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hipnoizz

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Similarly, when I played UT'99 (by the definition it was ages ago ;-)), I loved playing against stronger players. Yeah, losing a lot, but also getting better, decreasing the gap, learning new things, and at some point being able to win against some of them (or keep the match close). Lots of them was so good - I played solely Instagib, and a lot of 1-1s - that I was happy with just making some kills. But it was a lot of fun nonetheless.

But I've also seen a lot of players that could not cope with losing - maybe overly competitive, maybe a bit immature etc. etc.

Accidentally yesterday I watched 'Miss Hokusai' about a daughter of the artist - she was a painter herself. The (animated) movie can be seen as a series of episodes, with the relations between Katsushika Ōi and her father being one of the subjects presented. From a quick glance at the (English) Wikipedia page about Hokusai I could spot some divergences compared to the movie. Anyway, I enjoyed the move quite a bit.

What are BC features that you find to be so great?

I'm genuinely curious - I heard of lot of BC being 'the tool' for diffing. I'm used to Meld, but my current employee has a pretty strict policy which tools could be used so at some point I've managed a licence for some older version of BC. But for some reason I've found its UI/the way it works a bit less optimal that I was accustomed for. Since I'm using that primarily for text diffs these day I usually use a diff tool from IntelliJ Idea (I have Idea open all the time).

Approached Uzeda a few times (I'm much into noise-rock-and-all-the-friendly-neighbourhood) but it didn't click. On the other hand https://bellini.bandcamp.com/album/the-precious-prize-of-gra... (which consist of 2/4th or 3/4th of Uzeda I think plus Alexis Fleisig from GvsB) is great.

Anyway, I was kind of shattered by the news. All the stuff Steve Albini created (both as the sound engineer and the bands he played with) falls squarely into what moves me (for whatever reasons). And I think he was a really genuine person (outspoken, yes).

Well, from the PoV of someone who tries to learn how to play the guitar I must say that all this AI frenzy managed to produce some useful tools ;-)

I checked https://lamucal.ai/ with some example MP3:

- lyrics are OK (although I've seen tools that managed to do better),

- chords recognition wasn't bad,

- the UI is a bit rough around the edges (and I managed to get some Unity-related errors),

- pitch-aware speed adjustments is always a great tool when someone tries to learn how to play the song,

- transposing can be useful as well (although the web application does not support it).

I'm using (and paid for) some other similar application, although I primarily use that for tracks separation. Later I import tracks into Ardour and then record my own guitar lines. I use just a miniscule percentage features of the DAW, so if someone could provide an application with all that AI goodies coupled with recording ability that would be wonderful.

That said in personally I've found that one way or another I need to listen a lot to the song I'm trying to learn, make notes, break down the song structure (sections, strumming patterns, chords etc.). And a good video on YouTube that starts with a simple version of the song and then adds more and more feature are often the best help to start with, at least at my current level.

My first reaction was that I would pronounce 'ę' in both 'część' and 'język' in the same way, i.e. without 'n'. But I can see that pronunciation of these words as per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cz%C4%99%C5%9B%C4%87 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/j%C4%99zyk disagrees. And then a quick search brought these 'simple' four rules (https://sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/Wymowa-samoglosek-nosowych...) for pronouncing 'ą' and 'ę' in the middle of a word ;-)

So yeah, everything is easy, simple and obvious when you are a native speaker and I stand corrected :)

One exception would be words loaned from Greek, like 'matematyka' or 'fizyka'. But I think they are being 'assimilated' so one can say that they do not count anyway.

Polish has also a fairly rich system of prefixes and suffixes and I think some of them would result in stressing some other syllable than the second to last (penultimate).

I would not be so optimistic to say 99%, but I think a lot of things like that could be actually assigned to some rules that are, well, actually applied pretty consistently. E.g. isn't devoicing of 'w' in 'wszystko' just the case of clusters of voiced and voiceless consonants? Similary 'Hodów' shows devoicing consonants at the end of a word.

I'm not sure about 'ą' - some examples would handy, but if we are talking about differences due to regional accents then following rules would be perfectly fine. With 'ę' - how do you pronounce 'część' actually? Again, I think the worst that can happen normally would be to be judged as 'ą ę'* ;)

I think that in general Polish pronunciation is fairly 'regular' and with applying just a few rules you would be almost always OK. Obviously I haven't try to learn Polish as my second language.

* For non-Polish speakers - if someone is 'ą ę' it means that (among others) he/she tries to be overly 'correct' in pronunciation.

As this specific review is from Phoronix - do you have some proof that their reviews are (heavily) biased? I'm looking at reviews in more details only when I want to buy something, other than that I skip them or just have a quick look. I haven't did any serious comparison either, but I remember Michael Larabel from Phoronix criticising various parties. Many of his reviews are basically measures/benchmarks with some summary on top of that - his benchmarking methodology may be or may be not flawed, I don't remember him shilling for AMD. AMD has probably some goodwill from the Linux community since they open source or provide various specs for their graphics card. At least that used to be the case.

