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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • My guess was that they knew gaming was niche and were willing to invest less in this headset and more in spreading the widespread idea that “Spatial Computing” is the next paradigm for work.

    I VR a decent amount, and I really do like it a lot for watching TV and YouTube, and am toying with using it a bit for work-from-home where the shift in environment is surprisingly helpful.

    It’s just limited. Streaming apps aren’t very good, there’s no great source for 3D movies (which are great, when Bigscreen had them anyways), they’re still a bit too hot and heavy for long-term use, the game library isn’t very broad and there haven’t been many killer app games/products that distinct it from other modalities, and it’s going to need a critical amount of adoption to get used in remote meetings.

    I really do think it’s huge for given a sense of remote presence, and I’d love to research how VR presence affects remote collaboration, but there are so many factors keeping it tough to buy into.

    They did try, though, and I think they’re on the right track. Facial capture for remote presence and hybrid meetings, extending the monitors to give more privacy and flexibility to laptops, strong AR to reduce the need to take the headset off - but they’re first selling the idea, and then maybe there will be a break. I’ll admit the industry is moving much slower than I’d anticipated back in 2012 when I was starting VR research.




  • My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.


  • Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

    Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

    If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

    But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.


  • Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it’s high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn’t at the same quality bar or style as the training code.

    On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it’s continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.


  • I sit somewhere tangential on this - I think Bret Victor’s thoughts are valid here, or my interpretation of them - that we need to start revisiting our tooling. Our IDEs should be doing a lot more heavy lifting to suit our needs and reduce the amount of cognitive load that’s better suited for the computer anyways. I get it’s not as valid here as other use cases, but there’s some room for improvements.

    Having it in separate functions is more testable and maintainable and more readable when we’re thinking about control flow. Sometimes we want to look at a function and understand the nuts and bolts and sometimes we just want to know the overall flow. Why can’t we swap between views and inline the functions in our IDE when we want to see the full flow? In fact, why can’t we see the function inline but with the parameter variables replaced by passed values to get a feel for how the function will flow and compute what can be easily computed (assuming no global state)?

    I could be completely off base, but more and more recently - especially after years of teaching introductory programming - I’m leaning more toward the idea that our IDEs should be doubling down on taking advantage of language features, live computation, and co-operating with our coding style… and not just OOP. I’d love to hear some places that I might be overlooking. Maybe this is all a moot point, but I think code design and tooling should go hand in hand.




  • When I teach story points (not in an official Agile Scrum capacity, just as part of a larger course) I emphasize that the points are for conversation and consensus more than actual estimates.

    Saying this story is bigger than that one, and why, and seeing people in something like planning poker give drastically differing estimates is a great way to signal that people don’t really get the story or some major area wasn’t considered. It’s a great discussion tool. Then it also gives a really rough ballpark to help the PO reprioritize the next two sprints before planning, but I don’t think they should ever be taken too seriously (or else you probably wasted a ton of time trying to be accurate on something you’re not going to be accurate on).

    Students usually start by using task-hours as their metric, and naturally get pretty granular with tasks. This is for smaller projects - in larger ones, amortizing to just number of tasks is effectively the same as long as it’s not chewing away way more time in planning.



  • PixelProf@lemmy.catolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWindows 12
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    1 year ago

    Windows 11 has tabbed file explorer, a package manager, it’s quick, the interface looks nice and feels nice, and it’s been really stable for me. I don’t know where the complaints are at, it’s been great. All they need to do is regress all of the ads-in-your-OS stuff from 10. Bring back the start menu that doesn’t hang for 30 seconds looking something up online before showing you your installed programs.


  • I know this post and comment might sound shilly but switching to more expensive microfibre underwear actually made a big impact on my life and motivated me to start buying better fitting and better material clothes.

    I’d always bought cheap and thought anything else was silly. I was wrong. So much more comfortable, I haven’t had a single pair even begin to wear down a little bit, less sweating and feel cleaner, fit better, and haven’t been scrunchy or uncomfortable once compared to the daily issues of that cheap FotL life. This led to more expensive and longer lasting socks with textures I like better, better fitting shoes that survive more than one season.

    It was spawned by some severe weight loss and a need to restock my wardrobe. My old underwear stuck around as backups to tell me I needed to do laundry, but going back to the old ones was bad enough that I stopped postponing laundry.

    Basically, I really didn’t appreciate how much I absolutely hated so many textures I was constantly in contact with until I tried alternative underwear and realized you don’t have to just deal with that all the time.


  • It depends what “From Scratch” means to you, as I don’t know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about…

    • Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
    • Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
    • Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they’re more general purpose and you’ll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting “Making the game”, but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
    • Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images… that same as previous, but you’ll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

    If you’re new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here’s a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you’ll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it’s a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

    I’m a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn’t have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there’s lots of info out there.

    If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they’ll often run slow, they’ll take more time to get started on a project, and you’ll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

    If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you’ll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you’d like, but similar caveats to previous; there’s likely a low ceiling for the quality you’ll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.



  • Not the OP, but in Canada at least, I think you would legally be expected to because common law is (as far as I’m aware) very nearly marriage and is entirely implied by time living together in a conjugal relationship. It might be provincial to determine the actual property laws, though.

    I don’t have a firm opinion here, but I think the key difference in your case is that a conjugal relationship has some expectation of… Oh I don’t know, mutuality? A landlord tenant relationship is a lease agreement. If your roommate didn’t sign any kind of lease agreement, they might have a legal case to just not pay you and suffer no consequences (I don’t know), but they’re not in a conjugal relationship, so there’s also no implication of shared ownership.

    Without signing lease agreement and being in a conjugal relationship, I think there is a pretty fair case that expecting shared ownership is a fair assumption.

    That all said, it’s also really up to the individuals to figure that out early, and the deception in the meme suggests that the agency to have that discussion wasn’t available, and that’s really the part I find problematic here.


  • PixelProf@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlSplitting the rent.
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    1 year ago

    That and expropriation/eminent domain, etc. Even if you pay your taxes, if the government needs it, they have processes to take it.

    I’m not saying it’s an inherently bad thing, but it’s another one of those important things to realize is already present if anyone wants to argue for/against certain government reforms.



  • I know it’s controversial, but moving away from “guys” when I address a group and more or less defaulting to “they” when referring to people I don’t know.

    They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I’d never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn’t state pronouns.

    Switching away from guys was natural, but I’m in a very male dominated field and I’d heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with “Guys”, so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.