Oxalis's recent activity

  1. Comment on Are you lost? in ~games

    Oxalis
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    It was a neat experience to watch this live. The concept of a NPC being a real person is such a powerful thing, I guess that's why games like Journey were so impactful. Another game that pulled...

    It was a neat experience to watch this live. The concept of a NPC being a real person is such a powerful thing, I guess that's why games like Journey were so impactful.

    Another game that pulled this off at a larger scale was the GMod map gm_construct 13 beta. If you have Gmod, try it out https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2553727051

    For those that just want to see what the fuss is about:

    The main feature of the mod aside from all the spooky stuff Users of the mod are pooled into lobbies and randomly show up as NPCs in the instances of other users. It's honestly quite creepy to have random people showing up as broken models, doing weird things in your solo/offline game. https://gm13.xalalau.com/wiki/Mingebags
    1 vote
  2. Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? in ~tech

    Oxalis
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    For people that have been using Kagi, what's been the killer app so far? Research for things that have fallen out of the zeitgeist? Searches for things that commonly get filtered out of normal...

    For people that have been using Kagi, what's been the killer app so far? Research for things that have fallen out of the zeitgeist? Searches for things that commonly get filtered out of normal engines thanks to DMCA requests? Media searches for things that aren't AI slop?

    12 votes
  3. Comment on 2024 Spotify Wrapped thread in ~music

    Oxalis
    (edited )
    Link
    I use listenbrainz (last.fm but freeee) to track my music habits but the result is the same. Getting a car with actual carplay integration has really changed my daily soundtrack. The top 4 of my...

    I use listenbrainz (last.fm but freeee) to track my music habits but the result is the same. Getting a car with actual carplay integration has really changed my daily soundtrack. The top 4 of my top 5 are things I have on repeat to stay relaxed while driving.

    Artists

    No. Artist Listens Genre
    1 Cocteau Twins 114 Dreampop, Shoegaze
    2 Bersarin Quartett 67 Downtempo, Ambient
    3 Oblique Occasions 52 Barber Beats, Vaporwave
    4 The Advisory Circle 48 Hauntology, Library Music
    5 Principles of Geometry 42 IDM, Ambient

    Albums

    No. Artist Album Listens Genre
    1 Cocteau Twins Heaven or Las Vegas 72 Dreampop, Shoegaze
    2 Oblique Occasions Animus 42 Barber Beats, Vaporwave
    3 Principles of Geometry ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 42 IDM, Ambient
    4 Hidden Orchestra Archipelago 41 Doomjazz, Downtempo
    5 Bersarin Quartett II 34 Downtempo, Ambient

    Tracks

    No. Artist Track Listens Genre
    1 Cocteau Twins Pitch the Baby 19 Dreampop, Shoegaze
    2 Cocteau Twins Iceblink Luck 12 Dreampop, Shoegaze
    3 Cocteau Twins Heaven or Las Vegas 12 Dreampop, Shoegaze
    4 Piano Magic I Am the Sub-Librarian 10 Chamber-pop, Ambient
    5 Tanuki ファンクOFF 9 vaporwave, j-pop

    Aside from the general domination of my re-discovery of Cocteau Twins, the Piano Magic track was played on repeat during intros of my Book of Hours streams since it's so apropos. The TANUKI track is just a pumped up remix of a song by Kanako Wada. I discovered it through Beat Saber and it tickles my brain in nice ways.

    4 votes
  4. Comment on iPhone music players with good CarPlay experience? in ~tech

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    Since you already have a server, you might think about setting up an instance of gonic/navidrome (both are free+open source) then using a client app like play:sub (paid) or Amperfy (free). It's...

    Since you already have a server, you might think about setting up an instance of gonic/navidrome (both are free+open source) then using a client app like play:sub (paid) or Amperfy (free).

    It's nice to have a spotify-like interface for your collection that can work with apps on nearly every device out there. I use play:sub with navidrome and have loads of albums synced onto my iPhone for offline listening while driving about since I live in rural nowhere. The car play integration is pretty nice too.