I've spent probably close to a decade using Gerrit with various sized teams, and in the past few months I had an opportunity to work with Gitlab (so the MR/PR model). I've found that I definitely prefer Gerrit (and this feeling is shared by my colleagues). I think it boils down to following reasons.

Gerrit is a CR tool only (OK, it also hosts you repositories) and I've found that its UI allows me to focus on the code being reviewed much better than Gitlab. There are multiple maybe small things (navigation patterns, keyboard shortcuts, they way the information is provided) but all together make a tangible difference, one of reason being that reviewing someone other code is not an easy one and any obstacle will make it more mundane and lead to very shallow reviews.

I've found that a commit-based review process (although it is not enforced, i.e. a developer can push whatever number of commits and then ask for a review/assign reviewers) is much (much) better than the PR/MR model. I think it nudges developers into a) more though-out commits, b) smaller commits, c) pushing early and getting early feedback. Probably the fact that we are working with a bit unnecessarily complex branching model now makes things worse, but even without that I think that an effort to push changes (especially smaller ones/small fixes/small improvements) is (much) smaller in Gerrit.

There is one oddity with Gerrit, namely so-called 'Change-Id' (the way Gerrit tracks new revisions) - nothing unmanagable, but it probably will make you trip a few times at the beginning. And likely you will need to learn Git a little better (in general you will need amend/rebase to apply changes after your colleagues commented on them). If you are using any of JetBrains IDEs there is a very good plug-in, which also allows to easily fetch changes you are asked to review. All in all in the past decade we were able to on-board all new hires without much pain.

I still like many other bells and whistles provided by Gitlab (and likely Github), especially build pipelines. I would like to find some time to try to 'integrate' Gerrit with Gitlab - Gerrit can easily push changes to other Git repository, so I can imagine it would be possible to plug into build pipelines etc. etc. Yeah... so many things to do, so little time ;-)

Edit: One more thing - it is mentioned by fishywang below/around - I've just read his comment and facepalmed about myself why I didn't listed it as well - tracking comments/discussion/changes/revisions/diffs - this may be the biggest advantage of Gerrit - really, maybe I don't know how to use Gitlab properly, but this aspect there is really weak.

I remember reading about the development of Baldur's Gate II - around 2000 I suppose, a rather big game, especially for its times - and they supposedly tracked all bugs using some kind of physical board and paper notes. I'm not sure if that is true of course.

Pinball Fantasies was likely developed probably around 1991-1992, so 8 years earlier. We are really rather spoiled by nowadays tools (when we are not complaining about Jira etc. of course). I also still remember rather horrible crudeness of tools like Bugzilla or Mantis which were one of the first tools in this area I worked with.

Which of the boards in Pinball FX3 you think are not overloaded? Triggered by my recent visit in some pinball 'museum' (me and my family spent like 3 hours playing on various tables) I did a quick research about available pinball games, then I played a little a bit those 2 tables available for free in Pinball FX3 and demoed a couple of others. But it was easier to achieve some 'competence' and understanding and select favourite ones when you had 4 boards in Pinball Dreams/Fantasies then in FX3 when you had few dozens of them...

Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies were my favourite pinballs games on Amiga (and then Psycho Pinball on PC). I know that nowadays e.g. Pinball FX3 provides so many bells and whistles and boards... but I often find all these boards to be kind of overloaded and so busy with animations, sounds and flashing lights... Maybe it is like with football games - I understand that FIFA or PES are much more complete games but the arcade charm of Sensible Soccer makes it a winner for me.

This or just a nostalgia factor...

Well, it is definitely true that BGG UI feels dated and disjointed, and if Board Game Atlas triggered some reaction on BGG side then great. I don't find BGA UI that much better. Cleaner, more 'modern' - yeah... which includes a lots of white space and rather low information density. On BGG I visit some forums, read reviews for games I'm interested in and browse the files section - even if UI could be improved here it is usable enough and the volume of information makes up for all the deficiencies, at least for me. And contrary to Goodreads BGG seems to have working search ;-)

This is I think primarily related to transaction boundaries and tracking changes. You can read https://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/unitOfWork.html as a starting reference. I haven't heard this phrase much lately to be honest. ;)

In 'typical' Java application (since many comments here as well as the original article mentions Hibernate...) you will likely use annotations like @Transactional to mark your transaction boundaries (likely with default propagation and isolation levels...) and then Hibernate will track any changes ('dirty checking') to objects you asked him to fetch and then at the end the transaction Hibernate will issue whatever DML commands (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) needs to be issued in an appropriate order.

In a galaxy far, far away i.e. before Java 1.5 instead using @Transactional you would maybe use (write) some object like TransactionManager which provides an execute() method that receives a block of code in a form of a interface implementation (no closures for you!). This part is relatively straightforward. Tracking changes in any semi-automatic way was always messy...

I remember that long time ago I thought that using Google account to authenticate in other services is nice because, hey, I don't need to remember some many passwords. Luckily after so time I decided that it may not be such a good idea ;).

