Atvelonis's recent activity

  1. Comment on UK academic’s Wikipedia project raises profile of women around the world in ~life.women

    Atvelonis
    (edited )
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    This person's username on Wikipedia is Lajmoore if you're interested in her work. I've collaborated with a few users in the past on tangential aspects of similar projects, but the scope of...

    This person's username on Wikipedia is Lajmoore if you're interested in her work. I've collaborated with a few users in the past on tangential aspects of similar projects, but the scope of research done by such focused contributors is tremendously beyond anything I've attempted. Very laudable.

    Wikipedia editing initiatives are called WikiProjects, and there are many pages dedicated to chronicling them (of course, some are not formalized like this). You can find a list of active women-related WikiProjects as well as lists of users who associate with them using Wikipedia's thorough categorization and search system.

    One of the biggest and most data-intensive such WikiProjects is WikiProject Women in Red, which identifies "redlinks" (non-existent pages) about women on the site and systematically creates and expands them. There are also WikiProject Women scientists and others. But it is just as important to identify women not even mentioned on Wikipedia at all, especially in fields where they are overshadowed by men; this work is essential.

    4 votes
  2. Comment on Is fandom.com actually getting worse? in ~tech

    Atvelonis
    Link Parent
    The core MediaWiki software hasn't changed in a dramatic way. There have been many updates, improvements, and extensions, but MediaWiki in 2023 is pretty similar to MediaWiki in 2008. It's...
    • Exemplary

    The core MediaWiki software hasn't changed in a dramatic way. There have been many updates, improvements, and extensions, but MediaWiki in 2023 is pretty similar to MediaWiki in 2008. It's certainly much more complex than some other content management systems out there, but it was always that way.

    Self-hosting is relatively difficult for the general population and most fan contributors to wikis don't have technical experience. The way the MediaWiki front-end is designed involves few of the skills necessary to operate a website on the back-end. It's essentially just HTML with custom markdown and optional CSS, plus knowing some weird hacks and conventions around the GUI. Generally, the most technical work that wiki administrators do in wiki code itself is writing parser functions (like switch statements) to do useful template calls. Some wikis may have advanced extensions like Semantic MediaWiki and DynamicPageLists; may write custom JavaScript and Lua files; and may integrate with the API to operate bot accounts. However, even for a fairly technically minded team, self-hosting adds additional layers to their routines. To a set of software engineers, self-hosting on MediaWiki is not uniquely challenging. But wiki admins are personally moderating their site, manually reviewing edits and maintaining a style guide, which is tedious and time-consuming. They are also volunteers and most lack project management experience.

    I would argue that the prevalence of WYSIWYG editors in MediaWiki installations (especially Fandom) has attracted a more non-technical editor base over the years. If you edited Wikipedia in 2001, you were a nerd—because everyone on the internet in 2001 was a nerd. Today, the demographics of Wikipedia and Fandom are less programming-centric. When I worked for Fandom, I spent a lot of time helping community leaders with technical tasks. Some of them did not read or write code, including HTML, and struggled with basic computer science concepts. Many of them were also fairly young (in high school) and were not put-together enough to run a business, even a non-profit one. In many communities, the administrative turnover rate is high.

    Having been built specifically for Wikipedia, MediaWiki is fairly hard to monetize, which is why Fandom and other for-profit wiki hosts tend to build on their own software on top. It isn't social in the way casual internet users understand and wiki engagement is nothing like that of Reddit. Many foundational concepts, like user and article talk pages, are unintuitive to people familiar with SMS-style text messaging and article comment secetions. Fandom was running on a MediaWiki fork for many years before recently clearing up their tech debt and separating their custom-built software from the MediaWiki foundation. Even today, their implementation is complex and their business needs are not similar to Wikipedia's.