    3 votes
  5. Comment on Mathematicians discover a new kind of shape that’s all over nature (3D tessellating forms) in ~science

    Oxalis
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    Here's the publicly-available full text: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae311/7754698?login=false I always love repeating geometry. I went down a massive rabbit hole with...

    Here's the publicly-available full text: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae311/7754698?login=false

    I always love repeating geometry. I went down a massive rabbit hole with triply-periodic minimal surfaces a couple years back which made for some pretty neat shapes.

    I'll have to try my hand at modeling some of these to 3D print and mess around with like futuristic Lincoln Logs.

    8 votes
  6. Comment on Just bought a Sous Vide. Those who own one, what are your favorite things to use it for? Any recommended accessories? in ~food

    Oxalis
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    Just since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: Sous Vide is awesome for fermenting. Being able to hold things in the temperature butterzone speeds things up massively. Yogurt in particular is pretty...

    Just since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: Sous Vide is awesome for fermenting. Being able to hold things in the temperature butterzone speeds things up massively.

    Yogurt in particular is pretty easy to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMInAL7JRRo

    Anova has a nice list of other ideas too: https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/8-weird-ways-use-precision-cooker

    4 votes
  7. Comment on ‘Do not pet’: A robotic dog named “Spot” made by Boston Dynamics is the latest tool in the arsenal of the US Secret Service in ~tech

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    Most of the options here require loony toons gimmicks of balloons on drones or someone getting within close proximity of the thing with some kind of cover. Ideally, a device can be taken down at...
    • Exemplary

    Most of the options here require loony toons gimmicks of balloons on drones or someone getting within close proximity of the thing with some kind of cover. Ideally, a device can be taken down at range with something rather innocuous that anyone can get.

    As someone who has accidentally fried a few laptop cameras during undergrad optics research, just get a high power laser off of ebay/amazon/aliexpress and pepper the sides till you take out some of the 5 or so cameras it uses to build a 360-degree composite view of its surroundings.

    Just be sure to wear proper protective eyewear!

    Spots in particular also have well-defined blindspots, thanks Boston Dynamics!

    11 votes
  8. Comment on Scientists and archivists worry Epic Games' control of the 3D model market will 'destroy' cultural heritage in ~games

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    Oh no! This is what I get for being a lazy netizen and not reading the article. Thanks for calling me out. This isn't a good thing for anyone. FAB is a weird mess.

    Oh no! This is what I get for being a lazy netizen and not reading the article. Thanks for calling me out.

    This isn't a good thing for anyone. FAB is a weird mess.

    1 vote
  9. Comment on Scientists and archivists worry Epic Games' control of the 3D model market will 'destroy' cultural heritage in ~games

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    SketchFab is pretty big in this space. They're mainly a webgl-based 3d asset viewer but do offer downloads and a store for scenes and models. They have a pretty diverse selection of cultural...

    SketchFab is pretty big in this space. They're mainly a webgl-based 3d asset viewer but do offer downloads and a store for scenes and models.

    They have a pretty diverse selection of cultural heritage, history, science, and archeology models from various libraries, museums, and research groups: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/categories/cultural-heritage-history?date=week&sort_by=-likeCount

    Many are downloadable too! (though most are not "water-tight" for 3d printing)

    5 votes
  10. Comment on The Kids Should See This in ~tv

    Oxalis
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    Projects like this always remind me of a quote from Activist Dee Dee Halleck, founder of public access channel Paper Tiger: The activation energy to find something genuinely wholesome for young...

    Projects like this always remind me of a quote from Activist Dee Dee Halleck, founder of public access channel Paper Tiger:

    It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.

    The activation energy to find something genuinely wholesome for young minds is tiring. Billions of options but the majority of them are brain-rot trash churned out at industrial scales to capture the view market. So even though this isn't an endless feed of content to plop a kid in front of (that's a bad idea anyway) it's awesome to have a resource for consistent, curated things that hearken back to the glory days of PBS.

