Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on a strong beak, of course 16 hours ago:
I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.
- Comment on nets 1 day ago:
Yeah, I simultaneously want to comment that the left panels are a wild fantasy, as I’ve never seen an actual human say that we should focus on plastic straws. As far as I can tell, that’s propaganda put into the world by companies trying to discredit genuine efforts.
But at the same time, it’s not even like you have to focus on straws. You can simply not use them, because it is just a stupid concept to produce something that’s immediately trash, and then also go and do other things in life. Believe it or not, most activities in life don’t involve straws.
- Comment on Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release 5 days ago:
Alright, I just looked it up, so I don’t talk nonsense and apparently, what I assume to be most mods, will work directly with OpenMW. Mods that require MWSE, MGE or MCP won’t, though: openmw.org/faq/#mods
Here’s also a guide for modding OpenMW: modding-openmw.com
- Comment on Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release 5 days ago:
For experiencing Morrowind in its original form, I would definitely say OpenMW is the best way to do that. It works well on modern operating systems, allows playing in higher resolutions and has some quality of life improvements, like greater rendering distance and practically no loading times.
Some folks prefer to mod it, and I’m not really up-to-date on that, but I assume there’s still more mods out there, which target the original engine…
- Comment on Observer 1 week ago:
Specifically, because it’s non-vital information for the average person, I really do not think you can blame anyone for merely learning about it through memes. But I do also think this problem is much greater than just memes. I did not receive a better explanation during high school, despite opting for more advanced physics classes and us repeatedly telling our teacher that it makes no sense to us. I have to assume that our teacher did not know either. As such, I got the impression that more advanced physics is just devoid of any actual logic, which was a major factor why I decided against pursuing it further in college. Reading a proper explanation under a stupid meme, could’ve made the difference for me.
- Comment on Observer 1 week ago:
Lots of folks get their superficial education from memes and will be mislead by this…
- Comment on Since Volkswagen is a German company, the popular Jetta car is probably supposed to be pronounced "Yetta" 1 week ago:
Apparently, the name is derived from “jetstream”, so it probably is supposed to be pronounced like cheddar. But a German who does not know that would probably pronounce it as Yetta, yes.
- Comment on Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.11 out now with an in-game settings menu and better server browser 1 week ago:
I have no idea, if it’s any good, but apparently this exists: content.luanti.org/…/aw_personaje_anthro/
I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 2 weeks ago:
The SSN is likely to appear in multiple tables, because they will reference a central table that ties it all together. This central table will likely only contain the SSN, the birth date (from what others have been saying), as well as potentially first and last name. In this table, the entries have to be unique.
But then you might have another table, like a table listing all the physical exams, which has the SSN to be able to link it to the person’s name, but ultimately just adds more information to this one person. It does not duplicate the SSN in a way that would be bad. - Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Well, any software needs to include a license of some form, if you want it to be usable by others. But if it’s not an open-source or libre license, then it’s a proprietary license. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point, it depends on what’s actually written into the license. But it’s also not a good thing, as you miss out on various open-source benefits due to there being no proven legal compatibility with open-source licenses. Well, and if I remember correctly, FUTO’s license actively prohibits reuse of the code anyways.
- Comment on Firefox 135 Released, This is What's New 2 weeks ago:
Ubuntu users will be pleased to hear that Firefox 135 snap supports native messaging through the new WebExtensions XDG desktop portal. This means integration features, like the KeePassXC app, work as they should OOTB.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, they had broken that? I tried to setup KeePassXC for two colleagues and the extension just wouldn’t connect to KeePassXC, with no indication why.
- Comment on Is Civilization 7 not fun? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.
- Comment on Private parking rules review prompted by £2,000 five-minute fine 1 month ago:
Here in Germany, 5 minutes of leaving your car would not count as “parking”. It’d still be in the realm of just “stopping” your car. If you walk away from your car like the defendant did, then it can be viewed differently, but in practice, it still means that no one’s mad enough to try to fine you in that time.
- Comment on xkcd #3034: Features of Adulthood 1 month ago:
To be honest, I’m still annoyed that middle names don’t have more relevance. Maybe five or so people know my middle name, all of which are family or relatives. Aside from that, it just makes it more complicated to fill out forms for various government organizations.
- Comment on Fallout creator asks why triple-A RPGs focus on violence, doesn't provide very hopeful answer 1 month ago:
Yeah, I tried to create a non-violent game for a while in a genre that’s typically violent (roguelike) and so often, I’d play some existing roguelike and then have an idea, like for example, I could make the ice spell cover an area in the shape of a snowflake. Yeah, alright brain, what exactly is that ice spell for? Cooling the snacks?
