LichenStone

I would recommend checking out Chyrosran22's keyboard reviews for a more fair comparison across different boards. He's reviewed just about every switch type under the sun at this point - https://www.youtube.com/@Chyrosran22/videos

At the end of every review he does a typing test, and for the last few years at least I think the mic has been in more or less the same kind of position and they've been recorded in the same room. You still have to apply a pinch of salt because I don't know if there's been significant differences in audio level normalisation/compression/EQ, but it would give you a more representative idea of what to expect.

How does this compare to something like Godot?

What I do to deal with general noise but specifically disruptive low frequency noise from my surroundings is to mask it, in particular with longform (often an hour long) dub techno tracks. CV313 is good for this. It's the only good way to counteract the subsonic energy coming through my walls and ceiling.

We experience sub frequencies with our whole body, certainly I seem to have a high sensitivity to the 5-30Hz stuff. So no amount of ear plugging will be really that effective.

https://www.ventrella.com/Clusters/

I've been looking at DCS recently, considering the AV-8B...

This is a fascinating look and series of interviews of an early 3D avatar chat community. Their experiences still seem quite relevant today.

I've been getting into the early stages of developing a game concept, from the position of a near complete novice. My idea is very vague but I know enough of the elements to be able to break it down into numerous atomised technical challenges to be overcome, little things like making something move and emit a sound.

So far this approach seems to be working really well, I'm not getting overwhelmed or bogged down by trying to 'vertical slice' anything, and keeping the end goal very loosely defined means I can easily adopt new gameplay ideas as I come across them in the process of tinkering with the available tools and their interactions.

Once I've figured out all the individual challenges I can begin in earnest to craft the whole.

I generally take disinformation to entail some nefarious intent on the part of the source and those who amplify it. Misinformation is more akin to just noise, irrelevant or confusing details that obfuscate the truth.

The problems of course are determining when and where exactly someone has ill intent, and when information is unhelpful noise. This seems likely to remain a qualitative endeavour.

"Likewise we cannot generalise very easily from what information is given to us by the press or on twitter or on social media. We can generalise [pretty good] with some training, but we are not natually good at it.

So you will have a deficit in our understanding of reality, and that's what disinformation plays on"

Thanks, I'll check that out!

Reaper is easily my favourite software project out there, been using it for years. Still not got around to trying Ninjam though.

Realearn is an essential extension if you like to use Reaper with control surfaces.

I agree that this article perhaps veers a little too far into the kind of 'objective' territory that you mention, it's something I see and dislike often in similar pieces, though to be fair I think it's probably quite hard to avoid while remaining personally relatable to many people.

My strategy in general for taking in ideas is to simply pick and choose the bits that seem interesting and productive, and internally reinterpret those parts to remove the author's biases and excessions that don't seem relevant.

This tends to cause issues when I share things like this article though, people often seem to prefer to interpret the tone of the piece as a whole, and that overall or initial reading colours their view of the individual ideas that were espoused, making it harder for me and them to have a productive discussion about it.

That's a good way of thinking about it. Reminds me of when Alan Kay asks "Are ideas like matter? [bumps his fists together] Or are they more like light? [Overlaps his hands]" (roughly paraphrasing there).

The ability to entertain multiple, seemingly contradictory thoughts at once is a good skill I think.

Aye, the ideal goal of disussion shouldn't be to persuade in my opinion, but to explore each other's ideas with the aim of modifying and improving each position. I think the process of doing that happens to be the best way to actually get people to go along with something also.

I have heard very little of his music so far, only in some of the Tarkovsky films like Stalker which I adore.

This theme for Urga: Close to Eden is beautiful, I must watch the film one of these days - https://youtu.be/_U_DOuAWz4g He always seems to utilise a rich mix of styles and instrumentation.

... https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/08/russia-blacklists-...

Russia has blacklisted U.K. foreign affairs think tank Chatham House as an “undesirable organisation,” the country’s Prosecutor-General's Office announced Friday.

The authorities believe the organization presents "a threat to the constitutional order and security of Russia."