    Today, the biggest barrier for a wiki community interested in forking from Fandom is that the company's SEO is unbeatable. Even if the entire community were to move to a new platform, Fandom would retain a copy of the existing wiki. Their copy might slowly degrade over time, but not to a point that casual readers would stop using it. Given a choice between two wikis on the same topic, the majority of web traffic cannot consistently 1) realize that there are multiple wikis, and also 2) identify that one has significantly worse content than the other. Powerusers notice, but they aren't representative of the overall market.

    11 votes
  3. Comment on Making a calculator out of monkeys in Bloons Tower Defense 6 in ~games

    Atvelonis
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    Remarkable! Never would have thought to do this with the game. I love his solution for the XOR gate—what a clever emergent mechanic.

    Remarkable! Never would have thought to do this with the game. I love his solution for the XOR gate—what a clever emergent mechanic.

    5 votes
  4. Comment on What should kids know about factory farming? in ~food

    Atvelonis
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    There's a difference between knowing something cognitively and understanding or feeling it intuitively. Witnessing death and violence toward animals right before you, with all your senses...

    There's a difference between knowing something cognitively and understanding or feeling it intuitively. Witnessing death and violence toward animals right before you, with all your senses viscerally attuned to the act, is very different than being told that it happens elsewhere or even watching a video of it.

    Some literature is successful in demonstrating the grotesqueness of inhumane animal killings, such as Melville's account of the whale's extraordinarily violent, bloody, and drawn-out demise in Moby-Dick, but even such incredible and shocking descriptions are ineffective compared to personal experience.

    I don't believe that most people, children or adults, understand what goes into even a "humane" killing of an animal. They do not know livestock; they know packaged foods at the grocery store, or at most a chunk of meat from the butcher. Whether "humane" or factory farming is demonstrated in person, having any such experience would probably inspire more awareness toward consumption.

    12 votes
  5. Comment on How the ballpoint pen killed cursive in ~humanities.history

    Atvelonis
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    I've always regretted my poor handwriting and admired the very nice handwriting of my mother and father. Now that I think about it, I've probably never held a fountain pen in my life, although I...

    I've always regretted my poor handwriting and admired the very nice handwriting of my mother and father. Now that I think about it, I've probably never held a fountain pen in my life, although I recognize absolutely how uncomfortable cheap ballpoint pens are. I have little reason to write physical notes anymore, though perhaps if I could make my writing truly beautiful, I would find occasions to do it more often.

    4 votes
  6. Comment on A 17th-century classic of Ethiopian philosophy might be a fake. Does it matter, or is that just how philosophy works? in ~humanities

    Atvelonis
    (edited )
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    I was under the impression that strict literary formalism had withered unremarkably in the late 20th century and is now relegated largely to the realm of questionable judicial theories. Online...

    I was under the impression that strict literary formalism had withered unremarkably in the late 20th century and is now relegated largely to the realm of questionable judicial theories.

    Online discourse has revealed more than ever that authorial and social context informs meaning in unforeseen ways, though I think not as predictably or single-mindedly as we might traditionally believe. By extension, both high-level philosophical discourse among academics and real-world textual interpretations (of online messages, of political statements, of calls to violence, and the like) among laypeople have an evolved, postmodern, or really metamodern semantics. We see past some of the axioms of structuralism: that the nature of authenticity itself is subjective, and that the way we individually understand authenticity matters at least as much as whatever we are deciding is authentic or not.

    In this new paradigm of meaning (which, like all postmodernity, is not truly new), we may understand an alleged forgery not for what it is (if it is "authentic") or what it is not (if it is "forged"); but rather as what it is and is not (in the present, to us, both as authentic and as forged), what it was at its time of conception (both supposed dates of creation, if applicable, to the denizens of the past), and what it has been at all times in between. In other words, such a text can inhabit a semantic superposition or a hyperreality where we can choose to integrate all "truths" into our ultimate and ever-expanding pseudo-truth of the universe. Critically, we can take the opportunity to understand different interpretations of the text (which are made differently for all of said reasons) to still contribute to the philosophical corpus. Thus we widen our perspective rather than narrow it.