Somehow related - long, long time ago in one of Google services I've used an account bound to my 'external' email that I've been using actively back then. Just few days ago I had a need to login to this service. I know my login (and I still have access to those e-mail), I know my password, but since I haven't used that account for a few years Google wants to send me a verification code on some phone number. Even that the last 2 digits displayed by Google on the verification screen match my phone number apparently I've made a mistake back then and provided a wrong phone number. There is a zero possibility to contact a human person at Google support and their docs in general provide a gentle 'fuck off'. I understand (somewhat...) the scale they operate at, security concerns and hey, I'm not a customer really here. Still it is rather infuriating that I cannot do anything. Fortunately the account and that service is not that important... :/

I've started to untangle myself from Google services some time ago and this incident will only accelerate this. Unfortunately - in general - our dependency on digital services will only increase anyway. With so many services providing some kind of 'free' tiers and all the effort needed to backup your stuff spread across so many accounts it will only get worse.

This is exactly the way the current Goodreads rating is supposed to work (and I'm personally OK with it). But my guesstimate is that for 95% Goodreads users everything below 4 stars means that the book sucks.

Ahh, memories...

I remember finishing Baldur's Gate 2, then buying Baldur's Gate 1 and then spending a better part of holidays writing a Java app to convert BG1 data so it can be run on the BG2 engine. I was able to go from the start to the end of BG1-on-BG2 just with one glitch when the game could no switch from the custscene to the in-game mode...

There was (is?) a very dedicated community that reverse engineered practically all data formats allowing such projects like mine to be created. Of course there were much more persistent and knowledgeable people who released their projects to the world, so e.g. you could play from the beginning of BG1 to the end of BG2 in one go! Lots of community-provided fixes, modes and total conversions.

From what I know the guy (Avenger) who wrote the better part of GemRB (probably like 95% ;)) got hired by Beamdog to work on enhanced editions of BG1, BG2 and other Infinity Engine games to bring them to modern computers and other devices. Thx for the Linux version! (Even if I don't like Beamdog additions...)

Thanks as well! I have extremely awesome memories of playing Liero 1.33 and then Liero with ProMode like... 20 years ago? And ProMode was possible due to the tools your have created. I even fooled around a bit in Polish forums and IRC channels related to the Liero 'scene'...

I remember that you were reverse engineering Liero as Joosa lost the source code. Also there were some other attempts to recreate the feel of Liero with projects like Wurmz etc. I kind of stopped playing Liero back then but from what I remember 'physics' in those clones was always missing something. So TIL that there is Liero 1.36 and I wonder if it can brings those old memories ;-)

'Pro-grade' like something desired for people working with image/video? Not really IMO.

On the other hand both Eizo and NEC have usually good entry-level models as well. They won't have all the bells-and-whistles though that you may find elsewhere like FreeSync/G-Sync, 4K etc. resolutions or 144k refresh rates... :/

Isn't a panel just a (not-so-big) part of quality? I think for professional monitors (Eizo and NEC comes to my mind) there is a lots of electronics that provides consistency and wide-range adjustments.

Does Sourcegraph makes sense for smaller companies/companies with relatively fairly small codebase? As I'm working with 'not that big' projects that are primarily Java/Javascript/Typescript based it seems to me that the level of insight, easiness of navigation etc. is much greater when I just load a project into IntelliJ IDEA.

(Edit) I may see some pros with working side-by-side with our core review tool (Gerrit). E.g. you are reviewing some patchset, you want to check a usage of a particular method or class so you can switch to Sourcegraph to explore the codebase in a more sophisticated way that a 'dummy' repo browser would allow. If you don't have the project opened at that time in IDEA then maybe it could be something useful. But then Sourcegraph would need to understand/index/whatever 'magic' review branches in Gerrit.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

I definitely agree with BoorishBears - too much unnecessary details in this commit message. Of course it is much more preferable than "Fix template", "Fix utf8" or "fix" which is all too common. But if someone spent 1 hour fixing a problem and then probably 5-10 minutes working on the message then adding 5 minutes to make the message concise should not be a big deal, right? (Who am I kidding ;-))

We use Gerrit at my company, so pushing the change is just a first step. I routinely read my commits after they are pushed for review and many times there are one or more additional changesets because I thought I found something worthy to add to the commit message.

I found a small inconvenience of maintaining ChangeId (usually handled automatically by the git hook) a very small price to pay for all great features provided by Gerrit. I know that Gerrit team investigated few times a better way to attach this metadata to commits but so far it works this way.

What other 'hacky ways' you mean? 'Magic' refs/for/* branches can be a bit weird at beginning. On the other hand introducing Gerrit 7-8 years ago to my back-then employer made me understand the Git model much better. Anyway, e.g. IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Gerrit should alleviate almost all pain points (if someone stick to JetBrains products).

Were you working on Android/AOSP? I always assumed that this is the primary project where Googlers have a chance to work with Gerrit. I thought that Google uses some in-house CR system, as mentioned by https://www.gerritcodereview.com/about.html.