Russ

I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.

I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).

You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.

Patching Comic Code? It was quite a while ago unfortunately, so I don’t have the exact commands available, but I used their Font Patcher tool in order to do so.

From what I recall, the tricky thing was actually getting the dependencies it required to be installed properly, Font Forge would be up and running but then the script’s errors indicated that it couldn’t resolve all of the necessary dependencies. Not sure what OS you’re on so your mileage may vary - but for Linux they now have an AppImage that looks to contain everything it needs, and for macOS/Windows if you have Docker available there also appears to be a pre-built container for it. There’s also quite a few examples that I don’t think were there when I used it, since I also recall not being 100% sure of what flags were needed to run it

I pretty much agree, personally I rarely ever downvote a comment/post - to the point where I cannot even recall when my last downvote was, unless I accidentally have done so via a mobile gesture (I try to be cautious about this). If I were at my PC, I’d check my instance’s database, but alas.

[The rest here on is more of a “6 o’clock in the morning stream of thoughts from my perspective” thing. My friends know me as being very verbose - last paragraph is where I try to steer back on track]

If I do upvote something, generally it’ll be something that I feel is driving forward a discussion in good faith (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the content itself) and is respectful of all parties involved.

Though a lack of an upvote from me doesn’t indicate disagreement either.

An actual flat-out disagreement from me tends to be more on the rare side of things. Because so many comments are an opinion / viewpoint rather than solid fact. It’s one thing to say “No, 2+2 does not equal 5” since that is rooted in fact.

Whereas I have to feel pretty strongly about something to directly challenge an opinion, especially since it super easy to misjudge tone on the Internet/across text and I’m not here to unintentionally start a war over something that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer (within reason - but even that itself is something that isn’t binary). I try to be cautious about asserting something is wrong unless I’m very sure of it (even if I do often fail at that, given the previous issue of tone being hard to judge across text), and of course in most cases you can’t really say another person’s opinion is unequivocally wrong.

I don’t mind giving a different viewpoint, but again I try to be cautious about it because I don’t want to come across as “My viewpoint is ultimately right and yours is wrong” and that is unfortunately how a lot of discussions end up being seen (or I just simply make the human error of just having a far too strong opinion of my own).

I do my best to keep my tone as neutral as I can, though as they say “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” My original comment is a good example of this, because I do agree that downvotes are far too often used in the manner that you stated. I also agree that they’re typically a poor way of criticizing someone if they don’t include a corresponding reply (if I say something that is factually wrong - or even just poor taste, I usually want to know about it so I don’t keep doing so!), my only divergence from the matter was that they are a criticism - just a really bad way of doing so.

Oh, so that’s what those Python notebooks are that I’ve heard people talk about!

Oh hey, someone else who uses Comic Code - greetings!

I remember when I first saw it, I laughed - and then it grew on me. Then it turned into “I can’t believe I am buying a derivation of comic sans” but it is actually a really nice monospaced font.

Only thing I didn’t like was having to figure out how to use Font Patcher to make a copy of it that supports nerd fonts, but it was a one and done process.

(I also don’t really like how it looks in my IDE the few times I find myself on Windows, but I don’t really blame the font for that one - looks perfect in the same IDE on Linux…)

I do wonder why Valve hasn’t enabled it by default. It’s only defaulted on SteamOS and in fact, I believe they removed the option to turn it off on SteamOS recently…

I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it’s more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).

Even from the standpoint of “You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community” that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can’t enforce it not being a “I disagree” button, but I digress) have is still what I’d consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the “level” of it - I wouldn’t say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.

That’s just my view of it, at least, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be a form of criticism - you shouldn’t use them as a “This breaks the rules” indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it’s far less likely to be acted upon/handled.

I definitely don’t doubt their utility, despite my facetious comment regarding them - however it’s not likely I’ll ever be able to actually appreciate them (in this lifetime at least) due to my struggles with understanding far “simpler” areas of math haha.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

Welcome to Lemmy!

For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.

That’s a tough one. While I do think AI can be fun to play around with (though I personally prefer the ones I can run locally), there’s always a sort of “monkey’s paw” element to it. Text generation? Hallucinations. Image generation? All sorts of weird artifacts, and are heavily influenced by the training data (yes of course they all are, but what I mean is, if you pick a model that is heavily inspired by NSFW content for example, then you’re very likely to get NSFW content - sounds “common sense”, but nonetheless).

So I suppose in a world where it’s “perfect” then I’d want it to make some form of media that can make everyone happy. If everyone on the planet were happy, then it’d be a much better place.

Or if we’re talking less altruistic desires, probably a continuation of some TV series that I enjoyed which ended on a cliffhanger.

Income is the reason I will (typically) wait for the big sales to purchase games. I don’t have as much disposable income, so its much easier to justify spending $60 on three $20 games if they’ve been on my wishlist (or seem very appealing to me) for example than it is on one $60 game.

Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I’ve always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure “can u see me in the dark?” has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now… Lzzy’s vocals are fantastic in it!

Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I’ve been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.

I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.

Isn’t hardware acceleration for GPUs?

Not necessarily, in this case they’re referring to Intel’s QuickSync (Video) - or QSV for short, which is Intel’s way of doing video encoding/decoding on dedicated hardware in the CPU. On the AMD side, there is Video Core Next although I’m not very well versed with the video encode/decode side of things so I’m not sure how it stacks up with QSV.

Hardware aside, to my knowledge no one is really actively developing any of the Switch emulators due to the prior legal action that was taken.

Now, eventually it’s possible someone might do it for the Switch 2, but I wouldn’t expect anything quick as whomever does so will very likely incur the mighty wrath of Nintendo’s legal team.

I picked up Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, I think that’s really all I’m going to pickup honestly. Already have a fair bit in my backlog, and there’s nothing else in my wishlist that makes me go “I want to play that right now” that can’t just wait for another sale.

Ah, I thought this was in regards to AFK tracking when discord isn’t focused (which this plugin still won’t fix due to the mentioned Wayland restrictions) - I didn’t realize that it still didn’t work even when discord was focused, which is strange.

I’ve been using Vesktop since screen share wasn’t working on Wayland, and it already seems to do what this plugin does hence my confusion.

I’m not sure if this is actually possible - as far as I know, applications can’t track key presses/mouse movement when their associated window isn’t in focus. It’d be great if they just gave the option to disable the AFK detection since it doesn’t work…

All I wanted them to change was the fact that the installer for the game in 2020 would download then decompress one file at a time, so it took forever for the game to install (on top of the fact that it uses an in-game installer in the first place).

I don’t have the new version, but based on what I’ve been reading they sure curled the monkey paw this time.