And if you decide – fuck it, we’ll cool some snacks – a food-themed roguelike sounds nice and non-violent, then that leaves you with a ton of new questions. If the ice spell targets snacks, does that mean you’re defending against them? Why are you defending against snacks? Do they just make you fat? How do you reflect that in the gameplay?
And then you spend two days coming up with all kinds of ideas for making this work, until you realize it sounds like a fever dream and you have no idea, if it’d be any fun. - Comment on Infamous vs Prototype | 15 Years Later 1 month ago:
I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.
- Comment on We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition. 1 month ago:
More wild speculation:
- Patterns make brain release happiness hormones, because it rewards itself for correctly guessing how the pattern continues. The rewards stop when the pattern is overly repetitive, because the brain recognizes that this isn’t a challenge to guess correctly. And then it also quickly becomes not worth paying attention to, because if it’s not going to change, it’s irrelevant to our continued survival and all.
- This applies to anything where humans perceive beauty. A painting with a consistent color scheme or technique is nice, but just a blue canvas is pretty boring. A poem that rhymes is nice, but if it rhymes twice or thrice by using precisely the same device, then it doesn’t entice.
- Comment on What games did you complete in 2024? 2 months ago:
Not quite in the spirit of this post, but I managed to complete Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for the first time this year. It’s been my favorite game for a few years now, but it’s a roguelike and doesn’t allow for many mistakes, so lots of starting over.
That is also the complete list of games I completed this year. I started replaying Thomas Was Alone, but somehow the platforming passages were a lot more frustrating to me, so haven’t finished it…
- Comment on A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections 2 months ago:
Damn, don’t think I’ve seen so many links in an article in quite some years.
- Comment on Why Long COVID is looking more and more like it's driven by 'long infection' 2 months ago:
I mean, you could also post this article in the health community of any other instance. It’s not exactly specific to Australia…
- Comment on 20 years of Firefox: How a community project changed the web 3 months ago:
I feel like we need to bring back a lot of that early grassroots energy. Back then it was Internet Explorer, now it’s becoming Chrome, that you’ll be forced to use despite it being awful.
- Comment on Production quality often has in inverse relationship to information quality in youtube videos 3 months ago:
It’s so dumb, too. It really didn’t take long for TikTok to start skyrocketing after they made that change. But of course, they don’t realize their fuckup and roll it back, no no, short videos are a completely different offering. So, instead they glue YouTube Shorts onto the side and I guess, to convince themselves that it’s different, they restrict videos to 60 seconds.
Now you’ve got videos that are less than a minute long, which basically don’t ever contain useful infirmation, because they’re so short.
And you’ve got the 5+ minute videos, which try to insert enough padding to make it movie-length, so you essentially won’t find useful information in them either. - Comment on Whoogle: How can I use the preferences URL? 3 months ago:
Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.
Three things I can imagine:
- Something in your hosting stack strips the URL parameters, like maybe your reverse proxy, if you use one. You might be able to see in the Whoogle or web server logs, which URLs actually reach it. Might need to set it to debug/trace logging.
- Maybe there’s a flag in the Whoogle configuration you need to enable to accept these preference URLs.
- It’s a bug in that Whoogle version.
- Comment on Minecraft-like free and open source game VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) hits over 500K downloads 3 months ago:
I mean, the bulk of the work on this happens for the fun of it. The underlying game engine, Luanti, has a really lovely community. Some folks love creating mods/content, others love playing that content.
If you really want a hard reason, it’s that Microsoft bought Minecraft and has forced changes, such as a Microsoft account being a requirement now.
Microsoft has a long history of being extremely hostile to the open-source / libre software community, so after the news broke the community definitely bundled together even moreso to create our own Minecraft, withblackjack and hookersscrewdrivers and mese. - Comment on Oopsies 3 months ago:
Yeah, the formulation is a bit off here. With opt-out, you have no way to measure consent, because you can’t discern between people who actually consent and those who just haven’t opted out, for lack of knowledge or other reasons.
These societies have simply weighed up the two options and decided that saving lives is more important than leaving personal freedom intact at all costs.
- Comment on Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.10.0 out now bringing UI updates, fancier shaders, renaming work 3 months ago:
Hmm, did you try this? blog.rubenwardy.com/2022/…/minetest-steam-deck/#c…
- Comment on aerodynamics 3 months ago:
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 3 months ago:
Yeah, I haven’t read whatever paper this is talking about, but I imagine, it’s looking at the saying in a more literal fashion for the sake of argument…
- Comment on It's a ruff job, but someone has to do it. 3 months ago:
Good thing, it’s not a cleanroom, or they’d need a pretty big hairnet…
- Comment on It’s been 30 years since Intel’s infamous Pentium FDIV bug reared its ugly head – a math bug caused Intel’s first CPU recall 3 months ago:
Huh, I practically only know Intel as having defects and vulnerabilities, but I didn’t know this had such a long history…
