am indeed pretty serious about. ;)