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dgently7

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Blender 5.2 LTS 22 hours ago

in 3d we have "blinns law", someone else probably has a better definition but basically it says that we keep adding complexity and details to a scene until it takes about an hour to render a frame. that being about as long as any artist is willing to wait to see their work. so even though a computer today could render toy story 1 in faster than real time, toy story 5 probably rendered per frame as about the same amount of time as toy story 1.

this checks out.

Not the most technically impressive feat but i was able to do this with some remote controls for some ceiling fans. figured out the protocol, wired up an esp32 with a radio chip, and had the whole thing integrated into HA in about 1 day. with maybe 3 hrs max of active effort, much of it from my phone with claude remote control while i did other things.

idea to done realtime was thursday to saturday. and that was mostly waiting on the same day shipping for the 6$ radio chip i needed. no way i would have ever even attempted that project perviously, but now i have ceiling fans that are massively more capable, and i can throw away the cheap terrible remote and replace it with a dedicated in wall switch controller.

previously devices with those terrible cheap remotes were a downside, now its almost a selling point.

it occurs to me that you dont need to even actually do it. just say you will. say you have an ironclad way to lock it down that is baked into the hardware. If the scalpers think they cant actually sell them they wont try to buy them. MOST people will just login with the account that bought it those who dont are probably benign and can be ignored.

And honestly you probably dont want to tempt non-scalpers into being one time scalpers either.

at least for the first round till people figure it out it would totally solve it. people who actually want one get one at msrp.

the downside is you maybe dont get as many early or up front reservations from people who arent sure. but like your whole problem is more demand than supply so thats not actually an issue. and the people who can buy them for msrp will be really glad you did the thing. so you probably end out ahead on consumer side.

just invite more friends over and make it batch style in a punch bowl. still will be an unhealthy amount unless you have a lot of friends, but you will have a good time.

no idea on the accuracy or veracity of the history of the name (as is pretty common for cocktails) but i always loved the explanation that the drink is called the french 75 because it "kicks like a french 75" meaning the 75mm artillery gun used in ww1.

I do know that gun exists and you can see it on display at the ww1 museum in kansas city. Having never seen one fired i can only assume how much it kicks but it is pretty large, and working backwards from the efficacy of the drink i suspect it packs a whallop. still a great name, great drink.

this. also realize its a complex game with a legit learning curve. you literally cant just drop in to pvp and expect to have fun.

and also at least in lobbies with noob in the name its pretty rare for people to be actively hostile to the low os ppl who at least know the basics. but you do have to remember that in the middle of a match nobody has time to type and tell you what to do politely.(its an apm heavy game). try to assume good intent, its not ppl being rude usually.

i just started playing this last year, and tbh ive seen way more patience in "noob" lobbies than i would have expected for an online game. the bar (pun intended) to having a good experience as a noob is not hard but also not obvious. my observations are:

1. have at least played some pve, the "scenerios" are good for forcing you to learn a lot of the basics. if you literally dont know how to do basic interacting with the game there is nothing that the other players in the "noob" lobby can help you with. you will struggle they will struggle no one will have fun. pvp is just an objectively bad way to learn the game. don't even try to play pvp until you are at 2 or even 3 "chev". its a complex game with lots of mechanics, its going to take time to get the basics down. 2. watching replays/specing is helpful. so are some of the yt basics guides. find someone elses build and strategy and try to copy it. you can get to a pretty high os just by doing that. if you get beat bad in a round go watch your own replay. see what the other guy did. copy it next time. 3. remember that its an apm taxed kinda game, players will spend their apm trying to help you, but they wont have time to say things nicely. its not them trying to be mad or rude usually, they just dont have time to write you a novel. use the inbetween matches chat to ask for details. assume good intent on in game chat most of the time. 4. remember that os is literally just a number, it really doesn't mean anything. but finding lobbies with similar os to you helps. like even though there are lots of lobbies with like 30+os who will allow your 10-15 os noob self in its not the right match for you. find lobbies with like 25ish os cap. or no more than 10-15 os higher than your current rank. even better ones that are "unranked" but they seem more rare. 5. the rotato suggestion i saw on another thread is good but also the glitters/supreme with the consistent roles is also kinda nice. its much easier to find lobbies and follow replays and stuff, pick the same lane and watch how a few different people play it and copy what looks like it works as best you can.

