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MoonMelon

@ MoonMelon @lemmy.ml

Posts
1
Comments
275
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • If you are an American, how are you preparing for the upcoming tariffs and possible trade war?

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  • Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it's already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.

  • ‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

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  • Could do what nuke plants do and have another heat exchanger between the clean water and the water that evaporates, then use less clean water for that loop. If that's too expensive it just means they aren't being charged enough for potable water.

  • Millenials and Gen Z of Lemmy: how much Latin and Ancient Greek do you know?

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  • I was forced to take 4 years of Latin and I've basically reverted to "Salve Magistra, Italia Peninsula Est" levels. It never clicked with me. Every week was a struggle, I was a terrible student, and I remember jack shit. At best it helped me remember the names of stuff in anatomy class, which was actually interesting. I think the way it was taught is the worst fucking way to learn a language, like most 19th century educational theory.

  • The masculine urge to nuclear project posting

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  • It feels like we are either approaching, or have reached, a point where going zero carbon and straight up dumping unprotected nuclear waste in a population center would lead to less suffering and misery than our current trajectory. Obviously that's not necessary or even possible, but that the situation we are in is extremely bleak and fixing it at this point probably requires a level of ice cold motherfuckerness we've never reckoned with.

  • Software: Then vs Now

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  • High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal's new "Nanite" tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.

  • Caption this.

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  • Homer, are you still holding the can?

  • Recommend me good e-reader

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  • without any account

    Did they make this easier? I have a Sage and I had to open a SQLite database file on the e-reader, then flip some flag, to bypass account sign in. But that was a few years ago.

  • Why are so many Pro-Palestine (I am pro-Palestine and anti-genocide) Americans refusing to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel?

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  • It's the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, "Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people".

    But if you take a step back it's reasonable to ask, "WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don't spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus' forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose."

    So given that realization it's also reasonable when told you must choose to say, "Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt."

    That's the essential argument. There's the realpolitik decision to do "less harm", but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

  • Sea of Thieves temporarily yanks nearly all its big new stealth features following "significant issues"

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  • Sucks, but sounds like they're taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It's also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

  • Former PlayStation boss says games are "seeing a collapse in creativity" as publishers spend more time asking "what's your monetization scheme?"

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  • Sorry that doesn't drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that's just "Steam but Worse", so I'm afraid you need to close your studio. What's that? Sorry you're breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

  • What was the Worst car you've ever owned?

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  • Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

  • What is your favourite medical word

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  • Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

  • What's the coolest thing your library has available to check out?

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  • A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

  • An American bomb from WWII explodes at a Japanese airport, leaving a crater on the taxiway

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  • There's a nuke underwater somewhere off Tybee Island, GA.

  • Tcl/Tk 9.0 released

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  • Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar's Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

    It's been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the "glue" language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

  • Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck?

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  • I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.

    I think about that a lot.

  • What media have art styles that are very hard to learn and reproduce (only modern media, no ancient painters)?

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  • I agree with this. It's the artists, not necessarily the "style" itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what's hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.

    Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:

  • What's the most awkward time you've ever had to use the bathroom?

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  • When I was in elementary school I entered the bathroom and some other boy was standing with his back against the wall, facing the urinals, with his pants down and his dick out. When he saw me he said, "No wait! I can make it!"

    He then started to piss. He apparently was pissing as forcefully as he could, trying to "make it". As his stream started it went all over the floor in front of him, then crept up the wall, splashing all over the pipes and the bottom of the urinal. Finally he got, at best, one drop of piss into the urinal at which point his stream retreated and he re-sprayed everything a second time.

    "YEAH!" he said. "YEAH!", in victory. Then he left.

    It's been like forty years and I still remember this. I have five memories from elementary school and this is one of them.

  • What are your fears

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  • Not a huge fan of snakes. It's not to phobia levels, but I get a huge adrenaline rush when I see one, even if a fraction of a second later my forebrain identifies it as harmless. I love being in nature, so it's just something I have to deal with.

    I've had several rattlesnake encounters and it's at least one guaranteed nightmare every time. The dream is always the same: I'm standing somewhere at dusk, often barefoot. Under a nearby, low object I see a rattlesnake. Then I see another to the side. Then another behind me. Then I realize they are everywhere.

    I really hate ticks, so I appreciate their rodent killing service. But if we never ran into each other again that would suit me fine.