Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on What's wrong with Bluesky App? 2 days ago:
For me, the biggest red flag is that they decided to create their own protocol when the Fediverse is well on its way with the ActivityPub protocol. They claimed, they decided against ActivityPub, because they expect to be able to come up with something technologically better.
I don’t doubt for a second that some of their techies might have wet dreams about that, but it wouldn’t get financed, if their management and investors didn’t see an angle for making money off of it.
Which is ultimately what this is. Yet another venture-capital-backed company trying to get enough users on board, to the point where network effects prevent the users from leaving, and then the investors will want their money back manifold.
If they open up the protocol too much, the network isn’t under their exclusive control anymore and they lose the ability to squeeze users for money, so I cannot see them following through with their promises of actually making it decentralized.
- 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, withblackjack and hookersscrewdrivers and mese. - Comment on Larian revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has sold 2 copies in the Vatican 1 week ago:
Interesting. I almost guessed that variant, too, but figured it would be a bit too wild for a country to auto-adopt most laws that another country implements. 🙃
- Comment on Larian revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has sold 2 copies in the Vatican 1 week ago:
I’m more surprised that it even got offered there. There’s some legal hurdles to clear for selling in a new country, and I guess, one of their distribution platforms decided it was worth it.
I guess, the Vatican might not have a ton of laws, though…
- 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 Let's discuss: Mascot Platformers 1 week ago:
What I don’t like about the genre, is that I’m bad at it. 🙃
More seriously, I do find it kind of frustrating at times. Restarting ten times in a roguelike, no problem, because it’s always a new challenge.
But if I miss the same jump ten times, or have to retry the same platforming passage ten times, you’ll see me getting impatient, which means I’ll fail the next ten attempts, too… - 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:
- 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 What's the point of reading aloud the digits of the golden mean and recording the whole damn thing? 2 weeks ago:
Hmm, maybe this was considered for putting onto the Voyager Golden Record or something like it…?
- Comment on What's the point of reading aloud the digits of the golden mean and recording the whole damn thing? 2 weeks ago:
At the risk of calling someone’s work boring: Might help people fall asleep?
- 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:
- limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
- somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
- Comment on Peak performance 3 weeks ago:
Bulbasaur even has a sweet spoiler for that extra traction.
- Comment on Peak performance 3 weeks ago:
I mean, no, but people do still drive them on highways, so the mildest resemblance of fuel efficiency would be nice.
- 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 Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation 3 weeks ago:
Well, I’m at least not surprised. They didn’t achieve good face animations through technological advancement, but rather by throwing tons of money at the problem, i.e. hiring actors and motion-capturing them.
When it stops being your unique selling point, you’re not gonna get as much budget anymore, at which point it’s either scrapped or you might use worse equipment, worse actors and give the actors less time to practice and redo scenes.
In general, the problem with realistic graphics is that reality is your upper bound. It’s difficult to inch closer to it and it’s easy to regress when you don’t pay as much attention to some detail…
- Comment on Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation 3 weeks ago:
You see, the problem is that game publishers have been innovating hard…
…ly, so modern games are barely an improvement over old games, except in terms of graphics. In particular, they want to continue not innovating by re-releasing those same old games with new graphics slapped onto them.
If everyone could just play those old titles, then they wouldn’t need to play the new titles, which would be very bad, because it would mean game publishers would need to innovate.
- Comment on We need a vexillology community! 3 weeks ago:
- 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 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?