“Everybody within the Chatham House Russia program that has expressed an opinion is enormously proud of this endorsement,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at Chatham House.

“It comes as confirmation that the program’s work is both effective and heading in the right direction. For those old enough, it is reminiscent of times under the Soviet regime, when a denunciation in Pravda would be the ultimate recognition that you had annoyed the USSR by doing the right thing", he said. “We will continue to support Ukraine, and there will be absolutely no effect on Chatham House’s work promoting peace and security in Europe."

I don't know what you find hard to believe in the idea that an ex-KGB man who has been an autocratic illiberal leader for over 20 years now, might just be quite manipulative and duplicitous in his diplomatic communications.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, speaking about Putin's rise to power in the documentary Citizen K -

"It seemed to me that, ideologically, he was one of our people. A man of our generation, who gets it, who wants to push Russia in the same direction that we want for it. That is towards openness, towards democracy.

Boy was I mistaken.

He's a very talented KGB guy. Very talented. You like leftists? Putin will behave around you in a way that you will be convinced that he's a leftist. You like nationalists? Putin is going to act around you in a way that you'll think that he's a bit of a nationalist. You like conservatives? Talk to him and you will get an impression that he's a conservative.

That's a talent."

Also see this - https://tompepinsky.com/2022/03/03/heres-why-mearsheimers-re...

Both The Witness and Outer Wilds were two highly acclaimed games that I fully expected to really enjoy, but with both of them I left feeling very disappointed, for different reasons.

I respect what the Witness does and the craft of how it's all put together, very clever. But it just ends up feeling like a bumper book of puzzles to me, after a few dozen of the same kind of puzzle I just get very irritable. I was expecting a more Myst-like experience where the puzzles are varied and integrated into the environment, where there's equal focus between world/story building and the puzzling. To me The Witness felt like it took a long time to say very little, it's very rare that I use the term pretentious but I do feel like it applies here.

The Outer Wilds also has some very innovative and interesting ideas and craft, but left me very underwhelmed. I won't go into details but I honestly think it's pretty overrated. It all hinges on how well the story and world captivates you though, I can see how many people would like it.

Riven is still the absolute high point of the explorative puzzle genre for me.

This is very cool. I've always been very disappointed that programming is so utterly dominated by the linear text format. It feels like so much potential for expression and feedback is getting left on the table, making use of our capacity to understand and work with spatialisation, patterns, sounds, colours, dynamics, etc would make a lot of sense.

Bret Victor's The Future of Programming and other talks come to mind - https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4

So, a folder could be expressed in terms of a page full of links.

This is basically what I do in Obsidian with the Zootelkeeper and Folder Note plugins. Every folder has a note attached to it with an autogenerated index of all the notes contained within. So for all my notes I use a hybrid of folders, indexes, and the graph view to navigate though everything. So far I'm not really needing to go more than 3 folders deep, mostly it's just 2 folders deep.

Personnel oriented end - on to the blast wave (that is, lying down with either their head or feet pointed toward the blast) offer little resistance to the dynamic pressure component of the wave, and the incident shock (or side-on pressure) constitutes their air blast dose (Figure 7-8). The end - on orientation also gives the best protection against being displaced by the blast wind.

For persons side-onto the approachingblast wave, the dynamic pressure and incident pressure are additive (Figure 7-9). In the region of short - duration blast waves (a positive phase of 3 msec or less), there is a twofold difference in magnitude between the curves for the end-on and side -on orientations.

Individuals positioned against a large reflecting surface and normal to the incident shock would have the peak reflected pressure as their effective blast dose (Figure 7-10).

For example, the threshold (that is, the lowest overpressure at which trivial lesions are first detected) for lung injury is about 12psi for blast waves of greater than 20-30 msec duration; scattered pleural petechiae are the threshold injury. Subjects end-on to the blast would require an incident shock of 12 psi static pressure to cause this lesion. If the subjects are oriented side-on,an incident shock of 10 psi (with an associated dynamic pressure of 2psi) would cause equal damage. If the subject is against a reflector, an incident shock of just over 5 psi (reflecting to 12 psi) would cause the same injury. Although all three examples have different incident blast waves, the biologically effective blast loading is the same.

