Shurimal @ Shurimal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Volume sliders never sound linear to me

Ironically that is because (with very few exceptions) every application from OS-s to streaming service webapps to games to mediaplayers uses linear volume slider. Human hearing is logarithmic.

The way typical volume slider works is multiplying the audio sample values with a coefficient that is ≤1. Ie, if you set volume to 50% the input is multiplied by 0.5 and as a result the signal voltage level on the analog output to your headphone or loudspeaker drivers is halved. The kicker—halving the voltage is just 6 dB less volume. This is why if you have sensitive headphones (or big, powerful speakers) you find that you have to keep the volume slider in your OS at 10% or even lower to not blast your ears off. And why the upper half of volume sliders is completely useless.

I have an unconventional speaker setup that makes classical analog volume control completely impractical. Since said setup has the maximum sound pressure level output of around 110 dB at full scale digital input, I have to keep the OS volume slider at 30% and in-app volume sliders at around 20%, resulting the total multiplier of 0.06 (or about -26dB full scale) to have comfortable volume levels. Only exception is Elite: Dangerous; with sound set to full dynamic range I can keep the main volume slider at maximum and enjoy glorious dynamics. Youtube is also surprisingly reasonable, probably because they normalize to -14dB LUTS or something similar.

Independence War and Independence War 2 remake by Aerovery Labs, or maybe Eagle Dynamics would be dapper.

The Mist.

Not movies, but Rifters series, Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts; and Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino. These will never become movies or TV, they're just too nihilistic and have some extremely heavy themes. Watts especially does not shy away from describing and closely analyzing the psyche of some truly horrible characters in Rifters series.

Drop it
Hide it
Lose it

Heh, I always find someone pushing 30 km/h with one's own muscles, not caring about weather going through rain, cold and heatwaves while carrying what they need to carry far more hardcore (won't use the word "masculine" because people of any gender do this) than someone sitting in a heated seat in climate-controlled box that moves forward without any effort from the user and not even requiring significant driving skills in the age of automatic transmission, traction control and all the other electronic assists (ABS is fine and recommended)🙃

There are some, but I'm not willing to install a random ROM from who-knows-where breaking who-knows-what functionality on my only phone.

They are. Pixels are also good for longevity and alternate ROM-s.

The problem is budget phones—people who can't afford to pay 600€ for a phone are left with devices that are obsolete in 2 years and no custom ROM-s even when the bootloader can be unlocked. The ROM community mostly consists of enthusiasts who are generally not interested in budget devices.

Case in point: my Poco X4 Pro. Excellent hardware (5G, 120Hz OLED, headphone out and SD card slot, IR blaster), cost me only 300€, but no LineageOS, CalyxOS or /e/ OS support unlike the older X3 Pro because it was not as popular among the enthusiasts.

Second-hand market is also very situational, eg in my country Pixel phones are not popular and thus the second-hand market is filled with mostly Samsung and some iPhones.

Who needs more than 20HP anyway?

20 hursepurses is maybe pushing it, but 30 to 50 kW would actually be plenty if we kept our cars lightweight and aerodynamically efficient instead of insisting on 3-ton ugly boxes with the frontal area of a house.

Hell, for a single-person lightweight (40 kg empty weight) electrical vehicle that is expected to go no faster than 30 km/h (often legally limited to 25km/h here in EU) and requires no license to operate, 250 to 300 W is more than enough.

Lotus had it right.

I just find 3rd person view clumsy and disorienting. Especially in CQC. 1st person gives me much better SA and feels way more responsive.

1st person view is also way more immersive—I want to be the main character, not a puppeteer pulling the strings on them.

I made it to the mezzanine fight an hour or two in and realized that the NPC-s are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges and the PC is a low DPS squishy. The worst way to ramp up difficulty. Trying to fight tactically from the cover didn't work and I lost interest. Too bad, I liked the atmosphere and even forgave the 3rd person only camera (normally I disqualify a game instantly if it doesn't allow 1st person view).

Maybe I'll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.

In Sekiro you have a choice around two thirds into the game which causes the game to end immediately (with a very bad ending); since the game autosaves all the time, once you make that choice you have to start the entire game over and get to that point again to make a different choice.

Yeah, that's bad game design IMO unless the game is an hour or two long. The player should be able to roll back when they fuck up that much. In fact, only one save file and no way to roll back if it gets corrupted or you realize how badly you have fucked up is always a bad design.

Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I'm used to doesn't work.

EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50...60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.

Education is free in most of the world. And people sell their brains all the time. It's called "a job".

No-one. Training a neural network, natural or artificial, is not "stealing". Or no artist would be able to study the works of other artists to become a better artist themself.

Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network which is trained throughout its life the same way an artificial neural network is. Nothing is original, every creator is "stealing" from every other creator who's work they have studied to become better creators. No creator ever in history has created anything in pure, absolute vaccuum. Every creation is a remix and amalgamation of previously created works.

And intellectual property is a spook , anyway. No-one can own an idea.

Did they have a leveling system, class system and virtual dice rolls (explicit or implicit)? If they did, then yes, they were CRPG-s.

Yes, because vast majority of orgs both in private and public sectors suck at securing their systems. Either:
The admins lack the knowledge and skills to properly configure their stuff.
The admins are not given the resources they need to update and secure the systems.
The in-house parts of the system rely on some deprecated functionality of an old version of some underlying service. Updating in-house parts to make it work with new versions is not made possible because "Phil knew how but Phil was laid off 10 years ago" or "the company who made it is out of business" or "we don't have the money to do it" or "it works now, so why bother?"
The servers are fine, up-to-date and secure, but the in-house service itself has glaring security issues that go unfixed due to above reasons.

And thus came along little Bobby Tables and was able to completely incapacitate his school district...

Generally a Linux installation is very good at keeping itself up-to-date and installing security patches automagically. Updating Docker containers is somewhat more involved, but can be easily automated with Watchtower.

No Europa Report, probably the hardest of sci-fi movies ever (9.5 on Mohs scale)? Most movies on that list are somewhere around 5...6 on the Mohs scale, with some (GATTACA, 2001, Ex Machina) around 7...8 and only Martian at 9. Sunshine, Stalker and Coherence are not hard scifi at all, 2...3.

Most of the services you use every day run on Linux servers. Even Microsoft uses Linux on their servers. And these services, not an average laptop, are the main targets of malicious actors.

The vast majority of behind-the-scenes infra that the end user never sees are open-source, even if the end-user part is proprietary. Eg. Facebook and Xwitter are proprietary, but run on open-source infrastructure like Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx etc.

Proprietary OS-s are workstation/office/home PC land. They have way more security issues due to crap coding whereas security problems with open-source server stuff are as a rule the fault of the admins misconfiguring services and not keeping their software up to date.