    While I'm not personally keen on ascribing harmless creative associations to what might be thought of as cultural appropriation—realistically, there is much at stake over credentials in some disciplines; more so things pertinent to non-academics like medicine, though nationalism and national philosophy are certainly pertinent—I'm less interested in fussing over which individual gets credit for which literary achievement and more interested in the material or intellectual impacts on people or the world. I find that academia in general is far too concerned with academic fairness and not so much with the actual significance of appropriation; fonder of reinforcing exclusionary systems for the sake of either meritocracy, procedure, or vindictive experience rather than critically evaluating those systems for what they actually do.

    What is fair is not necessarily what is interesting, useful, or beneficial; and so I find that the key here is not to disregard forgeries like this, nor to dismiss them retroactively as never having been part of "the canon," but rather to create new sub-categories within the canon that account for the complicated nature of interpretation. In short: the world isn't black and white. If such a text is really Ethiopian, then it is so; if it is really Italian, but has been thought for so long to be Ethiopian that it has influenced other work in the latter tradition (or in others, with external understanding of it as Ethiopian), then it is not strictly Italian, is it? It belongs to a third category. It isn't prudent or necessarily possible to erase such traditions; despite popular thinking to the contrary, historians must understand history not as what objectively and certainly happened but rather what they and their predecessors understood to have happened, incorporating all relevant perspectives into that meta-understanding of historiography. Philosophy is no different.

    3 votes
  7. Comment on Moby Dick: Sentences sorted in increasing order of whaleyness in ~books

    Atvelonis
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    Melville meant what he meant back then too. Moby-Dick was critically overlooked in 1850, but it was very much a subversive commentary on culture, industry, purpose, and sexuality. I can't even get...

    Melville meant what he meant back then too. Moby-Dick was critically overlooked in 1850, but it was very much a subversive commentary on culture, industry, purpose, and sexuality. I can't even get through the first chapter without breaking out laughing: Ishmael is such a ridiculous and amazing character.

    9 votes
  8. Comment on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga | Official trailer in ~movies

    Atvelonis
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    I'm looking forward to this very much. Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favorites and I'm excited to explore more about Furiosa's past. I'm glad George Miller is still involved! This series is so...

    I'm looking forward to this very much. Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favorites and I'm excited to explore more about Furiosa's past. I'm glad George Miller is still involved! This series is so interesting because each entry has a completely distinct character/tone. This, I hope, will be a great complement to the rest.

    5 votes
  9. Comment on Moby Dick: Sentences sorted in increasing order of whaleyness in ~books

    Atvelonis
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    What a wonderful find! Sending this to all my whale-loving friends, colleagues, and old classmates/professors. (I'm especially amused by this because I've actually done semantic analysis on...

    What a wonderful find! Sending this to all my whale-loving friends, colleagues, and old classmates/professors. (I'm especially amused by this because I've actually done semantic analysis on Moby-Dick using spaCy in the past. But Whalequest is far more entertaining than anything I ever came up with.)

    You'd end up with a truly exotic reading of Moby-Dick if you went through this from beginning to end. Maybe that'll be my next literary adventure. Thanks for sharing.

    6 votes
  10. Comment on Easton area lights up night sky with bonfire ahead of 116th Thanksgiving football game in ~life

    Atvelonis
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    I happened to be in Easton, Pennsylvania the other day and came across this massive bonfire in the town, the construction and burning of which is apparently an annual tradition. You could hear it...

    I happened to be in Easton, Pennsylvania the other day and came across this massive bonfire in the town, the construction and burning of which is apparently an annual tradition. You could hear it crackling from over five miles away and behind a hill.

    Apparently it’s the duty of the high school seniors to make sure this fire gets built (with the coordination of the local fire department). Sounds like a very responsible teaching moment—and a lot of fun for the students!

    Sometimes, I think we all just need to take a moment to stare deep into a really massive, flickering fire. Campfires have always helped me reset and reorient myself in a world where my surroundings are often static. There’s something entrancing about the way the flames dance—they have a life of their own, shapeless and yet so sharp; it’s a special kind of gift to be able to gaze long into a twisting heart of fire (safely) and think about your life. You can see hunger, ambition, entropy; and also warmth, beauty, and inspiration. What a thing to experience!

