Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.

Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do

If there was something I give up on, it’s gun control. For several reasons:

1. There’s basically no gun control anyways so it’s not like we’re giving up something.
2. Compared to abortion rights (ie bodily autonomy) and climate change (ie existential crisis), not having gun control is the least bad. It’s still pretty crucial, to be fair, but comparing to actual existential crises like the other 2, not having gun control doesn’t seem that bad in comparison

A meme or post that has no deeper meaning. If you have to analyze it or think about it, you’re already past a shitpost. The point of a shitpost is the stupidity of its superficial, useless, low-quality humor

It’s possible to have a high-quality, high-effort shitpost, but it’s rare, since by nature, high effort posts tend to also be meaningful. In my eyes, this is peak high effort shitpost

I’m unsure what the game is supposed to be - is it just a collection of different versions of Tetris?

Yup, thanks! I was trying to figure out which word I was thinking of. I must have malaphored myself

Same for me, but with Tetris. I’m not the best, but I’m confident I can handedly beat the vast majority of the population. I spent most of my lockdown days just doing Tetris.

No, I don’t think there’s an ulterior motive. Reddit kicked out all the active mods and mods who knew what they were doing, and then brought in people with zero mod experience. Of course you’re going to get more issues with mod abuse now. Not everyone has the temperament to be a responsible mod, and I think Reddit is simply reaping the consequences of its choices

Haven’t had issues at all on my end. I use Windows 10/11. I get crashes/weird shit happening from time to time, but I’m pretty sure that’s more Windows’s fault than anything

I would like one too, if possible. Thanks ahead

I liked Noroi: The Curse.

No jumpscares, but really quite unsettling

Honestly, steam deck lol

It’s an odd form factor that people don’t really have much experience with, hence they don’t really know how useful it’ll be to them. To be fair to myself, I had been holding back on purchasing one until maybe a year after the initial launch, so I think I would personally describe my experience as a leap of faith.

In any case, it turns out to be a great little thing. There’s a lot of games in my backlog that don’t feel “desktop-y,” and therefore I’ve never played them, if that makes sense. But with a handheld form factor, now I have more motivation to go through those games. Emulation on the steam deck has also been great, for a similar reason. And sometimes I just want to be in bed than on my desktop. Or sometimes I’m just on the bus or waiting for something.

I think SteamOS also taught me how usable Linux was, and that’s been pretty instrumental in getting me to minimize my Windows dependence

You can’t outright, but you can at least try to minimize your exposure. Easiest way is to avoid buying products that use plastic packaging, especially if the product that you’re planning to buy is food. Don’t microwave plastics, even the supposedly “food safe” one - that releases a ton of microplastics into your food. Don’t order takeout - again, lots of plastic in the containers. Even paper food containers contain a plastic coating.

Don’t touch receipts, especially with wet hands. Or at minimum, wash your hands thoroughly after touching it

I don’t particularly like the layout of libreoffice, but I find that onlyoffice works for me. Not as feature rich, I suspect, but it doesn’t disrupt my workflow due to how similar it is to Microsoft Office

If you like GoT, you’d probably like Shogun

Windows 11. It sucks but I have apps that don’t run on Linux, and there simply aren’t any alternatives. I dual boot Kubuntu on my laptop and Kubuntu is great. I just wish software compatibility is better

Microraptor. I have a soft spot for the small dinos

It’s confusing because both AMD and Nvidia call both frame gen and upscaling as the same thing.

Upscaling: GPU renders game at low resolution (eg, 720p), and then (semi) smartly guesses what’s in the pixels that weren’t rendered. You get improved framerates because the GPU is doing less work per frame. The downside is typically that the image is typically a bit blurrier, and depending on how the GPU guesses the missing pixels, you might also get ghosting, which is where moving objects leave a smear trail behind them. The general consensus is that if you plan to use an upscaler, you should only use the highest quality mode on the upscaler. Any lower and the blurring becomes too significant

Use when:

• your GPU isn’t powerful enough to drive your monitor at its native resolution (ie you were going to run the game at a lower resolution anyways)
• your game isn’t running as fast as you’d like, but turning down the settings would result in too noticeable of a drop in visual quality
• your game doesn’t support your monitor’s native resolution (common in older games)

Do not use when:

• you could turn down the settings and still be satisfied with the visual quality

Frame gen: GPU renders a frame, holds on to the frame, renders the next frame, and then guesses at what happened between the two frames. The framerate is improved because the GPU is inserting an entirely guessed frame in between every rendered frame. The downside is that because the GPU has to hold on to a frame, the latency is increased. More specifically, the time between when you move your mouse and when your camera moves will be increased with frame gen.

Use when:

• your game isn’t latency-sensitive (eg puzzle games, strategy games, some adventure games)
• you have a high refresh rate monitor (higher refresh rates typically lead to less added latency)

Do not use when:

• your frame rate (without frame gen) is below 60 fps (added latency becomes too noticeable)
• your game is latency-sensitive (eg competitive multiplayer games)

Terminology:

• AMD FSR 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• AMD RSR: literally just FSR 1

• AMD FSR 2: semi-smart upscaler

• AMD FSR 3: very slightly smarter upscaler than FSR 2, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• AMD AFMF: literally just the frame generation part of FSR 3, but slightly dumber

• nVidia DLSS 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• nVidia NSR: literally just DLSS 1

• nVidia DLSS 2: semi-smart upscaler

• nVidia DLSS 3: smarter upscaler than DLSS 3, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• Intel XeSS: semi-smart upscaler

Ori and the Blind Forest. Every song in the soundtrack is brilliant

Seconding lockpocking. Easy to learn, tactile feedback (very kid friendly!), can absolutely annoy parents. But be careful to teach children not to do anything that’ll seriously get them into trouble

Yes, and people do do it. It’s just incredibly difficult to do it even for relatively simple programs, and the more complex the program is, the more exponentially hard the reverse engineering will be.

The problem is not necessarily turning it into code, since many decompilers do it already for you nowadays. The issue is understanding what in the world the code is supposed to do. Normally, open source code would be commented and there would be documentation, so it’s easy to edit or build on the code. Decompiled code comes with no documentation or comments, and all the variable names are virtually illegible.

It’s sometimes easier to build something new than to fix what’s broken, and this would be one of those cases where it’s true