Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.

  These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.

  The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  True, such a low number of production units design would really only make sense if you could find an off the shelf solution to drive multiple displays.

  If these displays are not supposed to be animated and they’re reasonably low resolution (say, 800x600 20bit RGB or less), they could be connected via SPI and pretty much every microcontroller out there has multiple SPI ports, so even a cheap SBC would work for that). However I expect that getting XWindows or Wayland in Linux to work with such displays would be a PITA.

  I’ve only ever got software running under Linux to control a tiny 2-tone display via I2C - on an Orange Pi SBC - and it’s totally its own thing which happens to be running under Linux sending low-level commands via the I2C dev and not at all integrated with X-Windows or Wayland. This would also work fine if the comms was via SPI (in fact the code barelly changes since I’m using a library that does most of the low-level work for me).

  To just display a static image or a sequence of static images loaded from storage in a bunch of screens low-resolution enough to support SPI (so 800x600 or less) I expect something like that would be fine.

  The more I think about it, there more I expect this thing could run on a single $50 SBC as long as the connector exposes at least an SPI device and 8 independent I/O lines (given how SPI works, shared SPI bus is fine with one separate Chip Select line for each screen as long as the SPI device under Linux can run on a mode that lets your code control the CS line itself, and the other 4 I/O lines are for touch detection) assuming touch position is irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Human replaceable printed paper labels, manual stick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What I describe goes well beyond things with screens.

  For example computer mice have a microcontroller inside (and unless it serves a mechanical function, not much more than that) and cars have several, only one of which actual handles a proper screen (it’s actually a microprocessor rather than a mere microcontroller).

  The simplest microcontrollers have nowhere near enough memory to handle any half-way decent display (some nothing at all, some can just about handle a two-tone 320x200 display over I2C or SPI, some can handle 640x480 16-bit RGB but without animations as they don’t have enough memory to actual have a buffer for image composition) and yet they keep getting sold in massive numbers.

  Pretty much all digital electronics out there no matter how invisible to users has been replaced by embedded microcontrollers or, in a some use cases, single function controllers (which are basically microcontroller programs converted into integrated circuits).

  Embedded computing was a massive revolution in digital electronics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The difference in what can be done and the amount of work that needs to go into it between discrete digital electronics and just having a microcontroller there is HUGE.

  Also with microcontrollers and microprocessors most of the work moves from Electronics Engineering and circuit-design space to Software Engineering and software development, and the latter experts are easier to find plus the development cycle is way more friendly when it’s just code which you can change and upload at will rather than physical circuits.

  Even more entertaining, microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap (the most basic ones cost a few cents) that throwing in a microcontroller is almost always significantly cheaper than doing the control stuff with discrete electronics.

  I actually got an EE degree back when we embedded circuits were just starting to be used so I didn’t really get taught how to use them, then went for a career in software instead of electronics and came back to digital electronics years later and it’s like night and day between the discrete digital electronics age and the everything is a computing device era.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it just me who feels that having one processing unit per display is a waste?

  I mean, I get it why they did it (it’s way easier to just have one SBC per-display, both on the hardware and the software sides), but if designing such a system I would still try to come up with a single board solution if only because waste gets on my nerves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also applies perfectly if he’s a Working Class person and the viewer is Middle Class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In the GDP calculations, the Official Inflation will “deflate” the GDP number calculated in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) to produce the Official GDP number (the Real GDP), so if the Official Inflation is lower than reality, the difference in inflation pretty much “leaks” into a higher GDP number than it should be, or in other words, officially it looks like GDP growth.

  You might have noticed just how much politicians celebrate that they’ve “made the Economy grow”.

  Massaging the Inflation is an easy way to create GDP “Growth” in the official figures and is far more indirect and obscure than massaging the GDP figures themselves so less likely for those doing it to be caught and even if they do only a handful of people actually understand the true significance of what has been done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.

  Hence why two money values at different point in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing power, the longer the time distance between them the worst.

  It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:

  • Directly because too much Inflation is seen as a bad thing, so if the official number is lower, it looks better.
  • Indirectly because Official Inflation affects the Official GDP - GDP calculation first yields a number in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) which then gets “deflated” by Official Inflation (so, the higher the inflation the smaller it gets) 1to produce the Official GDP (i.e. the Real GDP), so if from year to the next the Official Inflation understates reality the difference ends up making the GDP look bigger which appears as GDP “Growth”, something that in the Neoliberal era politicials harp about like crazy.

  We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reason being the increase in Inequality).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At least in the US and UK (and I suspect most of the West), the official inflation has been understating the reality for years (just look at the massive difference between what a salary in the 60s could pay for and the very same inflation-adjusted salary today buys) so the real picture is probably significantly worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ultra high iq⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I see it, that’s both a problem of low self-confidence and passiveness (or maybe underdeveloped values).

  For the first, we all have several qualities, but people often don’t recognize or value certain qualities, especially people driven mainly by what they think others value and hence end up valuing pretty much just the qualities modern Society focuses on - namely Wealth, Beauty and Brains - which is a typical low self-confidence thing.

  For the rest, as I see it, having some inherent quality that one was born with isn’t exactly something deserving of much pride because it’s not something one did anything to achieve. If that much one’s parents deserve the recognition for the “achievement”, though they didn’t actually do it on purpose, so maybe not even them. Having pride in being born with a high IQ makes about as much sense as having pride in being born in a rich family: it’s masturbatory ego stroking about one’s luck rather than a celebration of one’s successes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.