    5 votes
  11. Comment on Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times (2019) in ~books

    Atvelonis
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    Such a leviathan of a book—I say to thee, "Thy size, great like the whale; thy depth, an infinite sea! I shall read for-ever!" Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a masterpiece in literary structure,...

    Such a leviathan of a book—I say to thee, "Thy size, great like the whale; thy depth, an infinite sea! I shall read for-ever!" Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a masterpiece in literary structure, radical cultural and philosophical commentary, layered meaning, historical and religious allusion, and diverse social empowerment. It's also much funnier than you would anticipate, and as the article points out, more erotic.

    Though sometimes derided by classes of high school students forced to wade through encyclopedic descriptions of whale anatomy, those very sections contain some of the most magnificent pieces of writing I have yet to come across. The anatomy itself often contains great allusions to literature which enhance our understanding of both whale and whaler. Melville takes every opportunity to double up on semantics. If one were to skip the "boring" chapters involving the routine of the whaling vessel, one would miss out on sublime, psychedelic passages such as this:

    Chapter 94

    A Squeeze of the Hand

    That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

    While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

    It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

    As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, lie the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

    Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

    Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect of the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

    From page 308 of the Third Norton Critical Edition (2018). What a remarkable passage, creating space for such emotional, complex, and varied interpretation; and just one of many. The entire book is filled with pieces like this. There are so many I could not even begin to name them; I could speak for hours, days, weeks about this book and be unfinished. In college, I took an entire class on just this one novel, having already read it and seeking inevitable new perspectives—I found them, and yet more awaits to learn and realize. Impressed by its magnitude, its capacity to interlink with the literary tradition and modern ideas of living and being, I even wrote a thesis on it, contributing a very little bit to a very large body of academic material on the writing; a quantity well-deserved, I would say. That was fun.

    But Moby-Dick is a novel you have to want to read. You have to be in the mood to go on a journey through time and consciousness, to relax and allow yourself to drink this elixir of eloquence and insanity and riddles and metaphor. It is not merely a story nor an encyclopedia, nor merely an interaction of characters nor a development of social critique, nor explosion of camaraderie or sexuality or inner light, nor is it merely a love letter, memoir, fantasy, and so on. It is all these things, and more; an emergent sum as recognized subjectively by the audience whose nature, being created anew upon each reading, I cannot describe. It is a book to which you can return indefinitely; the "comfort read" of a friend of mine, actually. I certainly do recommend it! I am particularly fond of my edition from Norton, for its same-page footnotes, which I feel give it much more practical richness. I have another copy as well with beautiful illustrations, and a few others.

    13 votes
  12. Comment on Jen Jones – Needle to North (2023) in ~music

    Atvelonis
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    A haunting melody I learned at a folk camp this summer. The composer, Jen Jones, was described to me as a woman who "lives quietly in the mountains and creates beautiful music." When I sang the...

    A haunting melody I learned at a folk camp this summer. The composer, Jen Jones, was described to me as a woman who "lives quietly in the mountains and creates beautiful music." When I sang the piece, it was under the trees, near the water, a gentle breeze rustling leaves and friends wandering about.

    I almost regret not having a recording, but perhaps the moment is the more sacred for its evanescence. In so peaceful a setting I was especially moved by the song's wishful homeward call.

    Lyrics:

    I was down in the lowlands, where I don't know the stones
    Doubt held my mind like a cloud
    Heart's needle to North, like a bell ... rung (bell rung aloud)
    Mountains are calling me, Oh, Oh, come higher, come home

    I had, but seem no longer to have, a set of sheet music to accompany the piece. We were also taught a drone accompaniment that created an emotional and atmospheric harmony, possibly this one arranged by Heidi Wilson or a similar one. The recording I've linked feels as though it is what I remember singing (but memory is a fickle mistress). If one wished, one could transcribe it.

