JonathanFly

>A lot of people here seem to be surprised that people would spend $200 on a niche gaming console when you could instead get an emulation machine or "real" handheld.

A good explanation from John Siracusa:

>To a certain class of person, this makes no sense.

>This product is a celebration. It's all custom hardware, every single part, and they wrote their own operating system. Why would you do that? Why is this not running Linux or a Raspberry Pi or something sensible? Because the company is ridiculous, the people are insane, and this is an amazing thing that should not exist but does.

https://overcast.fm/+R7DX2ydgY/1:25:44

Link to longer discussion: https://overcast.fm/+R7DX2ydgY/1:17:40

>because of the political views of their CEO or some geopolitical event

If America were at this moment dropping paratroopers into Canadian cities and trying to hunt down the Canadian government, and 70% of the Namecheap workforce lived in Canada, would you still consider that just a 'political view' on 'some geopolitical event' or something more consequential and relevant to the company?

>I have to say I am appalled. Breaching hundreds, potentially even thousands of contracts for some cancel culture virtue signalling? This is beyond unprofessional.

The majority of Namecheap's employees live in Ukraine, and Russia is trying to 'cancel' them with military weapons. Right now.

>The precedent this is creating is beyond dangerous and not just for Namecheap as a company but also for the rest of the Internet.

If there is a dangerous precedent here, I do not think it is Namecheap's actions.

>This is a terrible move. Virtue signaling at it's worst.

The majority of Namecheap's employees live in Ukraine.

I sit all day with a back strap (NadaChair brand, but there are many cheaper knockoffs that also work fine) which enforces pretty decent posture. Monitors are on VESA mounts with carefully selected height. Split ergo keyboard so shoulders are nice and wide. Seems like a lot of hassle but once you have it setup it just works.

I turn on an overhead and a box fan, and use upgraded facial interface, and disposable covers if I'm going especially hard.

Same motivation as social exercise generally. It can make a mundane task more fun.

I'm sure it did receive a sales boost, but it was almost as highly ranked before the real pandemic. It really is mostly a coincidence.

These games never stopped and are arguably better than ever. Just of the game designers you mentioned:

The Lead Designer of Civ 4 just released Old World. It's designed around reducing end game slowdown by limiting the number of orders you can place each turn, mechanically you play a series of leaders who can only give out so many orders and have to manage their dynasty, Crusader Kings style. An excellent game. https://mohawkgames.com/oldworld/

The designer of Fall From Heaven made Fallen Enchantress and I think a modern Star Control remake. Can't speak to their quality personally.

The designer of the original XCOM recently released Phoenix Point. Haven't tried this one yet but it's on my list.

Turn based tactics games in general are extremely popular. Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous has a HoMM2 style army battles built into the RPG campaign (though it's reportedly quite buggy and unbalanced...) The game overall is fantastic, and the party-level combat is also turn based if you like. Baldur's Gate 3 is turn based. Some personal favorites are all the Long War variants. XCOM 1 Long War, XCOM 2 Long War, and now XCOM 2 Long War of the Chosen.

Edit: If you're looking for something specifically like Fall From Heaven, I'd say give Endless Legend a try. It has a similar feel in the way it combines theme and mechanics. It came out in 2014 but it's still getting updates and content to this day.

Logged in just to reply and say I enjoyed this comment so much I've been randomly laughing over the course of the day just thinking about it again. A+++

A quick google search suggests they should be available now. The article specifically talks about the situation your father is in:

https://www.pharmatimes.com/news/nhs_patients_gain_access_to....

>Initially, Ronapreve will be targeted at hospitalised patients who have not mounted an antibody response against COVID-19.

>This includes individuals who are immunocompromised, such as patients with certain cancer or autoimmune diseases.

>Honestly surprising why so few people know about the antibody therapy we already have, reduces death by 80 to 90 %. Also unclear why we still need vaccine mandates when we have a cure.

