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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2023

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  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlNon intentional peak performance
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    4 days ago

    I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.

    If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.




  • Used it a ton in the art departments of vfx and game dev. Im talking about the tools that make assets, not the game engine or a runtime scripting language. More like the stuff launching and running in Maya, or Houdini, or Substance, etc.

    Most of this is already highly OO, and there’s a lot of interaction with C++. Python is the perfect language for this. There’s a lot of rapid interation and gluing many different services and data together. Also you’re waiting on file IO or some massive scene graph update all the time so having the tools be slightly slower doesn’t matter. Also, at least in vfx, there’s mixed Linux/Windows/Mac and it’s great for that. ALSO art teams (unlike the programming team) have people who may not be super technical, and Python let’s them write tools and scripts more easily. They don’t even have to understand OO but you can say “copy this class template and implement these two methods” and they can write tools that “work” in the pipeline.

    It’s honestly a godsend. Before the industry settled on Python, every program had its own proprietary scripting language and some were quite limited. Their C++ APIs are all different, of course. So now everyone just ships with a Python interpreter, you manage launching each app so you can control PYTHONPATH and you’re golden.


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlRoad trip tips
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    20 days ago

    Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).

    Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.


  • I had a tricky time getting hardware encoding to work and it ultimately ended up being I needed to expose the GPU to the Docker container. The yaml config needed:

        devices:
          - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
          - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0
    

    Note this was on a low-end Synology NAS with some sort of crappy intel GPU, but it actually works now, I was surprised. I only mention because before this I spent lots of time messing around with the Jellyfin settings and only the logs tipped me off. Jellyfin loves to fallback silently to CPU transcoding it seems, which I guess is good, but make troubleshooting unintuitive. Searching for log errors online gave me this solution.



  • I do a lot of invasive species management. Many of the common names are “exotic” sounding and include “Asian”, “Chinese”, “Japanese” etc because they were marketed this way in the 20th century to appeal to gardeners and land managers who didn’t know better and just wanted fast growing, pretty plants.

    Now, in the current atmosphere of sinophobia I have often heard someone imply these invasives were deliberate sabotage. But it was westerners who imported these things. We wanted them, or at least wanted the plant that hosted the insect, or whatever. Also, by that logic we have “sabotaged” China with our invasives.

    I feel like as a society we are so inarticulate, hateful, and short-sighted that we no longer have the ability to solve complex problems.


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlYou are in good hands
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    1 month ago

    It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlIs that bad?
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    1 month ago

    Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.


  • This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.




  • I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

    I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

    Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

    So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.

    I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlweird priorities
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    2 months ago

    Seems like basically every company is covering up crimes that happen on their properties, and lots of those are sex crimes. I have no data, just anecdotally it’s been almost every company I’ve ever worked for and the experience of virtually every woman I’ve known well enough to talk candidly about this shit. I’m not talking about “nice ass” comments either, I’m talking like, “blow me or you’re fired” type shit.

    Not an excuse for Ubisoft, but it’s kind of like how Covid is now endemic so we’re like “oh well”. This disease is so common we apparently don’t give a shit. There was a brief window of hope with “Me Too” but then reactionaries shut that down.