    2 votes
  13. Comment on Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature [of effective altruism], not a bug in ~finance

    Atvelonis
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    I may have a different understanding of effective altruism than the author of this article. I hear and appreciate Westenberg's critique of unconstrained utilitarianism, which is not new. Bentham...

    I may have a different understanding of effective altruism than the author of this article. I hear and appreciate Westenberg's critique of unconstrained utilitarianism, which is not new. Bentham and Mill's contemporaries pointed out in various philosophical dilemmas the flaws of "sacrificing" virtuousness in a particular action for the sake of a virtuous consequence. But the existence of this extreme does not strike me as contradictory to most of the core principles of charitable or strategic giving in the effective altruist doctrine. As an equity-minded individual, it is worthwhile to think strategically about where to allocate your resources when solving a particular social problem, because some allocations have more impact than others. To me, that has always been the essential principle of the movement. As far as I'm concerned, this does not preclude recognizing when a solution/implementation is more or less ethical than another and using that to inform your decisions.

    I feel that the author does not define in clear terms what constitutes a failure to address "the undercurrents of systemic issues" and therefore does not convincingly argue that this entire branch of philosophy is inherently incapable of it. In my opinion the most "effective" way to realize social justice is by addressing systemic issues, and I think many people interested in altruistic lifestyles would agree with that. As one person, you cannot typically single-handedly reorder an entrenched system, but you can reallocate any inequitably distributed resources in your possession, which is why Singer and others support charitable giving. I do not see any reason why the position of "I would like to do good with the resources I can access" is incompatible with doing so in a way that addresses systemic issues. Here, I think Westenberg focuses too heavily on tangible resources like capital at the expense of comparatively intangible ones, like an individual's altruistic use of their perspective, subjective experiences, education, skills, and more—including their choice to work for an ethically responsible organization instead of an irresponsible one, to engage productively in community outreach and political reformation, or simply to be a role model. There are multiple interpretations of effective altruism and the one that I am most keen on would prioritize a holistically socially beneficial lifestyle over the examples of "sidestepping moral quandries" Westenberg provides; what she defines to be the entirety of the EA movement.

    With that said, the logical potential for compatibility between systemic activism and some form of EA does not automatically correspond to its realization. The EA movement as followed by people like Bankman-Fried clearly does not follow that paradigm. His belief, for example, that "regulators make everything worse" in regard to federal oversight on cryptocurrency or in general toward business taxation is a consequentially ridiculous claim which I believe speaks either to malicious intent or to an interior moral inconsistency rooted in narcissism. If this is the way the EA movement as currently framed is actually understood, then indeed its principles need to be re-evaluated. I would argue, for example, that it should be impossible for any individual to acquire so many resources that they can personally wield as much influence as Bankman-Fried. Likewise I would argue that a morally fraught action toward a positive, broad goal (systemic or otherwise) affects other action toward that goal; i.e. doing bad to do some human-subjective definition of ultimate good makes it harder for others to support that human-subjective definition of ultimate good, even by moral means; and so that initial action is inherently not effective in achieving good even if it is altruistic. While I don't believe these statements to be incompatible with EA necessarily, they are certainly not explicit in the philosophy. Westenberg states powerfully:

    SBF's saga is a stark reminder of the perils inherent in a philosophy that loses sight of the ethical compass in its relentless pursuit of utilitarian outcomes.

    When I was a college student, several friends (upon reflection, all STEM majors, mostly computer scientists) were involved with the "official" (?) EA organization, attending conferences and such. I thought it was a little ironic to fly across the ocean to attend a conference specifically advocating, among other things, personal initiative to address climate change. I also thought it was a little strange for one friend to work for a company that I would consider relatively socially harmful (he described his role as "morally neutral") exclusively in order to acquire money to donate charitably. I liked him very much and didn't really hold any of this against him—as we often joked, "go get that bread"—and he did make an effort to live in a generally thoughtful and sustainable way. He was a vegan (climate/ethical reasons), he was a wonderfully kind person, and he was vocal about social injustice. But it did strike me as odd where precisely he drew the line at individual responsibility: no animal products, but will develop software for a tax-dodging, economy-destroying, fraud-committing, and bribery-riddled corporation. I suppose the abstraction of the modern world allowed him to feel comfortable making those decisions.

