tal @ tal @lemmy.today

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156

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6,594

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sony WH-1000XM4/5/6

I don't have one of those, but they're pretty popular as headphones with good ANC.

Jlab Epic Air Sport ANC

I do have those, though.

Use !world@lemmy.world rather than !news@lemmy.world if you don't want US-specific news. That's specifically what that community was created for (as well as its predecessor on Reddit, /r/worldnews...which eventually forked into /r/animetiddies due to Reddit drama, but that's another story).

EDIT: Also, I was gonna say "if you want more news from elsewhere, you could also submit it", but I see that a significant chunk of your recent submissions were...on US politics, so...

Pew's pretty well-respected.

Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn't great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.

On the other hand, I've also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there's a single illustration for each character. For that, it'd be a good match.

AI-based speech synth isn't as good as human voice acting, but it's gotten pretty decent if you don't need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It's not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.

I've been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I've found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.

Phrases

What is banned?

• Possession of catapults, slingshots, or similar items without a legitimate reason

Was there an actual problem with widespread use of catapults in Spelthorne?

Gotcha, thanks!

I'm assuming that it's some sort of component from the air conditioner, but damned if I know what it is. Looks like power plugs on it, and someone else mentioned "caps", so maybe a capacitor, though I wasn't aware that there was some kind of plug standard for large removable capacitors.

kagis

Yeah, this capacitor looks similar.

EDIT: Apparently air conditioners can use large capacitors:

https://www.amazon.com/Capacitor-Conditioner-Multi-Purpose-Capacitor-5-Warranty/dp/B092ZQ3Y3N

Capacitor for Air Conditioner 5 uf MFD 370 or 440 Volt VAC, Multi-Purpose Round Capacitor for AC Motor Run or Fan Motor Start or Condenser Straight

EDIT2: Oh, I bet I know what it's for, given the "Fan Motor Start" and what I assume is a misspelled "Condenser Start" text on the Amazon listing. Some hardware will draw a lot of juice when starting up. Laser printers are prone to this, for example. The references above are to mechanical things, moving components, and maybe one need extra power to overcome static friction, to get the parts in motion initially; once moving, they face (lesser) kinetic friction. One option is to just draw a ton of power from the line, but then that increases the peak power demands of a device. Another option, gentler on whatever circuit or external power source is providing the power, is to charge a capacitor for a bit and that'll let you create a big surge of available power for a moment without having to have higher peak demands on the external power source. Adds to device cost, but limits its peak draw.

In fairness, rural America probably didn't entirely understand the implications of said vote.

As I've pointed out on here before, I feel like a lot of people in mostly-Republican-voting rural American are going to be even more disappointed when they discover agricultural subsidies ending, healthcare subsidies ending that disproportionately benefit poorer, rural areas, illegal immigrant agricultural workers that farms rely on becoming unavailable, counter-tariffs that tend to target agricultural output from rural areas, etc.

This is an amazing graph.

That's an older version rendered by the GitHub project that does those.

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline

Their releases page has current ones:

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases

For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.

External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it's right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn't matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn't matter much.

If you already have a larger Linux laptop that you're otherwise happy with, have you considered just throwing it in a padded laptop backpack?

No, please don't mess it up. While he's off doing pomp and ceremony stuff, he doesn't have his fingers in policy. In fact, a full world tour of all British territory might be warranted.

Why should the Pacific Ocean be named "the Pacific Ocean" when it could be "the American Ocean"?

I mean, he's some random 19-year-old who worked for Elon before. I doubt that he's personally done anything especially reprehensible at DOGE. The problem isn't so much him as it is other people placing him in the role he was placed in.

If you went to work at American Airlines as a high level executive and hired a 19-year-old who worked for you at some Burger King outlet as a pilot because he's a good guy and you know him and you think that he can learn on the job, the problem here isn't really the 19-year-old. It's you being wildly irresponsible with your hiring.

I wouldn't support beating up on those people for bad decisions on the part of others.

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I don't know what the internal mechanics are like, haven't read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I'd vaguely prefer the percentage --- I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics --- but it's nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn't been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I've got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.

even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

Yeah, I don't know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I've liked playing in the past.

While Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren't quite the same thing --- they're closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them --- the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you're hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.

I also played Silent Storm and enjoyed it, though it's now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2...). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.

And there's X-Com. I didn't like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.

I mean, yes, but a Mac is also a personal computer (PC), despite the fact that "PC" has also been used to distinguish a Windows machine from a Mac machine for a long time. Terms can have multiple meanings.

All of that said, consider replacing your central ducted unit with a multi-head mini-split system in the long run.

Mini splits don't provide ventilation, whereas ducted systems do. In general, if one can have a ducted system, I'd rather have that. The major problem with ducted systems is that ductwork takes up a lot of space, so it's hard to stick into an existing house; much less of an issue if you can build it in during construction. A mini split is less invasive to an existing structure.

Just don’t get a portable unit. They suck and are just a waste of money most of the times.

Get a dual-hose unit if you get one. There are a lot of companies selling single-hose units. Those are a lot less efficient and aren't much cheaper. I would guess that in a situation where they get any kind of meaningful use, a dual-hose unit pays for itself quickly.

I don't think I'd agree that they suck, but if you can use a window unit --- not all rooms and windows are amenable to this --- you normally want a window unit instead of a portable unit, unless you must take down the AC unit on a regular basis. Less noise inside, more energy efficiency.

Yes.

The Threadiverse has multiple intercompatible "Reddit-alike" software packages.

• Lemmy (the biggest). Example: https://lemmy.world/ Written in the Rust programming language.
• PieFed. Example: https://piefed.social/ Written in the Python programming language.
• Mbin (the successor of the defunct Kbin project). Example: https://fedia.io/ Written in the PHP programming language.

There's also Sublinks, written in Java, but I don't know for sure whether that's going to actually get the ball rolling. https://demo.sublinks.org/ Think they need more developers contributing.

EDIT: Note that while this approach is unusual for the centralized Web-oriented social media era, where typically one company controls the whole shebang and has one codebase, it is common for federated systems. There are many different NNTP server implementations for Usenet, many different XMPP server implementations for instant messaging, many different IRC server implementations for chat, many different SMTP server implementations for email, many different FidoNet implementations.