vithigar
@vithigar@lemmy.ca
- Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this. 5 days ago:
Holy cow. This is possibly the best description of how I usually think I’ve ever encountered. It was actually a bit unnerving to read. Though I’ve always conceptualized it as “shapes” and “holes” rather than vectors.
The ability to near-instantly make connections between symptoms and cause for any given issue in a system I’m familiar with especially resonated. The best explanation I could give someone without stepping back and basically re-solving the whole thing from a standing start would be “the shapes fit together”.
It feels like I’m being asked how I knew a puzzle piece fit in a space, and for some reason “I looked at it and could see that it fit” is not a sufficient explanation. No, I didn’t need to investigate other possible pieces. They are obviously different shapes. The one that you’re asking about doesn’t even belong to the same puzzle.
Similarly I am also utterly incapable of describing what a person looks like in any detail. I have a “mind’s eye” and can conjure up images of them in my head, but for whatever reason I just completely lack the ability to express what I see in words outside of very high level details. They have brown hair, they’re tall, what do you mean “what shape is their face?” Sara’s face is the shape of Sara’s face. It couldn’t be any other shape.
I do have an internal monologue or voice though, but it’s not constant. It usually only comes up when I’m dealing with other people and need to try to reason through what someone else is doing.
- Comment on Sensory issues 5 days ago:
I feel the need to ask about the choice of “loud” as the adjective here. Are the tags actually making audible noise, or is this just a non-standard usage of it an a synonym for “overwhelming”?
- Comment on Anon goes to a halloween party 1 week ago:
It’s highlighting “me” as a keyword. The only language I can think of that uses that is Visual Basic.
- Comment on Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post 2 weeks ago:
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of “I’m better at everything because I’m the main character”, but she’s hardly alone in that, and it doesn’t usually attract that much ire.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 4 weeks ago:
Average annual family income in the US is around $80k/a. Are you seriously suggesting that families should be looking for homes in the $20k to $30k range? What kind of home, exactly, do you think you get for that?
- Comment on Soon... 5 weeks ago:
“me at my parents age” is in the future.
- Comment on Fucking idiots 1 month ago:
Does the extra fuel you used hauling around your entire launch vehicle not count as waste?
- Comment on reddit chatroom 2 months ago:
This isn’t probing though. Probing would be like… mentioning some anime that featured fan service of questionably aged characters and gauging the response.
This is just straight up announcing yourself.
- Comment on Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it' 2 months ago:
I’m in a similar boat. Pledged but it’s been years since I gave them money and I’m not really following it closely anymore. Can’t say I ever felt like a rube though, backing a crowdfunded project is always a gamble to some degree, and that money was so long ago that any impact on my situation from having it or not has long since faded.
I’m a little disappointed in the date potentially being pushed back, but it’s not like I marked it on my calendar or anything. If they had said nothing and the date just slipped by I probably wouldn’t even notice if no one else brought it up.
I’ll play S42 if/when it comes out, and probably even enjoy it, but I’m not chomping at the bit.
- Comment on It's a whole genre! 2 months ago:
It’s also really bad even for AI.
Not only would it have been really, really easy to find a non-AI image, it would have been similarly easy to get better results from image gen. It’s like they went out of their way to find the worst slop possible.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 months ago:
That’s a fair point. Which I guess changes my reasoning from “I don’t watch them because they’re bad at games” to “I don’t watch them because they are insufferable clowns”.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 months ago:
This is basically why I can’t watch any “variety” streamers. They are, without exception, absolutely awful at learning new games or even just understanding what’s happening on screen.
You’d think that would be antithetical to having your livelihood hinge on playing a wide swathe of games, but here we are.
Steamers that focus on a specific game/genre thankfully tend to have some idea what they’re doing.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 months ago:
I don’t even have those anymore and now their absence is causing problems.
- Comment on The recent Steam censorship debacle actually sort of opened me up to adult games. 2 months ago:
Tycho, of Penny Arcade, actually had some words on this subject around the time the PC version of Stellar Blade came out and people were up in arms about it. I’ll quote it here because I think it’s a good passage.
I used to say that I grew up Christian, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say Evangelical, especially now that more people might know what I’m talking about. Sex was VERY naughty and we needed to be constantly on the lookout for incursions of this secular, demonic, but also somehow worryingly inherent force…? Breaking that pernicious notion down and enabling people to express themselves was the project I thought I’d more or less seen completed. Now it’s come around some weird bend, with precisely the same energy as before, except now it’s being done for the correct reasons. It can’t possibly be this dumb. And yet!
