Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨20 years of Firefox: How a community project changed the web⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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, with blackjack and hookers screwdrivers and mese.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oopsies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm, did you try this? blog.rubenwardy.com/2022/…/minetest-steam-deck/#c…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨aerodynamics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh, I practically only know Intel as having defects and vulnerabilities, but I didn’t know this had such a long history…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Couscous is the glitter of foods.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, “pop like popcorn” was maybe a bit misleading. I mainly meant that it jumped out of the pot violently. It didn’t turn inside-out like maize popcorn does.

  So, the taste was essentially unaltered. The seed had burst open, though, so maybe that would help, if you wanted to make a sauce more spicy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Couscous is the glitter of foods.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you know that when you fry mustard seeds, they pop like popcorn?

  Well, I didn’t, so I hadn’t put a lid on.

  I was still finding the little fuckers several months after the incident, in all kinds of corners of my kitchen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think, the main problem is that “X” doesn’t look like a name.

  When someone’s not starkly aware of the platform being called that, they might think the author typoed.
  Or is using it like the idiom “they posted it to X, Y and Z” (so just a nondescript set of platforms).
  Or genuinely means the letter X and that just doesn’t make sense in the context presented.

  “X, formerly Twitter” is just a better name than “X”, because it is recognizable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl Sagan be like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks. 🙂

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl Sagan be like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A web search tells me the θ (lower-case theta) is used to represent an angle. Do you just fill in 0° – 359.9° one after another to draw that curve?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.

  You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.

  Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.

  I’m guessing, what OP wants is:

  1. limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
  2. somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any reason to use the "new" sorting option on Lemmy, except to filter spam?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll often browse Lemmy by Top 6 Hours or Top 12 Hours, depending on when I last checked, and if I get through all the posts, I’ll start browsing via ‘New’ sorting…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, fair response. I started writing that comment thinking “if it’s in high-end hardware now, it’ll be broadly available in 10–20 years”.
  Then with the last sentence, I realized that it isn’t in high-end hardware, not in the form that allows you to throw out all the tricks.
  And with publishers simultaneously wanting ever more fidelity, which makes it more expensive to calculate appropriate raytracing, yeah, I would be surprised, if that happens in our lifetime, too.

  I guess, I’m personally somewhat excited at the thought of not having to learn all the tricks, with me having dabbled in gamedev as a hobbyist.
  But yesterday, the (completely unilluminated) 2D gravity simulation I’m working on started kicking in my fans and you see me immediately investigating, because I’m certainly a lot more excited about making it available to as many people as possible…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of smokes and mirrors tricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.

  Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it’s just always been out of reach performance-wise.
  Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The universe is bottle-necked at processor speed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Non-Youtube link: pbs.org/…/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-li…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We need a vexillology community!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Picture of striped toothpaste with similar colors to the Dutch flag

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I don’t know what shoes OP is wearing, but if you’ve got uncushioned shoes (leather shoes or fake leather or whatever), then you do want them to be basically skin-tight. Otherwise, they’ll grind up and down your feet and give you blisters.

  But yeah, of course, if they crush your feet, that’s no good either. 🫠

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, you do have a pretty big lever there. If your shoes are rather tight and you really gotta work your way in there, then you’re gonna exert quite a bit of force…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s metal shoehorns which are nearly indestructible.

  You probably can’t order from this shop wherever you’re from, but my parents have this model: shop.wenko.de/…/Schuhloeffel-Extra-Lang-58-5-cm-r…
  And yeah, that very much feels like you could repurpose it as a makeshift katana in some fictional zombie outbreak…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It does sound like you’d really enjoy the tinkering. When I switched (also to Linux Mint at the time), I spent the first few days figuring out how I could hide the window titlebars, because I realized I could set keyboard shortcuts for minimize/maximize/close.

  That was kind of dumb, but no regrets. 🙃

  I will give somewhat of an unusual recommendation for the distro, based on what you wrote: openSUSE with KDE

  KDE is a desktop environment (basically the OS GUI), which has a ton of customization options, certainly more than the default desktop environment on Linux Mint.
  KDE is probably going to be overwhelming at first, but on the other hand, hiding those window titlebars on KDE would’ve been a matter of minutes rather than days, because it’s just a built-in feature, not something I need to achieve with weird workarounds.

  And openSUSE, because it works well with KDE and because it comes with a system settings GUI, called “YaST”, which covers a lot of the settings that you’d usually need to crack out the terminal for.
  openSUSE isn’t as mainstream as Linux Mint, and not often recommended to newcomers. There’s certainly more guides and such for how to do things on Linux Mint. But yeah, I do think it’s a fine choice for newbies nonetheless and you do get that extra GUI.

  To conclude my autistic ramblings, one more point, you could totally throw Linux on there for now and if you don’t like it, then buy the Windows license and go that route.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Veganism is pro-fossil fuel⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would choose dying in the wilderness. A few solid years in freedom and then a potentially horrid death sounds like a much better deal to me than a few weeks/months in purgatory before a less horrid death.
  I am writing “purgatory”, because at this point, I do assume that mistreatment is involved.

  Ultimately, I just find that simple rule …simpler.
  Is it a capitalistic thing with animals involved? Then the default assumption should be that the animals get mistreated, because treating animals well doesn’t generally pay out.
  I just don’t care enough about honey to get into the gritty details of whether this doesn’t involve animal mistreatment.

  I would also bet a lot of money that it does involve questionable treatment at some point. For example, I’ve heard that beekeepers get live honeybees in the mail, and not in some fancy transport box.
  But you’ve got other moral aspects, too, like honeybees killing local ecosystems by taking food away from better pollinators.

  I could think about all that and try to work out the exact details of when eating honey is coolio, or I could just not bother.
  I don’t need a perfect moral framework, I just want to steer clear from immoral shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get good.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure, it’s not that simple.

  For one, you might not have much to chat about with your baby, so doing baby talk might actually get in more language training.

  But then baby talk is also very emotionally charged. So, it might help with emotional development, or simply make the baby pay attention for longer and therefore actually help the language development.

  Well, and then it also still depends on the baby. For example, this research suggests that babies with autism react differently to baby talk: nimh.nih.gov/…/toddlers-responses-to-baby-talk-li…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Capital has certain interests. If your research doesn’t produce the results that capital is looking for, you’re unlikely to get more funding. As such, it leaves a bias on what we have research for, which can already skew our perception of reality, and sometimes researchers will even fake their results or select certain data to reach a conclusion that’s in the interest of the capital.

  There are mechanisms in place to try to prevent that, namely peer reviews and reproduction of previous studies, so we’ll hopefully get to the truth eventually, but the bias still has a big impact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proud globohomo⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really (don’t) enjoy that this is what needs censoring about this post, to get popular social media to spread it around.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proud globohomo⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But how are you going to feel smarter than everyone else, if everyone gets convinced by your conspiracy theory?