marzipan · HackerTrans

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I used Dropbox from 2009 through last month or so. Switched over to Syncthing. I was a little bit worried about stability but soon after I sampled it I felt convinced that it was the right move. I was previously using Dropbox as a kind of makeshift backup as well as a sync tool, but now I have a desktop again and run automated backups on that using Backblaze, so I'm a little bit more in control over the data by doing my own syncing.

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

It's become conventional to use it to refer to a light with customizable RGB parameters, versus a single color. For example both my desktop keyboard and mouse are "RGB" and they have various color modes and even animation settings.

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

It's hard to pin down the source of injury because there are so many factors, but I suggest looking at it holistically:

* The weightlifting equipment - whether the barbell is balanced, if your shoes are flat to allow proper force driving, and lifting belt or shirt if applicable.

* Basic limitations of your body. I have scoliosis, and while it's a noticeable condition, it doesn't affect ordinary activities. But in the gym, compound lifts are considerably harder. I have adapted towards favoring bodyweight-centric exercises like weighted dips and leg lifts. I haven't had any injury from it in years now.

* Other health and nutrition factors. At 32, all it takes is one meal of junk food and I stiffen up for the next four hours or so, or one poor night of sleep and I'm struggling to do cardio the next day. Worse mobility transfers to worse form, and performance degrades from there.

For gathering information specific to me, I've just done a lot of data collection of both the "mental note" and "exercise log" kind. I don't aim to be in the gym more than once or twice a week, and as long as my numbers are going up(which I usually measure by total volume to allow weight/reps/sets to shift around) I'm happy.

Lately I've been training jiujitsu 2 hours a week and the overall intensity/satisfaction there far exceeds what I usually get out of the gym - grappling uses everything you have - while the injury rate is "scrapes, bruises and soreness from submissions every session" and any more serious injury is generally dependent on my own caution and whether or not the opponent is a maniac, which is most common in two settings: during competition, and when they are completely new. When you're used to rolling, it becomes less threatening and more of a mind game.

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Waterstones came back, and recently, too. [0] They're a similar company that faced similar issues - it CAN be done. This is about a lack of vision and will from the management to re-position the company, make hard cuts, and tap into the best things it had going for it. Stripping the company down to book value assets with no repurposing or new goal is what you do when you've given up and become a liquidator. Even "Kodakcoin" is a better plan.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I've done a few tests with GDScript.

There isn't the same depth of library support as Python for obvious reasons, which makes the experience different even though the syntax is pretty close, but it's not worse at the task of doing things with the engine, in fact it's better at that because it's more deeply integrated(which is the point of having a custom language). It's aware of engine core stuff like e.g. geometry vectors and the scenegraph, and the built-in IDE supports working with GDScript directly with no configuration step needed - edit/test/debug all done exactly like it should be.

Performance-wise, it's fine for what it's intended for - running gameplay logic for a game of small-to-midsize scope(think ~$5mm budget) that isn't trying to drive tens of thousands of entities or run parts of the rendering from script. Smaller games can get away with optimizing hotspots, and a bigger game can start to justify having someone forking the engine and poking around in the internals to optimize whatever part of the architecture starts falling over.

For the use-cases of running a specific task that's more intensive or bolting on some additional dependencies, the new GDNative support is compelling. Godot's stated aim is for convenience over optimization but the optimization is definitely present in critical elements.

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

These things don't actually explain why the download is large.

The download is large because it has example scenes included.

marzipan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

If it's complex and hard to maintain, then it's not dumb code. It's genius code. Dumb code is actually very hard to write successfully in production and there isn't a recipe for it. The novice flails and makes the code too complicated trying to add one hack on top of another without doing any causal analysis, the journeyman programmer starts throwing in a lot of defensive abstraction they learned about yesterday that doesn't tame the problem at hand, and the expert writes a correct solution that is exactly what is needed and no more. As a bonus, when you enter a new problem domain you're a novice again. All that stuff you knew about working with databases is irrelevant if you're working with real-time audio. But you get to skip through the cycle faster this time.

Ergo, dumb code. It's hard to make dumb code that actually stays dumb instead of turning into genius-level complexity or bad abstraction.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor.

So banks would be defined as not real economy since they are transacting in debt, savings, and other instruments that exist on balance sheets, while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

A lot of the stuff early Superman did also wouldn't fly today. In many of those 30's and 40's comics, he has a habit of simplistic "might makes right" behaviors like clobbering low-level villains or simply threatening to kill or endanger them(e.g. "I'll drop you out this window -- now TALK!") in order to extract a confession in the next panel and move along the plot, and the narrative does nothing to critique his application of violence or suggest it's anything less than heroic and justified.

Here's a thread with some examples:

[0] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/superman-165/golden-ag...

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Here is Billy Joel using Auto-Tune live in 2007, with overly aggressive settings:

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmhTmKD6rXc

Same man, same song, in 1978, 1986, and 2000:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcLV6gE6THg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwwu5vYSShY [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkXdRKMB9c

And now in 2015:

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovGwkScJRZ4

Now, while it's possible that he simply became a better singer between 2007 and 2015, subtler auto-tuning of the type conventionally used in pop production generally just makes the voice sound cleaner, thicker, more polished. Note that his style has also changed to favor staccato phrasing so as to limit stairstepping artifacts.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Spaghetti code by its original conception, code that uses GOTO to jump all over the program willy-nilly, mostly died with the adoption of procedural languages that eliminate or mitigate the usage of GOTO, forcing naive procedural style into something more reminiscent of straight-line code(which is generally a good practice, but still easy to deviate from with nested loops, function calls, state machines, etc.). But the general idea of "pasta code" that is hard to follow is going to stick around by any name.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

W/R to strength training, I've had a lot of success combating overtraining by following the science recommendations more carefully and logging my progress against a target volume which I can gradually bump up and reset with higher weight, and using exact rest intervals. Smartphone apps are a lifesaver for this stuff because they can do all the recordkeeping.

In the mental/emotional arena I don't have as easy a time. I started with judo recently and encountered a phenomenon I remember from other sports back in school, which is the other beginners being extremely hyped up and trying to backseat coach, telling you to do a thing NOW without allowing time or space to take a careful or exploratory stance (also they aren't necessarily doing it right themselves). I'm a lot more resilient in putting up with that stuff than when I was a kid but it still bothers me - fortunately, with the class being just once a week, there's plenty of time to recover.

And with programming, I definitely have a cycle but it's extremely hard to schedule it like I can with the gym. I don't get to pick exactly what I'm working on so it might be too easy(boring) or too hard(can't pick it back up) that day. Sometimes my attention gets torn by other stuff during the day, too, which cuts into coding.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

For those in SF, in the past I tried finding the longest possible flight from SFO using an "opposite side of the world" website. It landed in the ocean, in the vicinity of Madagascar.

marzipan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

It's a false dichotomy. Creating by copying and referencing is quite trivial now. We do it all the time and think nothing of it.

Creating original designs, giving them a lot of thought and attention, responding to feedback, and changing workflow as a result, that's still hard. And there are a lot of ways in which you can come up with an innovative spin on old stuff - presentation, cataloging, filtering, recommending, explaining - that isn't "creative output" in the sense we are romanticizing, but provides the same kinds of effect on knowledge.

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