frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I've been a late adopter of every version of Windows I've ever used - and I skipped 8 too, switching to 10 around the same time you did because my software required it. It does seem the best way to avoid most of the problems: Microsoft has moved on to pulling its old tricks on the newest version, and there are more tools for modifying the old version. So I figure I'll switch to 11 or 12 when Microsoft is doing awful things with 13.

I'm very glad that my definitely-100%-legit copy of Windows 10 seems to have no idea how to upgrade to 11. It still gets other updates, my hardware is definitely compatible. The thought of upgrading to 11 just never seems to enter its mind. I suspect I'll be sticking with Windows 10 for a long, long time, until either Microsoft give up on this ridiculous idea in response to customer backlash, or Linux becomes a viable option for my usecase (Nvidia GPU, lots of proprietary software that I need to use for university and future career). It wouldn't be the first time I've held onto an older version of Windows for a protracted period of time, skipping a dreadful iteration or two, and then upgrading when Microsoft have learned their lesson.

Thank you. :)

We did, amazingly, get it done on time, and the end results were pretty amazing. For first year student work, anyway.

Group project is due tomorrow, including the presentation of the completed animation to the client. After one person on the team (who has been thoroughly documented in these threads over the last six months) got caught lying about how much of his sequence he had done, he was given an ultimatum: a hard deadline that passed fifteen minutes ago, and if he failed to meet it, someone else is doing his scene and his name is getting taken out of the credits. We could justify this as he hasn't contributed significantly to any other part of the project.

He failed to meet the deadline.

I would like to note at this point that his scene is two shots totalling about 15 seconds. My scene was eight shots totalling 45 seconds and I was done last Friday.

We have another assignment due at midnight tonight, which I sensibly/foolishly completed and handed in on Friday. Since everybody else is finishing that assignment this evening, I am the only one with any time available to animate and render this scene, I get to rig and animate the final scene of our animation. That's why we can't just cut the scene and work around it: the story would not have a conclusion without this scene. In retrospect we probably should never have trusted him with it, but it's not like there was anything else that was short and simple he could have done.

I am very angry with this guy, and I'm not convinced I'll be able to hold my tongue if he turns up for the presentation tomorrow.

My local museum takes this approach with some of its historical exhibits, which were, to put it bluntly, stuff British soldiers nicked while they were in Africa, which were then donated to the museum when they died. These are all low value personal items which would be impossible to trace descendants of their original owners (its not practical to find the descendants of the owner of a shirt, a toy, a musical instrument, etc from 200 years ago), so instead the museum displays them with signage that puts them in the appropriate context for the time in history when they were acquired. As a result, I now know that a lot of men from my local area served in south Africa in the 19th century, who stole everything that wasn't nailed down.

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. I assume it's a reflection of how weakened regulators have become that no one was able to say "no" to Musk.

I mean, I'd like to be surprised that a technology driven by a techbro with the "move fast and break things" mentality has broken because of moving too quickly into human trials, but....

I guess we should just count ourselves lucky that the poor human test subject patient wasn't permanently harmed by Musk's raging arrogance.

Final week on the final group project of the academic year. Deadline is Monday. And I am fucking pissed off.

• Team leader and sub-team leader for the production phase of the project are incapable of providing leadership, because the former is lovely but timid, and the other is just never fucking there. With just days to go and important decisions and instructions just not happening, I have simply taken over and started telling everyone what to do. But this now means that on top of my work, everyone is now coming to me with questions, including the team leader and sub-team leaders.
• The useless, obstructive, narcissistic, lazy, arrogant piece of utter shite who I had to work with on the last project. Well, it transpires he has basically done absolutely fucking nothing on this project since January, apart from 3D modelling half of a rock (someone else finished the rock) and modelling 80% of one character (it's shit and the texture job is half-arsed). But this week he actually had to do something, which was building one set and rigging one character. I got a phone call at 8:30am this morning from the person who had to animate that one scene, and... yeah, surprise surprise, it's only half done. Lighting, cameras, and rigging are not done. I hope the guy who has to clean up this mess calms down by Monday, otherwise there's going to be a murder.
• After spending all day rendering shots, after making a judgement call on the resolution because it wasn't included in the assignment brief (so I guessed based on the previous project) and we were unable to get a response from the teacher when we contacted to ask. Nope, that's the wrong resolution. So everything that was rendered yesterday needs to be rendered again in a different resolution and format. Which takes twice as long. Shots that took 2.5 years yesterday require 5.5 hours today. So while I set up the remaining shots today, I've got both my laptop and my spouse's laptop re-rendering all of yesterday's work. My desk is a chaotic collection of three computers, six screens, three keyboards, two mice, and a specialist 3D mouse.

Yeah, I am extremely fucking pissed off and if my teammate opts for murder I might just join him, because right now an awful lot of people are looking incredibly stabbable. I hate group projects.

For me the biggest problem with modern games is the obsession with high fidelity graphics. The dev teams that create games without a focus on photo-realism or jaw dropping visuals are often the teams creating the best games in my eyes.