    8 votes
  14. Comment on Let us return to natural time in ~life

    Atvelonis
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    Natural time is a neat idea. Thanks for sharing this article. It would be valuable to be more attuned to our circadian rhythms, even if our system of scientific time is still based on an electron....

    Natural time is a neat idea. Thanks for sharing this article. It would be valuable to be more attuned to our circadian rhythms, even if our system of scientific time is still based on an electron. In addition to mental health benefits, paying more attention to the sun and less to artificial lights is a nice way to ground ourselves better in the real world which matters greatly.

    I don't love the idea of relying exclusively on computers to determine natural time. You should be able to use an analog or non-internet-connected digital clock to schedule your life. This system would resolve all practical communication issues by computer offsets to UTC time. If you don't want your device in the IoT, you would be out of luck. I suppose you could bring a sundial everywhere you go, but that seems unreasonable.

    8 votes
  15. Comment on Unreal Engine 5 first generation games: brilliant visuals & growing pains in ~games

    Atvelonis
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    It's certainly possible. My 970 ran the original terrifically (90+ fps avg, sometimes hitting my 144 fps limit). The newer video cards seem to have all sorts of features that mine doesn't, though,...

    It's certainly possible. My 970 ran the original terrifically (90+ fps avg, sometimes hitting my 144 fps limit). The newer video cards seem to have all sorts of features that mine doesn't, though, like DLSS. If the PC version is meant to be played with those fancy settings enabled, my old pal probably won't be able to keep up.

    It's about time to upgrade anyway—my system is coming up on a decade old now. (How time flies!) I was planning on waiting until the next GPU generation to buy. I've been put off by the pricing for the last few years, but I don't know if we have any indication that the market will improve. I'll have to bite the bullet.

    The storage requirement (100 GB) also seems high to me. I only have 750 GB, which is apparently really low these days. It'll have to be a full rebuild. May as well get a new desk too, at this rate.

  16. Comment on Unreal Engine 5 first generation games: brilliant visuals & growing pains in ~games

    Atvelonis
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    I thought this was an interesting look into how cutting-edge graphical features in Unreal Engine 5 have been implemented in some recent games. I also learned that The Talos Principle 2 is coming...

    I thought this was an interesting look into how cutting-edge graphical features in Unreal Engine 5 have been implemented in some recent games. I also learned that The Talos Principle 2 is coming out next week. (My computer would barely meet the minimum requirements, but maybe I'll get it one day.)

    8 votes
  17. Comment on Looking for music with creative or interesting or skilled violin or fiddle that are not the classics (cello or viola also) in ~music

    Atvelonis
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    I listen to a certain amount of traditional Scottish fiddling, especially Alasdair Fraser. He often plays with cellist Natalie Haas. Some other contemporary Scottish fiddlers of note include Paul...

    I listen to a certain amount of traditional Scottish fiddling, especially Alasdair Fraser. He often plays with cellist Natalie Haas. Some other contemporary Scottish fiddlers of note include Paul Anderson, Natalie MacMaster, Hanneke Cassel, Elke Baker, and others. Really, there are too many to name.

    As well as admiring these musicians' technical ability and musical personality, notice distinctive characteristics of Scottish tunes including the so-called "Scotch snap" in the strathspey. These musicians often play for social dances, which is how I'm familiar with them, but have an amazing repertoire in general.

    I don't live in Scotland so I'm not as personally acquainted with Scottish-from-Scotland fiddlers as American ones, but there are plenty. You will also find an incredible amount of talent in Nova Scotia's Cape Breton, which has retained more Scottish cultural influence than the rest of the New World.

    4 votes