Sunward's recent activity
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Comment on Rick and Morty - Season 5 discussion in ~tv
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Comment on Beat Saber (and the Oculus Quest 2) in ~games
Sunward Link ParentHuh, interesting! Yeah, I knew about OLED ghosting because I've seen it on phone screens and have seen apps that have OLED-specific "true black" dark modes implement workarounds to reduce it, but...Huh, interesting! Yeah, I knew about OLED ghosting because I've seen it on phone screens and have seen apps that have OLED-specific "true black" dark modes implement workarounds to reduce it, but hadn't really thought about why I wasn't seeing it on my Rift. I do recall noticing that the displays did still seem to be lit up a little bit even in what was supposed to be complete darkness, but I never really thought about why that might be.
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Comment on Beat Saber (and the Oculus Quest 2) in ~games
Sunward Link ParentInterestingly, I don't recall ever noticing this in my Rift.OLED displays have ghosting, which can be very annoying in VR (think: motion blur, but when you move your head, it's super visible.)
Interestingly, I don't recall ever noticing this in my Rift.
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Comment on Beat Saber (and the Oculus Quest 2) in ~games
Sunward Link ParentI get the sense I may have come off sounding more adversarial than I intended -- I wasn't intending to sound adversarial at all, in fact. If I did, I apologize. You raise good points. I can't...I get the sense I may have come off sounding more adversarial than I intended -- I wasn't intending to sound adversarial at all, in fact. If I did, I apologize.
You raise good points. I can't honestly say that I've ever thought the graphics were inadequate in any of the VR games I've played, and for all my talk of wanting a crazy-high-res, high-FOV headset, I can't say that I've ever found those aspects of my Rift particularly inadequate either; I only notice the limited FOV and screen-door effect when I'm consciously looking for them. Insofar as I have any technical objection to the Q2, it's that it doesn't seem like a sufficiently drastic upgrade from my Rift CV1 for the time that elapsed between the Rift CV1's release and the Q2's release; but as I was writing out my justification for that, it became more and more apparent to me that I was downplaying the significance of it being standalone and having inside-out tracking; being tethered to a PC and requiring external sensors to track the controllers were/are certainly major obstacles to VR adoption for a lot of users.
Insofar as I'd hold out for a higher-end headset it's out of a feeling that any new headset I buy should be a strict upgrade from the one I have, but I must confess, you and @zisa have gone a long way toward eroding my belief that the Q2 wouldn't be.
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Comment on Beat Saber (and the Oculus Quest 2) in ~games
Sunward Link ParentYou're not the first person I've heard praise the Quest 2, although I am still somewhat skeptical since it's basically an Android phone you strap to your face; given the all constraints imposed by...You're not the first person I've heard praise the Quest 2, although I am still somewhat skeptical since it's basically an Android phone you strap to your face; given the all constraints imposed by packing all the hardware into a single device and the fact that it has to be battery powered, it seems like it wouldn't be able to match the graphical quality that even my gaming PC's now relatively meager GTX 1060 can manage.
Ultimately, I think if I had already bought deeply into the Oculus ecosystem it would have been easier to hold my nose, but I didn't own that many games and I'd already re-bought all the non-exclusives I could on Steam when Facebook announced the account requirement for Oculus going forward. Now, if the cat chews through Rift cable #2 (which I intend to be more mindful about preventing), I might have to do some soul-searching and weigh the importance of continuing to have access to VR vs. resisting Facebook's further encroachment into my life vs. holding out for a meaningful upgrade (even considering the wirelessness and inside-out tracking, the Quest 2 seems like something of a lateral, if not slightly downward, move even from the Rift CV1 considering it's got a single LCD panel with a lower refresh rate, and possibly a worse FOV) like a Vive Cosmos Elite, Valve Index, or Pimax headset.
How is the inside-out tracking on the Quest 2, incidentally? I've heard that on other headsets that have it (like the HP Reverb G2 and the entry-level Vive Cosmos), the accuracy and responsiveness leave something to be desired.
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Comment on Beat Saber (and the Oculus Quest 2) in ~games
Sunward LinkI'd been playing Beat Saber for exercise intermittently until one of my roommate's cats chewed through the cable for my Rift the other day (serves me right for leaving it out when I knew that the...I'd been playing Beat Saber for exercise intermittently until one of my roommate's cats chewed through the cable for my Rift the other day (serves me right for leaving it out when I knew that the cat in question likes to chew on cables, though, I suppose). I struggled with whether to just buy a Rift S, or even a Quest 2, instead, but ultimately I spent $100 on a replacement cable from eBay (a used one! Friggin' Facebook stopped making replacement cables for the original CV1 Rift years ago, apparently). I'm just not comfortable giving Facebook more money, since they're still going to monetize my data, and it is possible to identify individual users based on VR motion tracking data, and I don't trust them to use that power for good.
