monotremata
- 0 Posts
- 47 Comments
Bud Clark for the win.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Expose_Yourself_to_Art.jpeg
2·7 months agoIn addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.
17·7 months agoOr it won’t happen when you’re watching, because then they’re thinking about what they’re doing and they don’t make the same unconscious mistake they did that brought up the error message. Then they get mad that “it never happens when you’re around. Why do you have to see the problem anyway? I described it to you.”
My favorite is “and there was some kind of error message.” There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?
Yeah, I agree about the textures, but I think you’re overestimating the existing LLMs. I think folks are already starting to recognize the style of the current LLMs and finding it off-putting. I think that’s only going to increase as people try to apply them in even more places.
I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.
I do think it’s a valuable tool, but honestly there’s not a ton that it does that you couldn’t already do with an asset store. And there’s a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky–there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there’s going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it’ll be the new “asset flip.”
Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you’ll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you’re going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there’s AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.
I think it’s going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.
Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.
Doesn’t the “missed step detection” on the Prusa printers already achieve a lot of that? I think it monitors the current to the motor and flags any abnormal behavior, without needing extra hardware on the motor.
That’s not to knock the value of positional feedback, which is clearly superior, but just to say that I don’t think this idea has been entirely neglected.
It looks to me like they did it this way so that it could have natural-language names in many languages. So, the function Z10096 is called “is palindrome” in English, but if you’re coding in Japanese you can call it “回文の判定”. I don’t think the idea is for people to refer primarily to the alphanumeric soup version; I think that’s just the unique identifier for the database.
It does look like it’s leading to some issues, though. E.g., someone added a test for the “is palindrome” function which uses a somewhat common example: “Straw? No, too stupid. I put soot on warts.” Now, a human would probably say that this is a palindrome, because it’s got the same letters forwards and backwards, but most of the implementations disagree, because they consider the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation to be part of the string; that is, they test whether the input string and its reverse are equal. So someone (possibly the same person) has added a second python implementation which ignores spaces, capitalization, and punctuation, and mentions that in its name on the page.
Fundamentally this function is solving a different problem than the others (as demonstrated by the differing results on the relevant test), so should it get its own number and page? should there be a “palindrome disambiguation” page? This seems like something the site will have to figure out how to handle.
Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis, but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.
On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language–it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.
1·10 months agoOh, I literally misread it as OpenSCAD. Laughing at my stupid brain right now.
I’d say it’s more like Premiere vs ffmpeg.
It really sounds like you’re describing Make (or LLVM). Is there something you need it to do that those can’t handle?
The only real objection I have to this as a term is that it’s too easy to confuse with “rubber ducking”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
7·11 months agoWas it possible that she meant that regular drug testing with Vyvanse is a standard for her hospital/clinic/whatever? There doesn’t seem to be any national standard for this, but googling brings up a bunch of other folks who have been required to have regular drug testing with this prescription at the VA specifically. So she might have been telling you the truth that she’s expected to require this. It might also mean that your next doc would make the same demand.
That doesn’t make it any less invasive, obviously, and I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with your reaction to the demand. But it might be worth talking with the doctor about your reaction to this situation before you decide to entirely cut off communications with them (whether that’s with this doctor or the next–it seems like this may not have been the first straw with this particular doc), because it’s possible that neither of you has much alternative, and if the doctor is sympathetic there may be ways they can make the imposition less onerous.
It all kinda sucks, but, y’know, that’s true of most US healthcare and often particularly for the VA.
I do a lot of this stuff with the HP48 Units menu (albeit at this point via an emulator on my phone).
Shaders are terrific fun. I highly recommend ShaderToy if you want to experiment with them; it makes the loop between changing the code and seeing the effect very tight. I also recommend the YouTube channel “Art of Code” for good examples, well-explained.
It’s not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It’s got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It’s really well done.
One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn’t get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn’t.
And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn’t, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don’t think that’s playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It’s a shame, as it was really well made.
Other than that… you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It’s a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it’s multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.