Pistos's recent activity

  3. Comment on Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning in ~music

    Pistos
    Link
    Perhaps this is a market opportunity that someone can snatch up, and provide a competing online service to classical musicians? I grant that one of the main benefits of using traditional social...

    Perhaps this is a market opportunity that someone can snatch up, and provide a competing online service to classical musicians? I grant that one of the main benefits of using traditional social media is easy, broad reach, but I still wonder if a competitor can be offered.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Is a YouTube video with a static image technically a podcast? in ~talk

    Pistos
    (edited )
    Link
    Something peripheral to consider: [My understanding is that] traditional podcasts and Youtube content differ starkly in one way: music licensing. If you use someone else's published (owned) music...

    Something peripheral to consider: [My understanding is that] traditional podcasts and Youtube content differ starkly in one way: music licensing.

    If you use someone else's published (owned) music in a YouTube vid, YouTube's magical algorithm elves autodetect this, and then, if the author (or music label, or whatever) has registered the given song(s), YouTube will automatically issue some compensation (royalties?) to the music owner, doing so without any action needed on the part of the music borrower. This is particularly the case for people doing covers of well-known music.

    In contrast, you are absolutely not allowed to use published music in a podcast (not even a cover of the music) without getting explicit consent from the music owner/publisher/whatever, and that likely will cost you some money.

    IANAL, yadda yadda, but it behooves anyone looking into podcasting to educate themselves about these legal concerns as regards background music and covers.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Orb.farm: A virtual ecosystem in ~games

    Pistos
    Link Parent
    It does seem very CPU-hungry, yes. Made my laptop very warm.

    It does seem very CPU-hungry, yes. Made my laptop very warm.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Anime: Where to start? in ~anime

    Pistos
    (edited )
    Link
    I think it would help you find good stuff if you narrowed things (to start with, anyway) to a certain demographic. If you don't know their general meanings yet, look up the terms seinen, shounen,...

    I think it would help you find good stuff if you narrowed things (to start with, anyway) to a certain demographic. If you don't know their general meanings yet, look up the terms seinen, shounen, josei, shoujo. I say this because something that a pre-teen finds funny might not be what a 30-something finds amusing, and vice versa, even though both would be considered "comedy".

    After that, you can browse genres, such as the checkbox grid at https://www.crunchyroll.com/en-gb/videos/anime/genres . If you say

    looking for a bingeable show that's funny and has feel-good characters [...] Some, but not a ton, action would be good too

    then you can begin by filtering with the Comedy and Action checkboxes, and possibly narrow more with Slice of Life, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Of course, popularity or ratings on anime sites (like Crunchyroll) can help guide you to the well-known and well-liked stuff.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on What did you do this weekend? in ~talk

    Pistos
    Link
    Unboxed my new PC! AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Gigabyte x570 Aorus Elite motherboard 32 GB RAM Radeon RX 580 video card Corsair SPEC-06 case Was like a kid on Christmas Day when it arrived. Been enjoying...

    Unboxed my new PC!

    • AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
    • Gigabyte x570 Aorus Elite motherboard
    • 32 GB RAM
    • Radeon RX 580 video card
    • Corsair SPEC-06 case

    Was like a kid on Christmas Day when it arrived. Been enjoying installing Linux (for the most part), bringing old files and settings over, and relishing the big improvement in speed and power over my old box.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on Directory challenge accepted? in ~humanities

    Pistos
    Link
    First: Congrats on getting a functioning Nextcloud installation set up. As for your next problem at hand: Apparently NC has a tagging system. I've never used it, but I just tried it right now, and...

    First: Congrats on getting a functioning Nextcloud installation set up.