Do promptly delivered monoclonals blunt your body's natural immune response and prevent natural immunity, as your body doesn't need to make its own antibodies?

If so, all the more reason to get vaccinated as soon as the engineered antibodies fade. Or before treatment, I don't see why having both wouldn't be extra effective?

That may have been exactly the article I saw, there's certainly more useful information in there than I can answer. I pretty much just took away MORE BULBS.

>The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.

For me I had to also really avoid light at night. F.lux or Windows Night Mode is not enough. You gotta suffer with strong indoor lightblocker glasses, or use e-ink or something at night.

And in the winter there sometimes isn't enough sun. You need a LOT of lightbulbs to make up the difference. A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.

The real test if this will help you: think back to a time when you were camping, or maybe a child at a summer camp in the woods, or a vacation somewhere without lots of light at night and where you got lots of sun in the morning. Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.

>Top earner is a role playing group. How interesting.

A group of professional voice actors who put on a real show every week, with extremely high production quality. A real standout on the list and well deserving of the #1 spot.

A personal favorite moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnl5r3hp1_k

I've always loved the spells in D&D that talk to plants. "You imbue plants within 30 feet of you with limited sentience and animation, giving them the ability to communicate with you and follow your simple commands."

Every casting of the spell is a Flowers For Algernon tragedy, as the plants around you realize they will only be sentient for 10 minutes and then fade back into nothingness.

>There are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33".

I must have 4 or 5 old Kindles in a drawer by now, somehow. I wonder if you could hack together a grid of old Kindles to make a giant e-ink screen?

>I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics.

You can see the new tileset in action here, demoed by Tarn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzCrJS1Fho

Overall they improved characters. Ashford is a cartoon in the books but is absolutely delightful and interesting on the show. Drummer barely exists in the books and might be my favorite show character.

Type 'How to speak English' into YouTube and you'll get absolute deluged with insanely complicated diagrams and flowcharts about stress-timing and vowel reduction -- so many rules that non-native speakers practice and explicitly learn but that you didn't even realize existed. Stress-timing alone must be really tricky coming from a language without it.

Random example: How do you pronounce the word 'for' 80% of the time? Like the word 'her' with an f. fer.

Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvba0DREM-s

>A non-native speaker once asked me why we say "Going overseas" instead of "Going to overseas". I couldn't give them an answer at the time(even though I'm a native speaker).

>Later I asked a very smart friend of mine who studied english as a second language (and was quite proficient at that point) and he was immediately able to recognize that it was because "overseas" is an adverb. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you just don't think about those things as a native speaker.

What about 'Going bananas' -- is that still an adverb?

>I think this is cool tech, and valuable. I'm just not sure that it offers a communication benefit over well-lit, well-miced, wired, low latency, 8K videoconferencing.

>Maybe there's some 3D emotional perception face processing stuff that we have deep in our brains that can immensely benefit from this, but I'm skeptical.

>I think simply doing 4k or 8k low latency high quality videoconferencing might be a 90 or 95% solution without needing special cameras/displays.

From my experience, 4k or 8k doesn't matter. Sound quality actually matters most, really clear low latency audio alone will give you a surprisingly strong sense of presence.

Video quality is important but 1080p is enough, beyond that the lighting and latency matter more.

Equally important from my personal POV is video size - physical size. Take a cheap 65 inch TV, turn it vertically, and talk to someone on that. When your talking to someone that is actually life size the sense of presence is vastly improved, even at the exact same video quality. And TVs are so cheap this doesn't seem like much of a techical barrier.

If you just screen share from your cell phone to your 65 inch TV and video chat -- holding everything else equal for audio and video quality -- it's SO MUCH BETTER.

>currently I don't have stereoscopic vision

>my brain CAN do it, if I had the correct images sent to my eyes somehow.