I have to admit I sometimes wonder if I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face here, though, considering Facebook's tendrils extend so deep into our lives that they supposedly even create "shadow profiles" for people not on Facebook. Like, even if I abstained completely from their services, they can infer my existence like astronomers inferring the existence of further-out planets based on perturbations in the orbits of the ones we know about.
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Comment on How Readup knows whether or not you've read an article in ~comp
Sunward LinkThis is probably gonna sound like a humblebrag, but: I apparently read so fast that when I got to the end of that post, it thought I had only read 80% of it. Judging from the comments there I was...This is probably gonna sound like a humblebrag, but: I apparently read so fast that when I got to the end of that post, it thought I had only read 80% of it. Judging from the comments there I was not the only one with that problem, either. I turned on their visual debugging and scrolled back up and there was a lot of text earlier in the article that it thought I hadn't read--perhaps because I tend to scroll to keep the part I'm actively reading roughly centered in the browser window. Seems like they recognize the need for personalizing reading speed, at least.
Now, with the humblebrag out of the way... when I come across something like this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the developer being asked to implement it: if it had been me I probably would've said it couldn't be done! Or at the very least, couldn't be done well. Of course, if I'd had a cofounder who wouldn't take no for an answer/pushed back against my perfectionism, I'd probably have eventually come around to a solution very similar to this.
All that being said, this is an interesting idea, and on the one hand I do like the idea of gating the ability to discuss content behind some form of proof of having read it, but on the other hand, their implementation would seem to shut out users who either can't or won't run JavaScript, and I suspect that particularly proficient screen reader users (if they're using a JavaScript-capable browser, which is more likely these days than in the past), the ones that have the reading speed cranked up so high it's unintelligible to the untrained listener, would probably run into the same problems I did with it not "tracking" rapidly enough. Then again, I suppose these would probably not be large enough constituencies to worry about, particularly at the early stage they're at.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~food
Sunward Link ParentI daresay that most meats on their own are pretty bland. Turkey is perhaps the prototypical example of this (even more than chicken, which, you know, everything is said to taste like), but I think...I daresay that most meats on their own are pretty bland. Turkey is perhaps the prototypical example of this (even more than chicken, which, you know, everything is said to taste like), but I think that's because too many of us have had poorly prepared turkeys, where someone just went to the grocery store and bought a Butterball and bunged it in the oven for however long the instructions said and it comes out dry and flavorless. I don't know much about cooking turkey, but I know it is possible for it not to be so bland and disappointing: a barbeque joint in a town I used to live in would sell turkeys in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving (I am American after all, though I infer that you are not from your use of "mum" and "flavourless"). They'd do all the prep and cooking, and you'd just go and pick it up sometime before Thanksgiving Day and store it in the fridge and pretty much just put it in the oven to reheat it when you wanted to serve it. Like I said, I don't know much about cooking turkey so I can't even begin to speculate about how they prepared it, but it was the most delicious turkey I've ever had in my life. Juicy and flavorful like no turkey I'd ever had before, it was like this BBQ joint felt like they had to help the humble turkey atone for every shitty holiday turkey that had been served at every shitty family holiday dinner ever.
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Comment on Has your local climate gotten noticeably warmer in your lifetime? in ~enviro
Sunward LinkI live in South Carolina, within about a 50-60 mile radius of where I grew up. To anchor the references to my youth that are about to follow, I'm in my mid-30s. Compared to my hazy childhood...I live in South Carolina, within about a 50-60 mile radius of where I grew up. To anchor the references to my youth that are about to follow, I'm in my mid-30s.
Compared to my hazy childhood memories, summer is definitely more humid than it used to be, and hotter too. Plus "summer" has gotten longer, with the other seasons shifting and contracting somewhat to accommodate it; summer-like (hot and humid) conditions often start in mid-May now and stretch out into mid-to-late October, whereas I remember us having spring-like conditions from about March to June previously. Fall also starts and ends later (I'd say from about November to January now) and is more mild now, with more days with highs reaching the 70s than I remember from childhood (though they absolutely weren't unheard of then) -- even on Christmas the past few years. Such winter as we now get typically occurs in January and February and maybe the first half of March, with an accelerated spring from then right up until summer starts. I'd say humidity is definitely the hallmark of summer now, even moreso than when I was a kid. Right now it's 85 °F (29 °C) out, but with 68% humidity, it "feels like" 94 °F (34 °C), and the air basically feels like a warm, wet towel wrapped around your face. Even allowing for the climatic variation introduced by the fact that I now live 50-60 miles from where I grew up, I don't remember it ever being that warm and humid.