    As for your next problem at hand: Apparently NC has a tagging system. I've never used it, but I just tried it right now, and I think it will meet your goal quite nicely. If you click on the ellipsis icon ("...") for a file or folder, and select the Details sidebar, you can click on a Tags button to set some tags for the item in question. Once things are tagged, then you can click on the Tags menu item in the left-hand sidebar, and search (filter) by tags. Searches can be for multiple tags, in which case the filtered items have all the given tags (an "and" search, not an "or" search). Try it out, see if it works for you. If it does, then uploaders won't have to concern themselves with adhering to any particular folder structure. Everyone can upload to a single folder. Or each member can get their own personal home folder into which they upload.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on I'm asking for some initial insight into a problem that I'm trying to solve for hundreds of users that are dismayed with Discord in ~comp

    Pistos
    Link Parent
    I set up NC on a VPS. Based on that experience, it's true that installing NC in this fashion takes a moderate amount of Linux know-how. If you don't think you've got the skills to do that, you...

    I set up NC on a VPS. Based on that experience, it's true that installing NC in this fashion takes a moderate amount of Linux know-how. If you don't think you've got the skills to do that, you have a couple other options:

    There seems to be a web installer available at https://nextcloud.com/install/#instructions-server which only requires you to have PHP-ready web space somewhere. At that same URL, there are packages like Docker images. That might be workable for you, too.

    Also, what looks to be an easy way to get NC is to pay a Nextcloud provider. There's a listing here: https://nextcloud.com/signup/ (click "change provider"). The default/first one is https://cloudamo.com/cart.php?gid=1 , which has pricing beginning at 4 USD / month.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on What are your favourite Space Games? in ~games

    Pistos
    Link Parent
    To get more out of the game beyond basic grinding (trading, transporting or bounty hunting), you need to visit the spaceports of the worlds. There is a lot of story that can be explored, and this...

    To get more out of the game beyond basic grinding (trading, transporting or bounty hunting), you need to visit the spaceports of the worlds. There is a lot of story that can be explored, and this is what makes the game really good.

    re: slow grind for small reward: Note that there is a spectrum of ways of making money. Some slower, some faster. In the early going, I found it helpful to make sure I scanned the full list of missions from a given world (job board) so as to be able to find the most lucrative ones and zero in on those.

  12. Comment on I'm asking for some initial insight into a problem that I'm trying to solve for hundreds of users that are dismayed with Discord in ~comp

    Pistos
    Link Parent
    Someone already mentioned Nextcloud, but I'd like to add my +1 to that. NC is pretty easy to use, even for non-technical people, insofar as its interface looks like a web-based File Manager or...

    Someone already mentioned Nextcloud, but I'd like to add my +1 to that. NC is pretty easy to use, even for non-technical people, insofar as its interface looks like a web-based File Manager or Finder -- meaning to say: files, folders, presentable in either icon view or list view. You can also share with people that don't have NC accounts by way of sharing a URL. You can even provide an upload folder for people without accounts by sharing a URL. I've used NC for general file sharing for quite a while now, and find it does the job quite well. There are also mobile apps which let you upload or download. e.g. take a photo with a phone, upload to NC

    3 votes

  13. Comment on What makes a good developer? in ~comp

    Pistos
    (edited )
    Link
    Experience means a lot. It shapes and hones your senses and habits, and having better habits vs worse has long-lasting impact as you work with a given codebase. So, as a student, look for...
    • Experience means a lot. It shapes and hones your senses and habits, and having better habits vs worse has long-lasting impact as you work with a given codebase. So, as a student, look for opportunities to get experience, whether that be diving into existing open source projects, or internships, or playing around with things at home.
    • Professional software development (in contrast with academic or personal software development) is very much a human, inter-personal endeavour in addition to being a technical one. Getting good at this inter-personal side of coding is crucial to success. Here are some examples of what I mean.
      • Write code so that it's easy to improve and augment. (It's interpersonal because you're being considerate of the people that are going to do that improving or augmenting.)
      • Write good commit messages. Be considerate when working with the codebase repository: branching, merging, rebasing are done in ways that help your team and not hinder it. Even if your team size is 1, you still have more than one developer working on your codebase: you of today, and you of the future, coming back to work with the codebase N months from today. Or, you could be moved to another project at some point, and someone else in the department has to come and take over what you built.
      • Give helpful, respectful code reviews; receive code reviews humbly; in both giving and receiving, keep emotions in check, and focus on the technical matters at hand, avoiding (or ignoring) things like ad hominem attacks, provocative or offensive wording.
      • Get good enough at basic professional inter-personal communication, because you'll be dealing with non-engineers rather a lot: managers, product managers, designers, artists, quality assurance, and sometimes even sales and marketing. Communicating with these people poorly (particularly product management and quality assurance) will have lasting negative impact on your ongoing work on the project at hand.
    • Be humble and continuously seek improvement. Try to assess things objectively, so you can effectively sort through the stuff of life and pick what to keep because it's good or better, and what to discard or avoid because it's worse, not effective, not valuable. This could be techniques, habits, guidelines, books, frameworks, libraries, languages, operating systems, third-party services, process, methodologies.
    • A good programmer has a good team around him/her. Early in your career, you'll have a hard time influencing this, but the sooner you can get into a good company, the better. And, to be clear: By "good team" I don't just mean a time that is good technically, but also good at the things I've talked about, and are "nice people". You're going to be working with your team 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. It makes a big difference whether your day after day after day is exhilirating, fun, joyful and life-enhancing, or is boring, depressing, taxing, loathesome, irritating, frustrating, stressful, traumatizing.
    3 votes