>when I watched Avatar, an actually well made 3D movie, it literally felt more real than reality

Buy an Oculus Quest 2. (Or any VR headset, but that's the best value at the moment.) It sends seperate images to each eye. You should get that same 'more real than reality' feeling. It may even train your eye muscles to see in 3D, I know I've seen some research into that area. (https://www.seevividly.com/ comes up on a Google search, though it seems to be prescription only)

>The Echo Show is now pretty much constantly on video call for 14-16 hours a day in the living room of both houses and it has become an extension of the one another; a window into the other house. The audio and mics are good enough that at times you genuinely forget the other person is not in the same room. This has truly helped them, especially during Covid times.

>It's actually good enough that my parents have their morning tea together practically almost the same way they used to when they were physically together.

I don't understand why this sort of persistant 'portal' isn't more popular. But 10 inch screen is so small! A 55 inch TV is what, $300? Put it portrait mode and that's a life size portrait. The feeling of presence when the person's head is the correct size is so strong! I know Facebook sells something for the TV but can it be left on all day like that?

I want it feel like one half of living room is a shared space, at all times. Like the couch is split in half by a portal. Then it just cycles through a list of friends and family with the same setup to find someone else watching Netflix or whatever, and you can casually join them just like a real shared living space.

I don't need 8k or 3D tv. Just a 55 or 65 inch TV on the wall at the end of the couch!

>Maybe the commenter has a very interesting use for it, but why would you buy a 256 GB RAM machine (which isn't a lot of memory for this arena either) to develop the model, instead of using something smaller to work on it and leasing a big cluster for the minutes to hours of the day that you'll need to train it on the actual dataset?

A 128GB of a ram in a consumer PC is about $750 dollars (desktop anyway, laptop may be more?). That's less than a single high end consumer gaming GPU. Or a fraction of a Quadro GPU.

So to the extent that developers ever run things on their local hardware (CPU, GPU, whatever) 128GB of RAM is not much of a leap. Or 256GB for Threadripper. It's in the ballpark of having a high-end consumer GPU.

>He was also on amphetamines constantly. If I was on amphetamine all the time I’d get a lot accomplished as well.

He started taking them in 1971, because he was depressed. He was 58 years old at the time and had been extremely productive for his whole career before that too.

It's good that the vast majority of people make full recoveries but 2% of the US is still over 6 million people.

I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.

>Sooo looking forward to being able to live fully in a virtual world. Virtual cash, virtual socially distanced "relationships" and friends, a virtual body so I don't have to work out

A surprising aspect of VR is that this is actually the complete opposite, just how much your real body actually matters. VR is exhausting. 10 minutes of Thrill of the Fight and I'm physically incapable of continuing. An hour of Rec Room or Echo VR and I have to stop from the sweat buildup. Even hanging out and just talking VR Chat is so more physical (standing, actively interacting with both arms, potentially full body tracking) than sitting at a desk during the day job, more comparable to something like being at a conference where at the the end of day you really feel it, all the standing around and slow walking, since in total it was more than an average day.

>My experience with VR has been limited to an HTC Vive. While a game like Elite Dangerous feels great, I had a lot of trouble reading text on it. Probably the same reason why I can't get along with binoculars, I just can't seem to focus on things with both eyes?

You might have a problem focusing with both your eyes, but the reason you couldn't read the text in Elite was simply that the Vive is a very low resolution headset compared to more modern models. Everyone had to lean into the display screens to read them on that display.

>To do AR, it'll need a camera. People hated google glass because of the camera.

I remember the fuss, but it's so weird -- everyone carries a smartphone with camera with them all the time, even into public bathrooms. If someone wanted to record me I think I'd have a better chance of noticing someone looking at me with their face than I would someone doing it while pretending to be scrolling twitter.

>The resolution on today's consumer headsets still isn't there to provide good experience (maybe https://varjo.com/ can work but it's not for consumers).

I think the display hardware is good enough, but I've only been able to get that quality by manually copying over 8k video files and playing them on the device itself. Not sure why they can't match this quality when streaming...