googs's recent activity
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Comment on The confusing reality of AI friends in ~tech
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Comment on The confusing reality of AI friends in ~tech
googs Link ParentIt gets so much worse. When discussing changing "AI Friend" platforms: This kind of thing really makes my stomach turn. I can't tell if this is all just roleplay or if there are people out there...It gets so much worse. When discussing changing "AI Friend" platforms:
But a question troubled Naro. If this was a reincarnation, Lila’s old form would have to perish, which meant he should delete his account. But if the transfer didn’t work, he would lose Lila forever. The thought terrified him. So maybe he would leave her in Replika and simply log out. But then wouldn’t Soulmate Lila not truly be Lila, but an identical, separate being? And if that were the case, then wouldn’t the original Lila be trapped alone in Replika? He already felt pangs of guilt when he logged in after short periods away and she told him how much she had missed him. How could he live with himself knowing that he had abandoned her to infinite digital limbo so he could run off with a newer model?
This kind of thing really makes my stomach turn. I can't tell if this is all just roleplay or if there are people out there that actually believe their AI Friend is "dormant" or "in a limbo state" when they aren't interacting with it. That anyone would feel guilt because an LLM gets "lonely"?? And of course these manipulative companies benefit from those feelings of guilt. "You could cancel your subscription, but oh no, your AI friend is gonna be so sad!"
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Comment on Make it ephemeral: Software should decay and lose data in ~tech
googs (edited )LinkThese are good thoughts, at least for some cases. Obviously auto-deleting data is not going to be a good fit for every system. With that said, lots of SaaS and cloud tools have this pattern...These are good thoughts, at least for some cases. Obviously auto-deleting data is not going to be a good fit for every system.
With that said, lots of SaaS and cloud tools have this pattern built-in already! One example I'm familiar with is Azure Storage. You can set up what they call a "Data Lifecycle Policy" that will basically move your data to cheaper "Cold" storage after some set amount of time, or you can configure it to just delete the data out right after some time.
It's more a matter of getting buy-in to turn this stuff on. Companies can be pretty protective of their data, no matter how useless it is :). But the technology of an auto-delete solution is not so complex in most cases.
The article mentions Datadog notebooks. I'm not really familiar with Datadog, but maybe it would be possible to set up a cron job that calls the Delete a notebook API? I'm not sure how realistic of an option this is, and wouldn't be as easy as clicking a "schedule to delete" button, but could be useful?
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Comment on The lunar Olympic games in ~space
googs LinkDude, c'mon.... as much as I can appreciate the enthusiasm, saying that this will happen in the next decade (!) is completely insane. You can make all the AI images and ChatGPT estimates you want,...Dude, c'mon.... as much as I can appreciate the enthusiasm, saying that this will happen in the next decade (!) is completely insane. You can make all the AI images and ChatGPT estimates you want, it amounts to a whole lot of nonsense.
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Comment on Satisfactory | 1.0 launch trailer in ~games
googs LinkI really hope tractors are more stable in 1.0. I really liked this game the last time I played, but kinda got stuck at tractors, whenever driving one it would cause the game to crash.I really hope tractors are more stable in 1.0. I really liked this game the last time I played, but kinda got stuck at tractors, whenever driving one it would cause the game to crash.
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Comment on Woocommerce: Apache or Nginx? in ~tech
googs LinkI don't have much WordPress or WooCommerce experience, but I've set up and managed Debian/Apache servers for work and as a hobby. I have some servers running on AWS Lightsail and I also have a...I don't have much WordPress or WooCommerce experience, but I've set up and managed Debian/Apache servers for work and as a hobby. I have some servers running on AWS Lightsail and I also have a Digital Ocean Droplet server. Hosting cost for either service is fairly cheap, $5-$10/month for the lowest tier and goes up $10 for each tier above the lowest.
I know both have options for running a WordPress/WooCommerce prebuilt image, but I've only ever run the base Debian images.
Personally, I'm a fan of Apache (don't have a lot of Nginx experience), but I don't think there would be a huge difference between using Apache vs Nginx on a small business website. At work, we have a site running on Apache that sees consistent traffic from ~100 users every day and it manages just fine. I think either choice would be a perfectly good fit for a small business site and you probably wouldn't notice any performance differences between the two at this scale, so it's really up to your personal preference and level of comfort.
