Random thought of the day
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@HardwareGeek No, but that name is in my family too.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Random thought of the day:
@Karla said in Random thought of the day:
At least I wasn't named Andrew Floyd.
I have two immediate family members with those names, and a third who was born on December 7. If I were a superstitious person I'd be very worried about ill omens on my family!
My birthday is April 4th. As a result, I cannot forget when Martin Luther King was killed.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Random thought of the day:
@Karla said in Random thought of the day:
At least I wasn't named Andrew Floyd.
I have two immediate family members with those names, and a third who was born on December 7. If I were a superstitious person I'd be very worried about ill omens on my family!
My birthday is April 4th. As a result, I cannot forget when Martin Luther King was killed.
My husband's ex-wife and I have the same birthday.
I joke that I use my powers for good versus her evil. To her kids (I consider them my kids as well this is just to differentiate between the older 4 and my youngest), I used to say me and mommy are twins and to my daughter me and titi (auntie) are twins.**
Her father has the same birthday as my mother. The anniversary of their deaths are 3 days apart.
**funny story, we are all walking to the beach from the subway, she asks me, "are you going to help dye our daughter's hair?"
I thought she meant my daughter, she meant her daughter (she had previously dyed her hair a bright color and it was fading and my daughter wanted pink hair).
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Random thought of the day:
@Karla said in Random thought of the day:
At least I wasn't named Andrew Floyd.
I have two immediate family members with those names, and a third who was born on December 7. If I were a superstitious person I'd be very worried about ill omens on my family!
Both of my dogs were born on the 13th. (neither was a friday at least!)
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It's not bad enough that the first famous person we heard about catching COVID-19 was the beloved Tom Hanks. Now the Rock has it too!
We need to build a protective bubble around Betty White. Now!
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This Twitter account is interesting:
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Some of us use
saneless insane technologies, you know.
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
Some of us use
saneless insane technologies, you know.Some of us use C++...
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If Book of Armaments was real, Valve would be heretics.
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@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
Some of us use C++...
I'm really sorry. Still, at least it's not NodeJS.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
If Book of Armaments was real, Valve would be heretics.
If Portal was real, Cave Johnson would drive a Tesla.
Thread is called “random” thought, not “sensible.”
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https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1303411617355489280 .
Manual embed because twitter threads are dumb:Great article!
AVIF (or AV1 intra) is quite powerful, with all those directional predictors and filters. It manages to keep looking sharp even at low bitrates. What I don't like is that it becomes hard to tell when you've compressed too much, because it keeps looking OK.
For some use cases that is fine, all you care about is having an image that looks OK. But it can really smooth things away, or change shapes, or apply makeup to a face, so to speak. That can be undesirable.
I once tried to introduce the notion of "honesty of artifacts", to make a distinction between codecs that produce 'fake' images that look good but with low fidelity, and codecs that are more reliable in terms of fidelity (if the pixels look good, they are good).
This will become even more relevant when AI-based codecs become mainstream - those codecs can invent details in very plausible ways.With those neural networks that can generate realistic images, you basically just have to encode "cat goes here with this shape and color" and have it regenerate an image at the other end. And of course these concepts will be gradually incorporated into lossy compression algorithms.
The result is some users will crank up the compression all the way up, and get an image that looks good, but actually all the small details are slightly different. Like those Xerox scanners that changed numbers in scanned documents, but applied to everything.
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
If Portal was real, Cave Johnson would drive a Tesla.
No he wouldn't; he died before the company was founded.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Random thought of the day:
@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
If Portal was real, Cave Johnson would drive a Tesla.
No he wouldn't; he died before the company was founded.
But if Portal was real, he wouldn't have.
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@da-Doctah But he would? He did in the game and that's the definition of "If Portal was real".
And he wouldn't drive a Tesla, he'd drive an Aperture Science Lemon Powered Personal Mobility Device or something.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
And he wouldn't drive a Tesla, he'd drive an Aperture Science Lemon Powered Personal Mobility Device or something.
Instead we've got Tesla Science Personal Mobility Hampered by a Lemon
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Random thought of the day:
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
And he wouldn't drive a Tesla, he'd drive an Aperture Science Lemon Powered Personal Mobility Device or something.
Instead we've got Tesla Science Personal Mobility Hampered by a Lemon
In any case, I'm not volunteering to do any testing at Tesla.
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Details...
Deer tails...