    I especially love that many of the videos have additional text/image content underneath with lots of related links in them for context. Makes a video into a stepping stone for deeper learning.

    Though it's worth noting that many of the videos are curated from youtube as far as I can tell (with a smattering of vimeo), so ad exposure is still an issue. Hosting this much video content would be super expensive so I can understand it.

    10 votes
  11. Comment on E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders in ~food

    Oxalis
    Link
    On a tangent, the fast food chain A&W released a "Third-of-a-Pound Burger" in the 1980s to compete with the quarter pounder. It was cheaper, it did better on taste tests, and had full ad support...

    On a tangent, the fast food chain A&W released a "Third-of-a-Pound Burger" in the 1980s to compete with the quarter pounder. It was cheaper, it did better on taste tests, and had full ad support nationally but still failed due to Americans not understanding fractions.

    Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/

    31 votes
  12. Comment on Big changes are coming to ArchiveBox! in ~tech

    Oxalis
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    Wow, I didn't see this coming! The restructuring to allow for a plugin system will be massive. I'll have to see how difficult the API is to possibly add support for dezoomify

    Wow, I didn't see this coming!

    The restructuring to allow for a plugin system will be massive. I'll have to see how difficult the API is to possibly add support for dezoomify

    1 vote
  13. Comment on I'm looking for a spicy wasabi snack that will kick my ass and make me regret eating it in ~food

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    I came into this post looking to see what OP was wanting out their near death experience with heat but I ended up finding my favorite new snack. I got a bag from my local pharmacy and they're...

    I came into this post looking to see what OP was wanting out their near death experience with heat but I ended up finding my favorite new snack.

    I got a bag from my local pharmacy and they're delicious. Thanks for the recommendation!

  14. Comment on My hated AI video in ~creative

    Oxalis
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    Given that many of his videos start with a disclaimer that "There is no stock footage in this video" implies that Posy understands the value and difficulty of creating your own visual content from...

    Given that many of his videos start with a disclaimer that "There is no stock footage in this video" implies that Posy understands the value and difficulty of creating your own visual content from scratch. He prides himself on putting in the hard work to get amazing shots.

    From that alone, dipping into using tools that forcefully took style and concept data from literally every human-made creative work in the world without asking for consent nor providing value back to those who helped train them is kinda against his brand's M.O.

    5 votes
  15. Comment on IPTV and 'Firestick' hacking in ~tech

    Oxalis
    Link
    I get m3u playlists of global channels from an old satellite-hacking forum. As you described, the quality of these temporary thieved-from-thieves streams is hit or miss at best. I would in no way...

    I get m3u playlists of global channels from an old satellite-hacking forum. As you described, the quality of these temporary thieved-from-thieves streams is hit or miss at best. I would in no way want to rely on them for entertainment or education on current events. Their use as such seems relegated to nations like Brazil and Argentina where affordable availability of more legal methods is nowhere to be seen.

    That said, it's a wonderful curiosity. Being able to bounce around through thousands of TV channels from all over the world is pretty magical. The sheer amount of amusement in seeing how diverse cultures put on TV productions is worth the tech nightmare of getting it to work. I'm especially fond of local broadcast channels in India and the Middle East; religion is a central cultural focus there and it colors every last frame in exotica.

    7 votes
  16. Comment on Ig Nobel prizes 2024: The unexpected science that won this year in ~science

    Oxalis
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    As fun as this years winners are, I'm surprised that there isn't more chatter about the demography award winner. Digging into population longevity data and finding that pretty much all the "people...

    As fun as this years winners are, I'm surprised that there isn't more chatter about the demography award winner.

    Digging into population longevity data and finding that pretty much all the "people who live in X are living longer thanks to Y and Z" stuff is complete bunk is pretty scary and frustrating. Discovering that the vast majority of global supercentenarian are either long dead or active pension fraud throws so much global health narrative in the garbage.