We also occasionally (very occasionally) would get what passes for snow this far south in February or March (maybe once every handful of years), but that hasn't happened in the past several years that I can recall, or if it did it wasn't cold enough for there to be any accumulation; the last time I remember there being any noticeable amount of snow, it accompanied an ice storm in 2014.
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Comment on Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - March 22 in ~health
Sunward Link ParentHonestly, if you're working from home, it should be isolated from your home computer usage in some way. If your employer didn't issue you a device, or you're a freelancer or something, at least...Honestly, if you're working from home, it should be isolated from your home computer usage in some way. If your employer didn't issue you a device, or you're a freelancer or something, at least use a separate account on your own computer. That will help mitigate some of the privacy losses from this sort of thing.
Also, that thread is hugely overblown: you cannot see what programs other people are running (unless they're sharing their screens, of course). As the presenter in a meeting, if the host has enabled the feature (it's not enabled by default), you can see in the participants list whether focus has been on a window other than the Zoom meeting for 30 seconds or more, but you can't see the name of the program or title of the window that they have focused; only that they haven't had Zoom focused for 30+ seconds.
However, if even that feels like too much of an invasion of of privacy (though IMO it's on a par with someone looking over your shoulder at your desk at work, mildly creepy but not a huge violation), then as @pvik linked below, there's a browser extension that will always join the web version of the meeting... though even browsers can detect when they're not in focus, so that might not gain you much.
Edited to add: If you are using a work-issued device, you should probably act as if you have no privacy on it anyway; Zoom attention tracking should be the least of your worries.
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Comment on The most iconic tearjerkers and empowerment anthems in music history in ~music
Sunward LinkWell, this is...unexpectedly timely for me.Well, this is...unexpectedly timely for me.
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Comment on NBCUniversal unveils Peacock, a free premium ad-supported streaming service with subscription tiers in ~tv
Sunward LinkCan't wait for this to fail to meet growth projections and get shut down in 18 months, taking the only legitimate streaming copies of a bunch of shows with it.Can't wait for this to fail to meet growth projections and get shut down in 18 months, taking the only legitimate streaming copies of a bunch of shows with it.
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Comment on You get to reboot any TV show, and give it a twist. What gets made? in ~tv
Sunward LinkSliders. I love the premise, and I loved it when it originally aired, but I don't think it's aged very well; it's definitely a product of its time. I think if it were made (or remade) today, it...Sliders. I love the premise, and I loved it when it originally aired, but I don't think it's aged very well; it's definitely a product of its time. I think if it were made (or remade) today, it could get away with being a bit more cerebral, its alternate worlds could be less caricatured, and story arcs could take as long as they need instead of having to be resolved in a single episode (or occasionally two-parter) because it's better for ratings. Oh, and hopefully whatever network (or streaming service) that aired the reboot wouldn't show the episodes out of order.
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Comment on 8tracks, a site for sharing music playlists, is shutting down on Dec. 31 - The story of their 11-year journey from launch to shutdown in ~tech
Sunward Link ParentAnecdotally, I know a few people who still use Pandora. Somewhat less anecdotally, Sirius XM bought them in February, so I'd imagine it will probably be kept around in some form for a while. At...Anecdotally, I know a few people who still use Pandora. Somewhat less anecdotally, Sirius XM bought them in February, so I'd imagine it will probably be kept around in some form for a while. At least, I don't think they'd set $3.5 billion on fire all at once by shutting it down a year after they bought it. Of course, I also don't know much about corporate accounting so maybe if they did they could write it off as a loss or something...
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~games
Sunward Link ParentI'll agree with @reese about DST, but disagree with you both about time zones. I'll let Sam "qntm" Hughes make the argument in favor of keeping them around, because he does so much more eloquently...I'll agree with @reese about DST, but disagree with you both about time zones.
I'll let Sam "qntm" Hughes make the argument in favor of keeping them around, because he does so much more eloquently and thoroughly than I could: So You Want To Abolish Time Zones. The tl;dr is: now instead of having to know that location x is y hours off your time zone z (or googling
current time in x), you now have to memorize (or google) arcane tables of local daylight hours for each location x you're interested in, plus you've obliterated the concept of the "day", and it only gets worse from there.I'll concede that things get a little iffier for people who live in communities straddling time zone borders, but, guess what: they, like all humans, adapt.
...Wait a second, wasn't this thread about a YouTube video about a game?
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~misc
Sunward Link ParentThe point was, maybe they wouldn't have. Insofar as I'm invested in this debate at all, it's mostly as devil's advocate for the "capitalism really is the source of all the world's ills" side...I genuinely fail to see how a dominantly socialist culture would be different from our own in this example, should they have made their society dependant on fossil fuels like we have.