It’s incredibly fucking boring to have the tail end of the revolution you saw win shame the tools that gave them victory, dust off a bunch of regressive shit, and then have the pluck to feel righteous about it.
It sort of mirrors my own experience (minus the evangelical upbringing). I definitely recall a period of general sex-positivity that has now come around some strange turn whereby the very same voices are admonishing people for daring to enjoy sexy things.
It’s very strange.
- Comment on Which way? 3 months ago:
I had a lot of trouble with this and in my case I just have weirdly curved nails. Viewed from the front my big toe nails are basically half-circles, so any pressure at all pushes them edge first into my toe.
- Comment on PSA on privuhcy 4 months ago:
Right? The fact that this is an extra bit of tracking information I don’t want makes this an easy sell for anyone looking for a reason to do this, but for me it’s because it just makes links uglier.
- Comment on kingdom come 4 months ago:
It’s just interesting that there’s a distinction between botanical and culinary classification. Once you realise that there are two different systems that don’t necessarily need to completely agree then it’s not a big deal.
…also, what exactly is wrong with taking a bite out of a tomato like an apple? They’re delicious.
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 4 months ago:
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a disclosure, but an uncertain threshold that might be as low as “a developer accepted a copilot completion suggestion one time” isn’t useful. You just end up with a prop65 situation where it’s slapped on everything and basically meaningless.
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 4 months ago:
- Comment on Can I lick it? 4 months ago:
I responded similarly when I saw this posted before. Yes, mercury can be very toxic if it gets into your blood, but the chances of that happening from a lick are astonishingly small.
- Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed 4 months ago:
They accepted BTC for a while but stopped. The other comment here mentioned the transaction fees being a problem for purchases on the scale of steam game prices, but it wasn’t just that. A big problem was crypto volatility and transaction processing time. They found that very often by the time a transaction cleared the value had swung enough that they were getting amounts that failed to align with the actual prices of the games people were buying.
It’s more stable now, so maybe that would be less of a problem, but I feel it highlights a big problem with crypto in general and that is that even when you do find places that accept crypto nothing is priced in crypto. It’s basically always just a proxy for USD using whatever its current market value is.
- Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time 4 months ago:
AA but having a swappable battery tray
Microsoft did something like this with xbox controllers. There are additional contact points inside the battery chamber for a li-ion pack, so you could use a pair of AAs or their rechargeable pack that just fits into the same space.
- Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time 4 months ago:
I disagree about the batteries. Give me replaceable AA cells any day over a built-in Li-ion. Rechargeable AAs are readily available and quickly swappable if you keep hot spares. Much better option for long term serviceability.
- Comment on Anon likes a thing 4 months ago:
Same. I learned this was a thing just the other day.
I don’t use them often but do find them nicer for parenthetical remarks sometimes.
- Comment on It was all a lie, wasn't it? 5 months ago:
“Conduit” is the word for those tubes for wires. Probably a shared etymology with “conductor” though.
Having the pipes in the mortar/bricks sounds like a maintenance nightmare.
- Comment on Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em 5 months ago:
Let’s table that discussion.
Tap for spoiler
The meanings of “table” as a verb in US vs UK parliamentary usage are literally opposites. With the US meaning being to stop discussing or put aside for later, while the UK version means to begin discussing. This actually caused confusion during allied meetings in WWII.
- Comment on Pissebed 5 months ago:
I’m in one of “certain regions” for carpenter.
- Comment on Kinda fucked up tbh 5 months ago:
Spent a moment thinking about this and I think there’s an implied definition for what “on earth” means that we intuitively accept but don’t ever really need to state.
If your projected free-fall trajectory both forward and backward in time intersects with the surface of the earth then you are “on earth”.
Standing on the ground? Intersects twice. Thrown rock? Intersects twice. Person in an airplane? Intersects twice. ISS? No intersection. Incoming impact meteor? One intersection.
- Comment on Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining" 6 months ago:
isthereanydeal isn’t grey market and only shows prices from resellers that operate “above board”.
You can find "way* cheaper than the prices listed there if you’re willing to go grey market.
- Comment on Einstein-Landauer culinary units 6 months ago:
So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?
That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:
At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10^−21^ J).
That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc^2^ to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.
It’s important(?) to note that Landauer’s Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there’s some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven’t checked.