hmm yeah, take that one step farther and you have your get on the ocean fast tutorial level.. go from point a to point b. fight one ship. capture a small island. then the map opens up an you are just in the first level. ready to take on the rest. it also solves the beginner problem where if you cant kill three ships in one health bar you cant capture the island to heal and you can get stuck roaming the seas looking for places to heal. with a small (but a little far away) starter island you could retreat to heal and try again.

while i have you... what does the bounty hunters thing do? i see it pop up but then nothing really happens. i keep expecting like 5 ships to try and hunt me down but nada.

a middle approach could be a trainer mode where you can say your desired direction of travel and the game gives you a suggestion of heading + trim. think like the driving line in racing sims, it doesn't brake for you but it helps you develop intuition of what to do when. a oldtimey map line drawn on the ocean to show where when to tack at what angle would be so nice. especially for the longer hops between islands.

sure of course nothing is perfect and oiio has a lot of surface area / is still oss. thats good advice.

ive just seen a lot of "ai researchers" who are getting into professional image processing and are both beginners and want things quickly and so could do much worse than just starting from what they get out of oiio. especially for a lot of the non-obvious stuff (more of that in color handling than just the io stuff though)

"Let’s say you’re writing an image processing program. The program takes in an image, converts it to floating point, does some processing and finally saves the modified pixels to disk as 8-bit colors. "

excuse to argue about the best way aside, if this is the goal you should not be rolling your own image file reading. you should use openimageio. idk what approach it takes in its internal conversion to float, but that library is more likely to have the right answer than you trying to roll it yourself given its the library used internally by tons of professional image manipulation software...

pull up any moderately busy picture with more than a trivial amount of objects. pictures of "traffic" or with other similar repetition are great for this demo. pick one specific object (like a specific tire on one car) in the image and write (or say) out all the words youd need to specify that exact object. now take the same image and point at the object with your mouse or circle it with an annotation tool. its often very very hard to describe accurately which object you are talking about, you will often resort to vague "location" words anyway like "on the upper left" that try to define the position in a corse way that requires careful parsing to understand. pointing/annotating is massively superior both in brevity, clarity, and speed.

wasnt that magenta highlights thing a pretty well known deficiency of the reds for a long time? (unsure if they resolved it in recent ones)

unrailed meets scrabble.

what dictionary does this use, i tried a few words that i was pretty sure are in the scrabble set but didnt work here. (could be wrong)

for me the train is a little bit too fast for the letter input method. like even if i have a word by the time i get all the tiles down the train has made more progress than my word added. some kind of way to get a bonus for longer words that gives you more time feels like it would be a nice balance tweak. like risky, take more time to find a longer word but more payoff for doing it. basically makes me look at the rack and say... do i have a long word here... do i have time to find it...

evil ... yet.

if op is really serious about fixing social networking he needs to figure out a way to operate it that wont enshittify.

ie, public good, not for profit, something like that.

as is hes already signaled he intends to enshittify it eventually ("premium features"..?) which to me is a non-starter.

the problem is that a successful network beyond a certain size like this needs funding. its unfortunate but this needs legal /compliance, moderation, even marketing...

those things aren't free, but you could imagine ways to pay for them. Id totally accept a small subscription fee for a network like this if paying that fee could guarantee privacy, and that the person hosting all my data would not be looking to squeeze every dime of value out of me as a user.

anything less than solving the funding problem and you are just saying you will become facebook (or get bought by them). no thanks.

double agree on the classic pro.

disagree on pid kit only.

the full on duino mod is way better for one primary reason. power steam or whatever they call the thing they do with the steamer. it takes the sputtery slow and weak steam wand and makes it actually functional.

