barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on Justice should be equal 5 hours ago:
Valta also sounds like a Germanic loan just a second… yep. Same root as German “Gewalt”, violence, “walten”, to rule, preside, also English wield.
What’s it with Finnish. One third borrowed from Estonian, another third from the Swedes, the rest from the Sami.
- Comment on Call me SKEPT1KAL 1 day ago:
- Comment on Call me SKEPT1KAL 1 day ago:
Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.
Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.
Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, “move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one” is kind of a no-brainer. That’s not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.
OTOH, physics shouldn’t feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 days ago:
Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.
The temporarily embarrassed millionaires don’t tend to be the ones going into gamedev: Our wages suck and being an indie is about as likely to make you rich as playing the lottery. I’d mostly limit that kind of behaviour to FAANG folks as well as people who should have studied business economics instead (or actually did) and probably can’t code for shit anyway, in short: Techbros. They’re about as toxic as your average corporate lawyer.
Assholes existing is a general feature of contemporary society, don’t pin it on people understanding “there are 10 kind of people” jokes.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 days ago:
About 50% of developers are 25-35. We skew young due to more and more people becoming programmers, that is, for the same reason that cobblers skew old, but not first vote kind of young.
And your source doesn’t even make an attempt to correlate voting behaviour to profession, much less specialised field (programmer vs gamedev), not to mention that not every gamedev is a programmer, all in all not enough data to slander a whole profession. Do better.
The reason gamedevs skews progressive, btw, is because artists do.
But OTOH yes you’re right in Poland’s case it’s not imported culture war BS it’s Catholicism.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 days ago:
Super Hexagon!
- Comment on How Would You Rank Quentin Tarantino's Films? 1 week ago:
Craft, pure craft, is what makes a Tarantino movie. Especially strong when it comes to dialogue and framing it.
Tarantino is about as special as Villeneuve is special – but not in the same way. They both have their specialities where they’re extraordinary, and in other aspects they’re only rock solid.
Not liking/enjoying a movie is fine, but it doesn’t really say anything about how good the movie is, it just might not have been for you. Maybe watch a scene analysis and even if the movie still doesn’t do it for you, you can appreciate the skill with which it’s done.
- Comment on TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal 2 weeks ago:
There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting without restraint on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.
In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
I’m not contradicting anything, I didn’t even use the word “life”. I’m simply taking the perspective of the genome, and fighting against the notion that viruses would act as mechanistically as prions.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
It’s a hostile instruction manual which learns, adapting itself to its surroundings, constantly re-writing and re-inventing how it interacts with the world. Which is more than can be said about most politicians. Forget about physical anatomy, for a second, and consider the species as an organism.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
Of course it adjusts to its environment – it even uses it to replicate. Viruses are that branch of the genome which is being minimalist about its seed pods, other branches need all kinds of superfluous stuff like eyes and limbs and brains and whatnot. Complete waste of resources, having pods which can maintain independent homeostasis, what good does that for the homeostasis of the genome? Eh?
- Comment on Starbucks wants a Bachelor's degree for a barista 3 weeks ago:
Many of which won’t be recognised, at least not without further qualification. And no you can’t become an English teacher with a US degree in literature: You need to study second language acquisition pedagogics, ideally for that specific language pair. Nobody cares about your interpretation of To kill a Mockingbird.
- Comment on #StopKillingGames Update: Initiative reaches seven country requirement 3 weeks ago:
All minimums taken together only sum up to 497025. The million signatures is the actual hurdle, any campaign that is not horribly lopsided should easily get the seven countries.
The idea is that if your initiative is excessively national it has no business being a EU initiative.
- Comment on ugh i wish 3 weeks ago:
Well yes that’s another reason but trust me when I say that you’re not the only European country with standards for milk and eggs. There’s nothing to brag about, also, do you even raw pork.
- Comment on ugh i wish 3 weeks ago:
You know that exact kind of thing is why you’re known as arrogant swots all over Europe, don’t you? Do you google whether Denmark has safe tap water before going on ølviking?
- Comment on ugh i wish 3 weeks ago:
UHT does, 140C for 2-5 seconds. Shelf-stable without refrigeration for up to nine months unless you open it.
Frankly speaking the difference between milk from cows with good diet vs. from cows fed protein slop is greater than between the modes of processing.
Still have PTSD from my mother feeding me raw milk – unlike in the US it’s legal here, also heavily regulated so it wasn’t a health risk microbiology-wise but boy am I sensitive to even slight off-tastes in milk because yes you’re going to interrupt the cooling chain and no that fridge doesn’t have 8C. Unless you’re a cheesemaker or such and it’s necessary for the process, stay away from raw.
And, no, it doesn’t have health benefits. Maybe if your kid doesn’t play outside in the mud and the milk is the only source of germs they’re exposed to, then it may help them to not develop autoimmune disorders. Be sane, choose mud over milk.
- Comment on The world is ending but here's a side quest - will RPGs ever solve their urgency problem? 3 weeks ago:
Because the world isn’t “ending”.
- Comment on Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media, and we should not be fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables, researcher says 4 weeks ago:
Now I might be an old disillusioned fart but nope, social media hasn’t changed a thing… for me. The anxiety, depression, and anger was already there, full force, in the 80s and 90s. I mean come on listen to Punk and Grunge. Coincides pretty well with the rise of Neoliberalism and New Labour, wait why did I use the same term twice. It’s at the tail wave of boomers having had their revolution and subsequently declaring the end of history.
What differs though is that (yeah I’m going to do it) the young’uns who never experienced life without the internet, worse, without a smartphone or tablet, don’t even go to fucking concerts any more where they could touch some grass and get laid. Also media competency falls off drastically again I think somewhere in the middle of gen Z.
- Comment on Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games 4 weeks ago:
Hmm it also got pulled from gog.
UT2004 Onslaught is still the best game mode ever btw. Haven’t played in a long while but like ten years ago there were still a good number of servers around. Not enough players for the big maps, though, those need like 20 people per team.
- Comment on Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell 4 weeks ago:
I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
OMG yes I said “blast furnace to reduce steel”. I meant “to reduce iron [to produce steel]”. Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?
But “reduce steel” is still actually correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would’ve realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe~3~O~4~ (that’s magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised, and the carbon that’s used in alloying, well, it’s not in the atmosphere is it.
You can rip the oxygen off iron with electricity but that’s less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It’s different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.
Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.
If you think that’s what I’m saying then no, you don’t understand my POV.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we’ll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.
Even with fusion up and running we’re going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running… and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they’ll have customers from day one.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 5 weeks ago:
When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?
Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we’ll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.
Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.
Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that’s what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer’s initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn’t hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that’s negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there’s good enough interconnectivity.
…meanwhile, we’ll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 5 weeks ago:
Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.
Gas can be synthesised and we’re going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don’t need much maintenance if they’re not actually running.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
It’s not technology it’s physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn’t explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.
Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it’s not like we don’t know how to do that, or don’t already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and “but we don’t want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive”.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 5 weeks ago:
The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.
…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.
Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
- Comment on IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default. 5 weeks ago:
3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing.
There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft.
- Comment on IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default. 5 weeks ago:
I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?
Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.
- Comment on IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default. 5 weeks ago:
AutoCAD
It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but a SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not yet everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?
- Comment on IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default. 5 weeks ago:
OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings.
Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.