    Here's the preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

    3 votes
  17. Comment on Does anyone have experience with tools for locally archiving the web, like Archivebox for example? in ~tech

    Oxalis
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    Archivebox is great but I wouldn't rely on it, at least not in the current release state. In its current state, I've had issues with zombie chromium instances stacking up during archive jobs and...

    Archivebox is great but I wouldn't rely on it, at least not in the current release state.

    In its current state, I've had issues with zombie chromium instances stacking up during archive jobs and slowing my server down to an unresponsive halt and requiring me to do a hard restart.

    The project's dev, Pirate, is pretty fast and loose with the codebase. Pushing broken and WIP code to the main repo branch instead of creating feature branches as he works on things, so don't try and jump the gun and run :dev to see if a given issue has been fixed. I learned this the hard way. :\

    With all of that said, it's a neat system and it's easy to pop up using their docker container. For now though, I would just follow the project on github so you can get emails as Pirate pushes RC releases so you can see how the project is progressing and when the eventual 0.8.4 release goes live. He's been swapping out a lot of the inner workings so a lot of the user grievances should be remedied.

    10 votes
  18. Comment on Looking for chill horror lets players in ~games

    Oxalis
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    When new horror games come out, I usually try to watch SuperGreatFriend's play sessions over others. By day, he's a civil servant in New Jersey but by night he's a mellow sardonic streamer who has...

    When new horror games come out, I usually try to watch SuperGreatFriend's play sessions over others. By day, he's a civil servant in New Jersey but by night he's a mellow sardonic streamer who has a lovely dry wit. There's absolutely no overreaction in his content except maybe a good laugh if something bonkers happens in a game.

    Some of my favorites:

    • Whose Lila? - Bizarre slavic indie horror spread across two executables that goes into some really weird philosophical places.

    • Martian Gothic: Unification - Quirky puzzle point and click, has a somber horror vibe that I really enjoy along with some really comedic jank.

    • Alone in the Dark (original) - Screwball old PC horror game. SGF ended up playing every Alone in the Dark title including the modern reboot from this year. The entire series is worth watching.

    The only remark I have is that he does 1 hour tryouts of games every stream session and then a larger project for the second half of the stream. The games from the tryouts may never be picked up again. This is also never really discussed. So if you see a playlist with just one video and it's reasonably old, it probably wasn't picked up as a project.

    8 votes
  19. Comment on Why GitHub actually won in ~tech

    Oxalis
    Link Parent
    A nice weekend project would be to setup a self-hosted gitea instance and set it to mirror your github repos for safe keeping. It looks and works exactly the same as github but you can run it on...

    A nice weekend project would be to setup a self-hosted gitea instance and set it to mirror your github repos for safe keeping. It looks and works exactly the same as github but you can run it on your own intranet.
    Then you could disengage from github at some point in the future without any issues other than redirecting the remote urls in your local repos. If that never happens, well then you still have a backup of everything on your github account.

    It is a server application though, best used on something that runs 24/7. I have mine running on a raspberry pi along with a number of other self-hosted applications.

    There are tutorials on installing it into the OS directly but I'd always recommend using a containerization system like docker or podman instead.

    3 votes
  20. Comment on A new AI model can hallucinate a game of 1993’s DOOM in real time in ~games

    Oxalis
    Link
    For a (much simpler and older) example, a developer named Ollin Bohan trained a custom neural net for real time image generation based on pokemon for the Game Boy Color that works in-browser. It's...

    For a (much simpler and older) example, a developer named Ollin Bohan trained a custom neural net for real time image generation based on pokemon for the Game Boy Color that works in-browser.

    It's very trippy; like being a ghost as reality melts away around you https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/demo/

    The accompanying blog post complete with 2022-era musing upon AI and where things will go: https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/

    10 votes