Page 256 (241 in the page print) for "The Physics and Mechanisms of Primary Blast Injury"; I was trying to find information about the effect of lying flat on the ground for surviving a blast, there's some graphs on page 269.

Here is that chapter as a standalone PDF - https://ckapfwstor001.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/pfw-images...

This would be relevant information to those living in Ukraine right now.

Anyone who lived in or visited a third world country and watched people produce works of astounding precision and perfect finish with their bare hands will understand that in the 1st world we are just not very capable with our hands since the industrial revolution.

This is too true. I realised this in the last few years after getting into wood carving and deciding to learn how to sharpen a blade properly. You don't need some fancy contraption or machine to put a good edge on a knife or other cutting tool, using just my hands and eyes with a few small stones I can put a consistent razor edge on just about anything. It's shocking to me how common it is for people to have dull or completely blunt chefs knives in their kitchen, freehand sharpening is a basic skill that I think 90% have the dexterity and capability to learn, but proper hand skills just aren't a priority anymore.

A lot of still quite relevant traditional building methods are being overlooked or forgotten too, a relative who does slate roofing and various other work for housing in the UK often expresses dismay at the state of building education and common practices.

I have a hope that eventually hand skills for maniplation of objects in 3D space might once again become something of a priority, with some kind of future haptic technology. See Bret Victor's excellent Humane Representation of Thought talk - http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf He doesn't know exactly how such technology could be made exactly, just that it probably will one day and we should think about designing software and interfaces to build towards that.

You don't have to be a neoconservative to criticise realism, just speaking for myself I wouldn't fit into the definition of one. Using expressions of particular opinions to demonstrate that people belong to a more general class is usually a bad idea.

I think most people who are making counterarguments to Mearsheimer et al are not ignoring or dismissing realism, they are pointing out the limitations and flaws with its predictive powers and usefulness for determining 'optimal' policies.

People want realism to be a theory of how the world actually works, a theory of how the world should work, and a theory of what should we do given how the world works, all at the same time.

In terms of presenting an accurate model realism is only as good as the analysis you put into it, and unless you have a very advanced computer simulation of the world you can't test these models for what exactly will happen and when. Sometimes your prediction will be reasonably accurate and sometimes it won't, and hindsight bias will play tricks.

And as for its usefulness for deciding what we should do there seems to be little provision for the role of ideology, ethics, a sense of honour etc, i.e. what kind of world people would like to live in. Those factors are critical not just for making a model of current and future realities, but are of course essential for figuring out how we want to shape our world. A purely utilitarian view just aiming to minimise war and death might permit a more highly autocratic and repressive world, which could be at odds with many people's view of meaning and personal or collective destiny. An example of such a destiny would be the Ukrainian people's desire to live in a democractic Western-aligned state, and the West's desire to support them in this goal.

Thanks! That's really useful.

May I ask what other search engines you use? I'm trying to find good alternatives to the usual right now.

Personally I never really like graphical overhaul mods that do more than just add subtle technical improvements to what's already there. The art direction is usually such an important part of a game that doing things like changing colours, shadows, and textures always seems to lose something that made the original coherent and unique.

The official remasters of Halo 1 and 2 are good examples of how not to do it, Halo CE Anniversary edition in particular is truly horrid. Initially I was quite warm to Halo 2's treatment, but on a subsequent replay I felt that the new graphics took something away from the composition of many of the scenes.

Games' graphics and level design are designed for a specific level of graphical fidelity at that time in history. Going back to things and adding more greebling everywhere and making the shadows fancier won't necessarily improve the game, signposting is a subtle art and it's easy reduce clarity with additive changes.

Doing graphics overhauls and remasters right, without corrupting the original art direction is really really tough. Most of the time it tends to go wrong, hopefully Desolation turns out great.