robrtsql

I have found that input latency is a LOT more acceptable with a controller than it is with a mouse.

Playing a cinematic game with a controller (especially with auto-aim) at 30FPS with vsync is fine. Playing a first person shooter with a mouse, or a game where you control your camera with a mouse, at 30FPS with vsync feels very bad.

That's my theory on why the priorities are different, at least.

I have a 4K 43" TCL (model number 43S423) which has been working for 7 years. Unfortunately that doesn't disprove your claim because that would require over 10 years of service.

I believe it was rhetorical. They were trying to illustrate that we've automated tasks that people might find to be fulfilling (drawing, writing) but are still a long way off from affordably automating drudgery.

or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art

They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.

Don't be so hard on 17-ish-year-old you. What exactly were you supposed to do? Not take the ACT (and probably not get into your desired college)?

I gave this feature a try and it didn't work for me. I was curious to see if it was effective, so I asked my wife to drive and I tried to read in the iOS "Books" app with the dots on. I think within 5 or 10 minutes I was feeling pretty sick, and stayed that way for the rest of the drive. Hopefully others have better results. I'll have to stick with audiobooks when in motion.

They would rather back into a parking spot surrounded by stationary obstacles than back into a parking lot or road which may contain pedestrians or other drivers.

I'm not saying _I_ back into spaces. I generally drive into spots and reverse out of them. However, I admit that what I do is a tradeoff where I take on risk in order to have a mechanically easier time entering and exiting the space.

I'm not a WoW player (never had the PC required to play it, until I did, and now I'm busy with other things), and I don't care about Blizzard's rights as IP holder, but what exactly is Blizzard failing to deliver which makes Turtle WoW's success self-inflicted? Sounds like Retail is no good, but don't they have 4 or 5 different versions of "WoW Classic" to choose from?

Minneapolitan here! Just had to agree that The Current is a treasure.

For the benefit of others, you can stream it here, if you're curious: https://www.thecurrent.org/

My friend bought an ODROID and an SD card at the recommendation of some tech YouTuber for Home Assistant. Within 3 years the SD card was dead, and I had to help him re-set-up all of his stuff (this time, with a more resilient storage medium and remote backups).

YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.

The M1 is indeed too good. It seems like the best tool that Apple has to force users to upgrade is ending macOS support on it.

I keep telling people that the best laptop value on the market right now is to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro M1/M2. I stand by that from a usability and performance standpoint, but I feel weird about recommending a laptop that could only get security updates for another 3 years.

My two cents: The Keychron Q11 is a decent choice for a split keyboard which also has a traditional layout and therefore doesn't require any learning. If you don't like the distance, you _can_ push the pieces back together and they'll just resemble a traditional keyboard. And it's definitely the highest build quality of any keyboard I've used this far in my life.

It seems to have this issue (or maybe Macbooks do? I don't know..) where, waking my computer from sleep, the right side of the keyboard doesn't work. It's quickly fixed by unplugging and replugging the right side of the keyboard into the left, or unplugging and replugging the entire keyboard into the computer.. it's a shame that I have to do that sometimes, though.

One of the great injustices of music. As a bass voice, both pop music and theater is _dominated_ by tenors (or maybe they're baritones? The point being that it seems no one wants to hear you if you can't belt a Bb4).

It cost me over $3000 to be married on my 2024 taxes.

I used to be able to declare my house, and my parents' house (I own it). Because of these two things, I have been able to itemize my deductions. In 2024, because I got married, the itemized 'threshold' to reach was higher so I had to take the standard deduction, which ended up costing me a lot more in taxes. It's making me ask questions like "is it worth $3000 every year forever to stay married?"

Your mileage may vary!

NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.

The generic, ad-ridden wikis are everywhere, unfortunately, because the terrible service they provide is free. However, there are also lots of passionate people who pay to host their own MediaWiki servers, and then communities that populate it with accurate information! I think they deserve special applause for providing a really cool service that we mostly take for granted.