  I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).

  In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.

  Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.

  They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.

  The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, having those decay over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That requires political will to achieve and objective other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.

  The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominat political* philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).

  The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

  It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.

  This of course accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money.

  Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct action-consequence links cycles such as situations whose negative effects are very delayed in time or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ultra high iq⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People at the peak Dunning-Kruger point of intelligence - just above average intelligent enough to feel they’re “above” most people but not enough to properly understand the full nature of intelligence and its limits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ultra high iq⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s my impression that people tend to be more attracted to the unusual, so if you’ve grown up surrounded by big booty latinas, they’re not as appealing as otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ultra high iq⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I can tell, most people out there have expectations about high IQ people which are straight out of Hollywood films and wholly unrealistic, so best just leave then with whatever de facto impression of brightness they have about you than mention a number and trigger the “Mental Superman” expectations.

  Also going around parading your IQ falls straight into the rule “the more a person brags about some great personal quality, the less strong it is” - if you’re really that bright, brave, strong, beautiful, confident and so on, there is no need to mention it since it’s generally obvious to others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petition to tell MasterCard, Visa, and activist groups to stop censoring legal fictional content⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I seriously suspect they’re a psyops to help dissipate people’s righteous anger - people are pissed of a something, sign a meaningless petition in something like change.org, get their “I’ve done something” psychological kick and, having satisfied their need to do something, don’t actually go ahead and do anything effective.

  Defusing the anger against injustices of the very people who tend to be more aware of what’s going on and more concerned about it, before it turns into action or even causes civil society movements to rise, is a pretty useful mechanism for established powers in those countries which peddle the illusion of freedom to their citizenry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even “content at it’s zenith” - AAA games nowadays are pushed out both expensive and broken, plus they come with the risk of some form of enshittification being sneaked in later (be it promised content that we’re told “couldn’t make it into the launch” being sold later as overpriced DLCs or even monetisation).

  I would say that the zenith of most AAA games (in the sense of peak enjoyment) is at least a year after release once most bugs have been fixed and the threat of enshittification has passed, sometimes never (for those games that did got enshittified).

  IMHO, the best value, not just in terms of fun-per-$ but also in avoidance of unpleasant feelings (such as feeling that you’ve been swindled by a game maker or are being taken advantage of) is in buying games which are at least 2 years old, or in the case of some publishers like Nintendo, it’s never.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GET BOMBADEERED, IDIOT⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Only a couple more million years of natural evolution before we beetles capable of jet-powered flight…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hubris go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Neural Networks, which are the base technology of what nowadays gets called AI, are just great automated pattern detection systems, which in the last couple of years with the invention of things like adversarial training can also be made to output content that match those patterns.

  The simpler stuff that just does pattern recognition without the fancy outputting stuff that matches the pattern was already, way back 3 decades ago, recognized at being able to process large datasets and spot patterns which humans hadn’t been able to spot: for example there was this NN trained to find tumors in photos which seemed to work perfectly in testing but didn’t work at all in practice, and it turned out that the NN had been trained with pictures were all those with tumors had a ruler next to it showing its size and those without tumors did not, so the pattern derived in training by the NN for “tumor present” was actually the presence of the ruler.

  Anyways, it’s mainly this simpler and older stuff that can be used to help with scientific discovery by spotting in large datasets patterns which we humans have not, mainly because they can much faster and more easily trawl through an entire haystack to find the needles than we humans can, but like in the “tumor detection NN” example above, sometimes the patterns aren’t in the data but in the way the data was obtained.

  The fancy stuff that actually outputs content that matches patterns detected in the data, such as LLMs and image generation, and which is fueling the current AI bubble, is totally irrelevant for this kind of use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTuber Faces Possible Jail Time for Reviewing Gaming Handhelds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alternativelly, some higher-up got pressure from some lobbyist or golf-buddy of some politician to “do something”, and some lower-down who got the hot potato covered their ass by finding something they could do, all of which quite independently of any strategical considerations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTuber Faces Possible Jail Time for Reviewing Gaming Handhelds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost certainly there was some kind of pressure by somebody well connected on some higher up in the Italian Justice or Political Authorities of the

  “Something Must Be Done!”

  kind.

  Followed by whomever was the last link in the shit chain coming from above, following the mental process of:

  “This is Something we can do”

  “We shall do This!”

  It’s pretty standard in the stuff which isn’t their daily bread and butter that Justice Systems are driven by cronyism at the higher level and cover-my-ass at the lower level, especially in countries which have a culture of Cronyism.

  Often this shit gets overturned when it gets to court or on at least appeal (generally the system gets less crooked as you go up, though I know of cases in other similar countries were only when it got the European Court Of Human Rights did the injustice go made right) and once the Press’ (and the higher up’s) attention has moved on, but that is a mentally and economically very costly fight for individuals to fight, which is why poor people almost invariably get shafted in such a system when they cross the wrong person or “don’t know their place”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microwave Intensifies⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but that makes the waves more choppy and stormlike which increases degradation of the equipment on the other side as the waves collide against it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  T-Sidious Rex!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, once you ionize it air is a great conductor ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or a new kind of Physics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Uuh, nice - that sound like it would work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it’s not actually a “biological” mechanism, though by some definitions of the word one might call it a “natural” mechanism ;)