shib71

9개월 전discuss

Yes, I could see a lot of GMs being interested in plug in and go product that fills that niche. Implementing the right feature set is challenging, as existing dedicated virtual tabletops have already shown. But something like a simple Owlbear Rodeo extension that adds basic miniature recognition might be all we need.

shib71

10개월 전discuss

Real world example of:

    Patient: Doc, it hurts when I do this.
    Doctor: Then stop doing that.

shib71

10개월 전discuss

My first thought was that it would be explaining Quicksort using an Ikea warehouse as a metaphor, to show how different algorithms suit different constraints.

As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice. It took some work for me to understand the diagram, and I've used Quicksort.

shib71

2년 전discuss

Might be useful to add tags. The more complex credit-based services often have categories (e.g. ec2, s3, etc). It could be useful for the dev to track service usage by spend, the client can get visibility into their own spend breakdown, and free trials often break out the free credits amongst different services.

shib71

2년 전discuss

> Art is ... mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.

I like the phrasing of the first part. But what art is "about" is very subjective.

For me, part of what I look for in art is intentionality - the notion that the artist has crafted each element toward a purpose, consciously or not. The less an artist contributes to the final piece, the less meaning I assign to it.

In this case: I would say that the individual pictures being displayed are not "art" - they have no meaning. But I think the device in whole is a piece of art. That is a creation that surfaces the creator's inner world, because they designed the device, wrote the code, crafted the prompts to achieve pieces that reflected their notion of beauty.

shib71

3년 전discuss

Reminds me of an old Discworld chestnut:

    Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

shib71

3년 전discuss

I wanted a Markdown notes app that I could access over the internet, and stored files in a files-on-s3 structure that would makes sense if I accessed it directly and would be stupidly simple to backup/restore.

Ended up with an Amplify app that had basic login, file upload with image thumnbnails, indexing of frontmatter, some query macros to list pages matching specific criteria, autocomplete for frontmatter and macros, and ability to make specific pages public if I want to. Apart from login, it only uses direct S3 calls, so I'm effectively only paying for S3 storage costs.

shib71

4년 전discuss

> "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong."

True in so many situations, Vincenzo.

shib71

4년 전discuss

In Australia, the fees for a four year engineering degree is around $30k AUD, and that's with very humane packback rules. $80k a _year_ is mindblowing. Rich folk and scholarship students I get, but why would anyone else go there?

shib71

6년 전discuss

I've backed quite a few projects (150), so I did a review to look for patterns.

* 33 software/game projects

* 23 board game projects

* 20 "thing" projects (i.e. requiring manufacturing)

* 60 rpg material projects (adventures, systems, supplements, etc)

* 14 other media

I initially backed quick a few software and "thing" projects. But both seem to be prone to unexpected setbacks, delivering late or never. My only outright scam was a "thing", but quite a few of these have gone silent. Transparency in these projects was never great, but maybe that has improved since I stopped backing them?

Of the board games: I enjoyed half and still have 3. Honestly, this seems to be in line with the games I try in general. Kickstarter has practically become an official business model for the industry, with established companies using it regularly. The result is that there is a high standard even for amateur projects in terms of understanding the game they're making, having artists lined up, having reasonable ideas of manufacturing/shipping costs and delays, posting regular updates, etc.

Currently I mostly back RPG books. They're often useful and inspiring for my own games and I've found quite a few systems that I'm keen to try (fingers crossed, 2021 will let that happen). About half of these result in a product I like and keep, and for the rest... Almost everyone running these projects is an RPG nerd like me, looking for an excuse to take their crazy idea as far as they can. I can get behind that. Transparency on these projects has usually been very good.

On lateness: every project has been late, except the ones that were basically just a preorder for something already in progress. The best you can hope for is regular updates that are transparent about progress and setbacks.

shib71

7년 전discuss

The copy implies very strongly that comments can be a respected part of the article as a whole, and by implication - of journalism.

My experience in the past has been that comments are not taken seriously by the publisher, seemingly just added to tick the "social" checkbox. But to make a commitment to the dialogue an article can generate seems like a positive development for journalism.

shib71

11년 전discuss

I found the repetitive use of "outdated" to be off-putting. It implies that much of the value of a new interface (including this one) lies in it's novelty. Except for a minority, the precise opposite is true - most people aren't interested in learning how to use their computer again.

shib71

12년 전discuss

I would be very interested in seeing a tutorial for how to build a custom developer tool in this.

Something I've been very interested in over the last couple of years is the idea of creating once off, task specific, development and introspection tools. Breach seems like the perfect environment for that kind of thing.

shib71

13년 전discuss

I personally find the characters very sympathetic and laughing at the BBT characters is like laughing at myself. It's refreshing to see the extreme qualities which other shows merely caricature be shown in the context of fully fleshed out human beings.

shib71

13년 전discuss

I also like it for sites that have ads everywhere. But the outright intrusive ads are the worst.

shib71

13년 전discuss

I'm not familiar with LKML or any of the developers, but Sarah is very impressive in this thread. Every time someone else tries to shift the topic, she brings the conversation back on course. She's right about a minimum standard of civility being crucial in email. Even if no one on the list is personally affected by the language (a big if for a large list), a single vitriolic email can poison the atmosphere for days.

shib71

13년 전discuss

This inspired me to find a scale comparison of Africa vs my home (Australia) which led me to MapFight:

http://mapfight.appspot.com/africa-vs-au

http://mapfight.appspot.com/africa-vs-europe

http://mapfight.appspot.com/africa-vs-usc

shib71

13년 전discuss

They won't be able to do this, for the same reason they couldn't open source Flash - too much proprietary code and licenced stuff.

shib71

13년 전discuss

I think the question might be better put this way:

Pick 5 random points on an infinite plane. Draw lines between all of them. One of those lines will contain another integer point. Prove this is true for every set of 5 random points.

shib71

13년 전discuss

I've had the same experience as Tesla, though not so extreme as to cause problems. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed extremely detailed "daydreams" where I explore worlds and meet people inspired by the books I read. I suspect this is fairly common in children, but I did it right through high school, university, and several years in the workplace.

The real question is: how much benefit does having a strong and well exercised imagination have for a technical career? (I assume it's very useful for artists).

I've found that software development gets a large boost. The more of the design you can hold in your head on once, the better the coder is able to anticipate the consequences of their decisions. When debugging, the programmer is able to see the entire state of the application that must have predicated it, experiment with a range of fixes, all before writing any code.

I love this quote from The Tao of Programming[1]: "Sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke."

[1] http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

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