  14. Comment on The FOSS real-time strategy game 0 A.D. gains FXAA, more animals, and other features in the upcoming Alpha 24 release in ~games

    Pistos
    Link
    My mistake; it looks like this is not a release announcement, but rather an overview of some of the things to be expected in Alpha 24, which is yet to be released. See also...

    My mistake; it looks like this is not a release announcement, but rather an overview of some of the things to be expected in Alpha 24, which is yet to be released. See also https://trac.wildfiregames.com/milestone/Alpha%2024 . Mods: Perhaps the title can be edited, please and thanks?

    3 votes

  16. Comment on How do you organize your gaming library? in ~games

    Pistos
    Link
    I keep most games on a shelf in a closet, except for the one or three I'm currently playing, whose cases are in arm's reach on my desk, the disc of one of which is nestled in the optical drive of...

    I keep most games on a shelf in a closet, except for the one or three I'm currently playing, whose cases are in arm's reach on my desk, the disc of one of which is nestled in the optical drive of my PS4. The games in my closet are sorted by the default entropy of the universe. The cases on my desk are sorted by most recently played. /s

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Jukebox - Neural net that generates music in ~tech

  19. Comment on On verbosity in ~talk

    Pistos
    Link Parent
    Me too. For pretty much every comment or post, on any site, I read it beginning to end at least once before submitting. If I edit any paragraph, I re-read that paragraph. If I've edited any...

    I am now a habitual editor of my own comments on social media

    Me too. For pretty much every comment or post, on any site, I read it beginning to end at least once before submitting. If I edit any paragraph, I re-read that paragraph. If I've edited any paragraph(s) (which is almost always the case for anything longer than a tweet), I re-read beginning to end again. When I do these read-overs, I do it in Preview mode, if the site has such a thing, so I can see what I've written with full formatting applied, links linkified, etc.

    After I have submitted, I usually read it over again, in the context of the thread (if any). About as often as not, I catch something, or just want to improve my wording, and I employ the Edit feature the site provides, to change my writing even after submission. Sometimes I even re-read my writing after the thread as progressed (with other replies), and, occasionally, I'll edit then, too, if the site hasn't blocked that action due to comment age.

    Perhaps I'm narcissistic; perhaps I'm obsessed; perhaps I'm just plain abnormal. I'm not sure, and I'm not sure I care. :)

    5 votes

  20. Comment on Jukebox - Neural net that generates music in ~tech

    Pistos
    Link
    I certainly applaud the effort. The uncurated list (click "explore all samples") is very clearly hit-or-miss, but when it hits, it's quite impressive. Curated selections could probably easily be...

    I certainly applaud the effort. The uncurated list (click "explore all samples") is very clearly hit-or-miss, but when it hits, it's quite impressive. Curated selections could probably easily be playable at low volume in an elevator or in a supermarket or in a hotel lobby, and very few would notice anything amiss.

    3 votes