Some examples: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page (Pokemon) https://minecraft.wiki/ (Minecraft) https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ (Old School Runescape)

..only after I started putting together the list, did I realize that a lot of them are hosted by the same individual or community (https://meta.runescape.wiki/w/Weird_Gloop). Interesting!

They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time.

I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game.

Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this game.

I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.

The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)

Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.

So, Adam of "AI Village" ordered a fleet of AI bots to do "acts of kindness". And the AIs are basically just a 'loop' where an LLM comes up with a goal and then uses a virtual machine to try and accomplish this goal. What did he expect the AIs to do, if not bother people?

Is Spotify "featuring" the AI band clone, or did they just put it on their platform because some opportunist uploaded it to CDBaby / DistroKid / some other music distribution service? Feels like we're trying to make a headline about Spotify when something much more mundane is happening.

Maybe the headline is that there is absolutely no curation happening, so if KGATLW remove their music from Spotify, you can probably get a few streams from unwary listeners by uploading song covers under a similar moniker. This has been happening forever though--lots of people identify music that isn't on Spotify and then release their own covers to try to capitalize on the vacuum (this is especially common with video game and anime music, which doesn't always have a label release).

Not that Spotify is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't know how if this has been proven but there is theorizing that Spotify loads their own featured playlists (specifically ones like 'ambient study music' which people might consider to be fungible) with bogus, probably-AI 'artists' who don't need to get paid at all.

It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.

I don't think comparing the dating app to a pizza restaurant makes the dating app argument fall apart. The difference is that even a satisfied customer will get hungry again, so it's possible to provide a really good experience and still have that customer come back. A dating app is unique (or, at least in a different category) in that the best possible outcome for the user (assuming monogamy) is that the user deletes the app and never uses it again.

They cover that in the FAQ: http://nethack4.org/faq.html

Basically, NetHack development stalled out, so the developer(s?) behind NetHack 4 decided to fork it. Unlike other forks whose main goal is to put cool stuff in the game without regard for taste or balance, they wanted to stay true to the original.

Not that I agree with the fork name. It's best to not call your fork something that could be confused with the original, were the original devs to ever reach a 4.0 release.

That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need). Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate because Facebook is such a hostile platform.

I’m not saying it could never happen, but SEGA appears to be much more tolerant of fangames than Nintendo. A cease and desist is a given for any Mario fangame of renown, but Sonic games appear to attract no attention from SEGA. Also, it’s been 25 years..

I searched "AMD EPYC 7532" and there are a ton of listings for $150-$200. Are you just regretful that it wasn't like this when you were shopping parts for your homelab?

I agree that it doesn't need to exist, but as far as I can tell, almost no one depends on it directly. The only person using it is the author, who uses it in some other small libraries, which are then used in a larger, nontrivial library.

I just created a Next.js app, saw that `is-arrayish` was in my node_modules, and tried to figure out how it got there and why. Here's the chain of dependencies:

next > sharp > color > color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish

`next` uses `sharp` for image optimization. Seems reasonable.

`sharp` uses `color` (https://www.npmjs.com/package/color) to convert and manipulate color strings. Again, that seems reasonable. This package is maintained by Qix-.

Everything else in the chain (color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish) is also maintained by Qix-. It's obnoxious to me that he feels it is necessary to have 80 different packages, but it would also be a substantial amount of effort for the other parties to stop relying on Qix-'s stuff entirely.

I apologize in advance because you'd probably prefer text, but this is a very high quality video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNca1L6CUk

The video is segmented into chapters--if you're not interested in the whole thing, the section about the Lincoln animatronic is chapter 4, about an hour into the video.

Linux is a great way to spend more time customizing your computer than using it. I'm sure there are lots of people in this community that just roll with whatever defaults KDE or Gnome has, but there's _also_ lots of people who consider installing and configuring a minimal tiling window manager to be a Friday night well spent. I think PewDiePie kind of proves my point in this video too.

Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).

It's kind of strange that this clip is making the rounds again. I highly doubt that Miyazaki would have anything nice to say about generative AI, but it's pretty clear to me that the "insult to life itself" comment is referring to the aesthetics of the AI that was presented to him, was it not?