also the "adaptive" settings you can do on there let you basically never have to "dial in" a shot. throw any random (still decent q and paired with a good grinder) beans on there and you get a shot thats very drinkable. For lattes and stuff where you are hiding the coffee in milk anyway this is like still better than 90% of what you can get from the coffee shop with the 20k$ big iron and 0 effort. and when you do have that special bag that wants the extra attention and straight espresso you've got all the controls and presets and shot tracking.

if you are gonna try and do home espresso you already have an involved hobby, if you are gonna mod your machine you are already pretty hardcore about your hobby... you might as well go all in at that point

the most interesting thing here is actually maybe that this is cad targeted for easy 3dp modeling. while you wont ever unseat the big guys there is a lot more you could do to make this sub space better by targeting it.

like could you make it aware of the fdm limits and help me avoid them while im building instead of needing the build-slice-refine flow across multiple software?

im familiar with this work and specifically they tried replicating the sodium vapor style approach but what worked for poppins level isnt actually good enough for today. Specifically you still end up with light spill that contaminates the foreground, especially for things like the fresnel reflections on the side of a face. the magenta idea was to still do what is basically a color difference key, but increase the color separation between fg and bg by lighting the two with different opposite colored lights. then using a ml model to recover the original fg color.

youd have to train it to also generate and st map of the distortions but creating the ground truth version of that from the synthetic data would add a lot more to render. also its very easy to plausibly fake, its not something humans are good at seeing and knowing its wrong. you can tell its completely missing but accurate vs just distorted in a plausible way is not something most brains are tuned to notice.

the general problem with any technique that isnt just throw some vaugely green thing behind our actors is that setting up complicated tech like this on an actual film set is extremely expensive. both the time it would take and the risk of it not working. so you end up with a dedicated permanent stage install but now you need to get the actors and crew to that place. better keys isnt a bad enough problem to justify that effort/cost. even the highly touted "virtual production" mandalorian stuff where you just put a big led wall behind the actors has shown to be more expensive than traditional vfx unless you tightly control the creative or approach.

awesome glad you liked it. id love to try it out again if you implement any of them. idk what else to call the black squares so "enemy" felt right for the board fights back vibe.

another nice thing i thought of with enemy block types idea is that you don't need to look anywhere but the board if you get rid of powerups that you just have so your whole interface gets simpler. if you still needed powerups you could have them show up as normal pieces in the chain of pieces.

it def starts to veer into more of a classic tetris how far can you go vibe than maybe the puzzle thing you are going for, but maybe its actually two games. puzzle mode is as now but starts with a fixed set or fixed progression of enemys. you finish the puzzle when you defeat them all. winning then is time or rows cleared or minimum number of pieces even. infinite mode is more like the current. or classic tetris, how far can you go while new enemies spawn in of increasing number and difficulty. winning is how many enemies you clear + lines + time

Also enjoyed this, similar frustration at not being able to use powerups in a loss condition. Never got to the state where it felt like the "board fights back".

This comment above about difficulty made me wonder if there are more interesting things to do with the unclear-able blocks that would both let you ramp the difficulty and achieve more of your vision. A few off the cuff ideas:

* enemy blocks that are clearable if you make a row and a column through them * enemy blocks that require to be surrounded by n deep blocks to resolve * enemy blocks that automatically pop into single cell holes * enemy blocks that grow by infecting neighboring blocks over time or the more other rows you clear * enemy blocks that require multiple row clears to resolve

the thought is having a few types with each enemy block needing a different strategy to resolve would give you more levers on how to control difficulty and give you more variation to the strategy and more agency to defeat them. powerups is kinda a deus-ex-machina currently. you dont feel earned satisfaction when you clear an enemy block.

I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

i have that rule and the same exception for the 0. it feels like its "cyber" look done actually right with proper design (i dont let other inferior designs steal the word cyber). i would also add any decently good* ev minivan that is actually available to buy in the us.

*vw buzz fails the good test for no one pedal driving and the price for what you get is outta wack. though lots of the 1st gen ones are still sitting on car lots so maybe that could cross the exception barrier if they go for cheaper.