I think this is very much down to personal taste. While I don't think a great game needs photo-realistic graphics, for me a game's graphics do factor into my enjoyment of it, so it should at least feel like the devs put some effort into making the game visually appealing. That could be focusing on making the graphics beautiful, or stylised and quirky, or just incredibly cute. But if I'm gonna spend hours looking at something, I want it to look nice.

Railways and public transport are grouped under infrastructure because even if climate change was not an issue, public transport is infrastructure that's good for people and the economy. There's plenty of statistics to support the idea that good public transport infrastructure has a wide range of benefits, including improved economic growth, that pre-dates climate change by decades, and will still be the case long after climate change is fixed. The Victorians didn't build railway lines all over Europe because trains are better for the climate than cars. :)

It probably helped that Susan Hall is deranged, and the UK as a whole prefers its politicians as close to the centre as possible, rejecting extremes on both ends.

If the people involved in this project don't do a maniacal laugh at least once during the process, I'll be very disappointed.

where does that weirdness come from?

Kids are weird, largely because they repeat things they hear without any understanding of the meanings and significance behind the words. So in the cases of past lives, they're repeating stuff they've heard on TV, films, documentaries, etc, and describing images they've seen on posters and adverts and book covers. And they talk about it like it's real because at that age, kids can't tell the difference between reality and fiction, so it's all equally real and it all gets blended together in their minds. Then adults read something into it that isn't really there.

Consider me highly sceptical.

How Aija once dramatically declared to her parents, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!” and curtsied.

“It’s a little disturbing to hear that from a 2-year-old, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” Marie says with a slight laugh.

Tucker nods. “You kind of wonder where she even picked up the expression.”

Because, yeah, there were absolutely no individuals on TV or radio who sarcastically remarked during the pandemic "ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!" Just because the parents didn't remember hearing it, doesn't mean the child didn't hear it and emulate it. Childrens' brains are wired to pay attention to their surroundings in ways that adults aren't, because that's how they learn. It seems massively more likely that the children in these cases are echoing things they have heard and absorbed that their parents simply paid no attention to.

Unless the parents can categorically prove that, for example, they never watched a film or documentary about the Holocaust while their child was nearby and able to hear it, that seems a far more likely explanation than reincarnation. For that matter, I'd be more inclined to believe that the child was remembering details from a documentary the parents watched when the child was still a baby, and thus considered unable to absorb anything at all, than believe the child was remembering a past life.

The fact that they can never be pinned down to a specific historic individual is also suspect. The article gives a generic "Presumably there were a lot of Ninas in concentration camps", but okay, has anyone checked how many there were, and what ages they were, and what other details might match up with the child's story? A bit of research would prove it one way or another, and the reluctance to follow through on that research makes it hard for me to take the claims seriously.

"Dragon of Ash and Stars" by H. Leighton Dickson is definitely worth a read.

You get what you pay for. If you download a free game, then of course it's going to be full of pay-to-win microtransactions. Although there are issues with greed in some larger games run by big companies, the reality is that game devs deserve to earn a living too, and that means at some point a game needs to be paid for.

There are still plenty of good quality mobile games out there, they just don't tend to be free to download. Back when I had more free time, I actually got good usage out of the Play Pass on Android, which was £5 a month and gave me access to a catalogue of excellent mobile games with no microtransactions at all, the vast majority of which were single-player, offline games. Literally the only reason I'm not still subscribed is I just don't have time to play mobile games at the moment - the chances of me subscribing again over the summer when I'm not at uni is high.

Inflation in the UK didn't really go into overdrive until Russia invaded Ukraine and caused a spike in oil and gas prices, which fed through to every other part of the economy because literally everything uses oil and/or gas at some point in the supply chain.

One of the downsides of staying (mostly) on top of my university work, including the group project, is when it comes to a soft deadline and other people aren't done yet even though I am... that just means more work for me. I narrowly avoided getting assigned a difficult task (moving the project forward into the next stage) by proactively volunteering to take over an easy task that two of my fellow students hadn't finished. Thus, I spent the morning generating trees instead of importing dozens of 3D models at variously disorganised scales into a single scene. Which was honestly a relief because I am so drained and burned out and exhausted.

I'm sure someone else can do a much, much better explanation than I can, but... As I understand it, it comes from the perception that inflation is driven by a "too much demand" problem (ie, too much money in the system chasing the same amount of goods), and by raising interest rates they discourage spending and encourage saving, both serving to reduce demand.

Obviously there are valid questions about whether raising interest rates to deal with a "not enough supply" problem actually helps or causes more harm - and given that the current inflation was initiated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in supply disruptions. The problem was not a surplus of money, but a deficit of goods. And, of course, a lot of things most hit by inflation are impossible to meaningfully reduce demand for, like food and electricity.

I have suspected for a while that raising interest rates to deal with inflation is largely a "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation: the Bank of England only has one tool - changing interest rates - so when faced with a problem, the only thing they can do is raise or lower interest rates.

Please learn elementary anatomy and physiology. You don’t have to get a medical degree. High school level knowledge will do.

Or failing that, learn enough critical thinking skills to be able to tell the difference between a reputable source and a wannabe celebrity influencer who will say anything for attention.

I don't have a huge level of knowledge of anatomy or physiology, but I can tell the NHS website is going to have more accurate and trustworthy information than an attention-seeking influencer.