One of my cats love fishing used tea leaves out from mugs. She doesn’t eat them, she just paws the leaves out from the cups and then leaves them on the counter. We have no idea why she does it but she absolutely insists on doing it. No other cat does this.

Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.

Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do

If there was something I give up on, it’s gun control. For several reasons:

1. There’s basically no gun control anyways so it’s not like we’re giving up something.
2. Compared to abortion rights (ie bodily autonomy) and climate change (ie existential crisis), not having gun control is the least bad. It’s still pretty crucial, to be fair, but comparing to actual existential crises like the other 2, not having gun control doesn’t seem that bad in comparison

A meme or post that has no deeper meaning. If you have to analyze it or think about it, you’re already past a shitpost. The point of a shitpost is the stupidity of its superficial, useless, low-quality humor

It’s possible to have a high-quality, high-effort shitpost, but it’s rare, since by nature, high effort posts tend to also be meaningful. In my eyes, this is peak high effort shitpost

Technically not legal, but depending on the wording, there’s a ton of gray area in what’s considered warranty-covered damage and what’s not warranty-covered damage. Companies absolutely take advantage of the gray area, even lying in some instances because they know that their users would rarely have the know-how to call them out on it and demand rightful warranty coverage. LTT’s argument is that if there is such large legal gray area on the warranty, it is meaningless to provide one to begin with

Yup, thanks! I was trying to figure out which word I was thinking of. I must have malaphored myself

Same for me, but with Tetris. I’m not the best, but I’m confident I can handedly beat the vast majority of the population. I spent most of my lockdown days just doing Tetris.

Honestly, steam deck lol

It’s an odd form factor that people don’t really have much experience with, hence they don’t really know how useful it’ll be to them. To be fair to myself, I had been holding back on purchasing one until maybe a year after the initial launch, so I think I would personally describe my experience as a leap of faith.

In any case, it turns out to be a great little thing. There’s a lot of games in my backlog that don’t feel “desktop-y,” and therefore I’ve never played them, if that makes sense. But with a handheld form factor, now I have more motivation to go through those games. Emulation on the steam deck has also been great, for a similar reason. And sometimes I just want to be in bed than on my desktop. Or sometimes I’m just on the bus or waiting for something.

I think SteamOS also taught me how usable Linux was, and that’s been pretty instrumental in getting me to minimize my Windows dependence

Windows 11. It sucks but I have apps that don’t run on Linux, and there simply aren’t any alternatives. I dual boot Kubuntu on my laptop and Kubuntu is great. I just wish software compatibility is better

Microraptor. I have a soft spot for the small dinos

It’s confusing because both AMD and Nvidia call both frame gen and upscaling as the same thing.

Upscaling: GPU renders game at low resolution (eg, 720p), and then (semi) smartly guesses what’s in the pixels that weren’t rendered. You get improved framerates because the GPU is doing less work per frame. The downside is typically that the image is typically a bit blurrier, and depending on how the GPU guesses the missing pixels, you might also get ghosting, which is where moving objects leave a smear trail behind them. The general consensus is that if you plan to use an upscaler, you should only use the highest quality mode on the upscaler. Any lower and the blurring becomes too significant

Use when:

• your GPU isn’t powerful enough to drive your monitor at its native resolution (ie you were going to run the game at a lower resolution anyways)
• your game isn’t running as fast as you’d like, but turning down the settings would result in too noticeable of a drop in visual quality
• your game doesn’t support your monitor’s native resolution (common in older games)

Do not use when:

• you could turn down the settings and still be satisfied with the visual quality

Frame gen: GPU renders a frame, holds on to the frame, renders the next frame, and then guesses at what happened between the two frames. The framerate is improved because the GPU is inserting an entirely guessed frame in between every rendered frame. The downside is that because the GPU has to hold on to a frame, the latency is increased. More specifically, the time between when you move your mouse and when your camera moves will be increased with frame gen.

Use when:

• your game isn’t latency-sensitive (eg puzzle games, strategy games, some adventure games)
• you have a high refresh rate monitor (higher refresh rates typically lead to less added latency)

Do not use when:

• your frame rate (without frame gen) is below 60 fps (added latency becomes too noticeable)
• your game is latency-sensitive (eg competitive multiplayer games)

Terminology:

• AMD FSR 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• AMD RSR: literally just FSR 1

• AMD FSR 2: semi-smart upscaler

• AMD FSR 3: very slightly smarter upscaler than FSR 2, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• AMD AFMF: literally just the frame generation part of FSR 3, but slightly dumber

• nVidia DLSS 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• nVidia NSR: literally just DLSS 1

• nVidia DLSS 2: semi-smart upscaler

• nVidia DLSS 3: smarter upscaler than DLSS 3, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• Intel XeSS: semi-smart upscaler

Ori and the Blind Forest. Every song in the soundtrack is brilliant

Yes, and people do do it. It’s just incredibly difficult to do it even for relatively simple programs, and the more complex the program is, the more exponentially hard the reverse engineering will be.

The problem is not necessarily turning it into code, since many decompilers do it already for you nowadays. The issue is understanding what in the world the code is supposed to do. Normally, open source code would be commented and there would be documentation, so it’s easy to edit or build on the code. Decompiled code comes with no documentation or comments, and all the variable names are virtually illegible.

It’s sometimes easier to build something new than to fix what’s broken, and this would be one of those cases where it’s true

You plan to walk into the counter? Daring strat, but I can see it freaking out the cashier enough to cancel the tip himself if you also maintain eye contact while walking, like an Oblivion NPC

Not necessarily an acronym, but here’s a fun one for Japanese: Laughing in Japanese is warau, which gets shortened when typing to just w. If you want to laugh a lot, you would type wwww. That ends up looking like a field of grass, so that in turn gets shortened into 草 (kusa, or grass). Basically, 草 is the Japanese equivalent of lol

Also, in Chinese, thank you is often abbreviated as 3q, because when you say it out loud, it sounds like “thank you” (san kyu)

Not gaslighting, and from what you seem to describe, doesn’t appear to be manipulative either. She just seems to be angry. Not to say that you can’t be both angry and manipulative, but I don’t see clear intent for her to try to guilt trip or gaslight you.

Gaslighting would be if she lied and said that she sent you a message when in fact she didn’t. i.e., lying with the intent to make you question your judgment and perception

Guilt tripping would be if she pressured you into giving her a gift as compensation for ignoring her message. i.e., taking advantage of someone’s feelings of guilt to get them to do something for you.

I don’t see any lie, and I don’t see hee trying to extract anything out of you. Worst case interpretation, she’s being a bit petty. Best case interpretation, she’s scared of being alone outside.

I noticed your final paragraph, and I would be cautious in general about saying that someone who’s trying to convince you that their anger is justified is automatically manipulative. That’s kind of just how anger works. People think that their anger is justified. Otherwise they wouldn’t be angry. Manipulation occurs when you start to feel like you are being used for their own motives.

Either way, you should probably talk to her about it. It seems like she thinks the issue is more severe than you appear to think, and that is something that should be discussed with her

End of mankind - nothing, really. Even with climate change or nuclear war, the rich will live on. It will be a shitty, greedy, undeserving populace that lives on, but mankind will live on.

End of the world as we know it - climate change. I don’t know of anything else more existential

My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don’t really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.

And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like

Did you go to college/what was your experience with college?