The point was, maybe they wouldn't have. Insofar as I'm invested in this debate at all, it's mostly as devil's advocate for the "capitalism really is the source of all the world's ills" side (though I am no fan of capitalism either, especially the barely-regulated form that we now live under). At the same time, I don't think it's that "out there" to suggest that that's not too far off the mark. Since fossil fuels have become the main thrust of this conversation, let's use them as the poster child for malignant capitalism: look at all the fossil fuel companies who secretly funded climate change denialists even as their own scientists were sounding the alarm internally about climate change. Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, and their ilk could have been funding research into sustainable and renewable energy technology decades ago and spearheaded a more gradual transition when it might have made a bigger difference in the warming we and future generations will experience, but they didn't, because the ROI on making it seem like it was A-OK to keep burning dinosaurs was higher. They're only pivoting to renewables now because, as you say, there is profit in it. Ultimately, my point is that a system that prioritizes ill-defined "growth", and profit, over all else--even over preservation of the environment (both literal and metaphorical) that makes that growth possible--is what got us into the mess we're currently in. I think it's telling that it's difficult--for either of us--to even coherently imagine a world where the highest priority is keeping the world livable (in all senses of the world).
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~misc
Sunward Link ParentI don't think this sarcasm is helpful or contributes to the discussion. I'm not going to try to argue that a primarily socialist world wouldn't have used carbon-emitting energy sources to...Ah yes the well known colonizer's and resource exploiters Canada, Norway, and Finland.
I don't think this sarcasm is helpful or contributes to the discussion.
Capitalism didn't cause climate change. Human advancement caused climate change. Are you seriously going to try and argue a dominantly socialist world would not have made use of carbon energy sources to industrialize?
I'm not going to try to argue that a primarily socialist world wouldn't have used carbon-emitting energy sources to industrialize (I'm also not the OP, so I can't say that that is actually the entirety of their argument). However, I would point out that, while "capitalism caused climate change" might be somewhat facile and un-nuanced on the one hand, on the other hand a "growth at all costs and damn the externalities" mindset tends to go hand-in-hand with capitalism, especially in the last 40-50 years or so, and carbon emissions (and their effect on the climate) are one such externality that, absent measures like carbon taxes, tend to be ignored by participants in capitalist economies. Of course, socialist economies could easily fall victim to that same indifferent mindset, but presumably in a world where the workers own the means of production, attitudes would be more collectivist and everyone would feel a sense of responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, even at the cost of slowing growth and innovation; after all, what good is a newer, better, faster widget if the planet's going to be too hot for anyone who would use it to live on?
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Comment on How do you turn a smart TV into a dumb TV? in ~tech
Sunward Link ParentCertainly it's possible, but considering that a smart TV's firmware updates are probably (hopefully) digitally signed, you're probably looking at, if not iPhone-jailbreak-exploit-finding levels of...Still I’m curious if it’s possible to go even further, and actively render those features unusable.
Certainly it's possible, but considering that a smart TV's firmware updates are probably (hopefully) digitally signed, you're probably looking at, if not iPhone-jailbreak-exploit-finding levels of difficulty, then at least Wii-jailbreak-exploit-finding levels of difficulty. I'd just not connect it to the internet and be content with that.
Also:
I think the only control on the TV I’ll need to use is the power button.
If your HDMI switch passes through CEC, you might not even need to use that.
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Comment on She took her amputated leg home, and you can too in ~health
Sunward Link ParentThe leg that "looks like the bogwater remains of a diabetic Mr. Goodyear" is, per the photo caption, actually a specimen in the National Museum of Health and Medicine, not the article subject's...The leg that "looks like the bogwater remains of a diabetic Mr. Goodyear" is, per the photo caption, actually a specimen in the National Museum of Health and Medicine, not the article subject's own amputated leg, which (again, if you read the article) she sent to Skulls Unlimited in order to get it stripped, cleaned, and articulated like a skeleton in anatomy class so she can take pictures with it on Instagram.
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Comment on The next recession will destroy millennials in ~finance
Sunward Link ParentStudent loans in the US (federal ones, at least) do have payment options similar to what you describe: there are repayment plans where your payment is based on a percentage of your income that can...Student loans in the US (federal ones, at least) do have payment options similar to what you describe: there are repayment plans where your payment is based on a percentage of your income that can be 0% if your income is low enough. I never qualified for it, even fresh out of college (having gotten a job in tech), so I don't know that much about it (it's difficult to find actual hard numbers on where the cut-off is; I'm guessing it changes from year to year, but also I'm writing this in a few minutes before a meeting at work so not searching very hard either). If you're on an income-based plan your loans are forgiven after 20 or 25 years (depending on when they were disbursed after or before July 2014)... but the IRS treats the amount forgiven as a taxable "gift", so you're arguably just kicking the can down the road for 20 or 25 years.
Not in the US, at least.