Venison factory sub-unit spent-fuel extraction chute raincover flaps...
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@acrow Are you having a stroke?
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@Zecc No, but nobody's had a thought any more random than that.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Zecc No, but nobody's had a thought any more random than that.
Or someone just hit a deer and it got rather messy...
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@dcon Based on the last sentence, it sounds like it already got pretty messy without hitting anything
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Transparent encryption is kind of an oxymoron.
Both etymologically and in terms of security.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
Transparent encryption is kind of an oxymoron.
Both etymologically and in terms of security.
Vigenère cipher with a key code of AAAAAAAA.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
Transparent encryption is kind of an oxymoron.
Both etymologically and in terms of security.
Transparent to whom?
(Also double-ROT13 FTW!)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Random thought of the day:
@Karla said in Random thought of the day:
At least I wasn't named Andrew Floyd.
I have two immediate family members with those names, and a third who was born on December 7.
My FIL was born on December 7th. I also have an uncle born on December 7th and he was born in Tokyo. His father was a Pearl Harbor survivor (and later stationed over there after the war when my uncle was born).
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@boomzilla sorry, but...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071581917301593
Our results indicate that depicting virtual animal-like characters at realism levels used in current video games causes negative reactions just as the uncanny valley predicts for humanlike characters.
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@boomzilla The Uncanny Valley doesn't cause fear and make people want to run away; it causes revulsion and unease. The biggest theories I've heard are that 1) it stems from the same mechanism that recognizes human corpses as something distinctly different from a living human being, as even though a dead body looks almost perfectly human, (at least at first,) it's definitely not something you should form an emotional attachment to, or 2) it's related to the subtle processes of detecting camouflaged predators, to make you feel that something's fundamentally not right when everything looks mostly fine but there's just a few subtle details out of place.
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Some people just hate fun.
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@boomzilla some people just love science.
@error_bot xkcd beauty
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If copyright was shortened to 25 years, there would actually be a decent number of good video games in public domain. That wasn't true a decade ago.
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But for some reason, you can still find plenty of them on archive.org, and nobody bats an eye.
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
nobody bats an eye
That's because bats don't see very well
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
But for some reason, you can still find plenty of them on archive.org, and nobody bats an eye.
Actually it's all shareware.
At least the 5 random titles I bothered to check out were shareware.
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They have plenty of commercial titles as well. So many that there's very little chance they got explicit permissions from the copyright holders. And they're not exactly an obscure, underground site.
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Fighting insomnia by thinking up trivia questions and then trying to solve them. The one that's keeping me up right now is "are there more countries with names ending in -stan or ending in -land"?
Related question: "more ending in -ia or ending in -a without a preceding -i-"?
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@Zerosquare I just opened the list of DOS games in their classic games collection and tested each and every one that shows up in the first screenful.Except for Alien Poker, which is primitive indie freeware that doesn't even have a main menu, and 4D Prince of Persia, which is an unauthorized clone with custom levels, everything else is either demo or shareware (which basically means the same thing). So no, I am rather convinced they do NOT have non-shareware commercial titles.See below.
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@Zerosquare wow, their site search is shiiiiiiit, and their Google positioning is even worse.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
But for some reason, you can still find plenty of them on archive.org, and nobody bats an eye.
Actually it's all shareware.
At least the 5 random titles I bothered to check out were shareware.
There are allegedly complete rom sets for video game consoles on there
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@hungrier and the browser local storage is marked to delete in 24 hours so it's all legal
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@hungrier said in Random thought of the day:
There are allegedly complete rom sets for video game consoles on there
You can remove the "allegedly".
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@Zerosquare I have heard that some people may have downloaded said alleged rom sets to replace other alleged rom sets that they may have allegedly previously lost track of
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:panic-basket: We are less than 100 days from kids born in 2000 being able to legally buy booze in the US :panic-basket:
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@izzion said in Random thought of the day:
:panic-basket: We are less than 100 days from kids born in 2000 being able to legally buy booze in the US :panic-basket:
Solemnly hands @izzion a
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It is really weird to say we are going to urgent care tomorrow.
We were planning to go for our flu shots (urgent care location far more convenient that either of our primary docs). My daughter needs hers before 9/30, her school has been fully remote for 5 weeks, and has plans to open in hybrid more at soon (?).
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DuckDuckGo is a difficult name to verb. It's another reason why it's next to impossible for them to ever beat Google.