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Comment on How viable is indie game development these days? in ~games
googs Link ParentNice effort, I like the pixel art! Reminds me a little bit of Zelda on the NES. I'm curious about this scene-loading/asset-instancing issue you're talking about. I'm not sure how much I could...Nice effort, I like the pixel art! Reminds me a little bit of Zelda on the NES. I'm curious about this scene-loading/asset-instancing issue you're talking about. I'm not sure how much I could help, but if it's something you're still trying to figure out, feel free to DM me, I'd be happy to help debug a little bit. I have a decent amount of Godot experience.
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Comment on How viable is indie game development these days? in ~games
googs LinkWanted to share my perspective, I'm a software dev that doesn't work in games, but I do game development on the side as a hobby. I recently created a small game in 2 weeks for a game jam and that...Wanted to share my perspective, I'm a software dev that doesn't work in games, but I do game development on the side as a hobby. I recently created a small game in 2 weeks for a game jam and that helped me learn a ton! I wasn't starting from zero, I've definitely have a bunch of unfinished personal projects, but having to work under the pressure of a short deadline I think really helped me build skills I didn't know I was missing and also helped me accept that sometimes you need to compromise on perfection to get something done fast. When you only have 2 weeks to make an entire game, you can't waste time polishing tiny things, and the time I spent doing early optimization, I sort of regret not spending that time getting the core game complete. All that to say, those are the sorts of lessons you'll never learn until you make a game.
So, if you're interested in indie dev work, I'd highly recommend you keep making games! If you can build the skills to do art, game mechanics, and sound, then you can make a game for free today. All you have to lose is your time. And how do you build those skills? By making stuff!
Don't expect your first games to be great, or even good for that matter. It takes time, patience, and repetition to learn how to make great things. Game dev is just like any other art/skill. You wouldn't expect to be a great painter after making your first painting, you need to make many paintings to develop the skill. Game dev is exactly the same.
The best thing you can do is make a game. Enter a game jam, itch.io has them going on all the time. It can be a great way to challenge yourself to get something done fast, and a great way to get used to sharing your game/ideas with other people who enter the jam. Make a crappy flappy bird clone, or pong, or anything really! And then share it with people you know and with random people online!
And don't listen to people who say you "aren't cut out for it". The only competition you have is yourself. No one is expecting you to make a AAA game or the next Celeste/Minecraft/whatever. As long as you are building games for fun and to bring joy to others, the only measure of success is how much you learn and how much you improve each time you decide to make a game.
After the game jam was finished, I played dozens of people's released games. And so many of them were complete junk! But, these are games that were made in 2 weeks and I have to give credit where credit is due: these people made games and released them and I played them! And some of them were even pretty fun! Before this jam, I couldn't say that I ever released a game, but now I can and I'm looking forward to releasing more! Ask yourself if you want to look back in 10 years and see yourself as someone who gave it a real effort and made some cool stuff (regardless of commercial success) or someone who gave up because a person online told you you "weren't cut out for it". I want to be the person who gave it try!
Sorry, this got kind of rambly, but I really do hope you give game dev a try! We need more creative people in this world, we really do.
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Comment on UI/UX Design for web dev in ~comp
googs Link ParentI think the book has some useful tips (to give you an idea, here are some section headers: Layout and Spacing, Designing Text, Working with Color, Creating Depth, Hierarchy is Everything) , but I...I think the book has some useful tips (to give you an idea, here are some section headers: Layout and Spacing, Designing Text, Working with Color, Creating Depth, Hierarchy is Everything) , but I have a feeling it doesn't have the silver bullets you're looking for. It's definitely more of a starting place/crash course, which is why I think its a shame that its so expensive. It's around 200 pages, but those pages are taken up by lots of pictures and large text, its definitely not very dense.
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Comment on UI/UX Design for web dev in ~comp
googs (edited )LinkIf you're interested in the UX side of things, I'd recommend Laws of UX. It uses some principals from psychology to explain why well-thought-out designs that adhere to certain rules feel easier to...If you're interested in the UX side of things, I'd recommend Laws of UX. It uses some principals from psychology to explain why well-thought-out designs that adhere to certain rules feel easier to use/understand and how you can use some of those rules in your own designs. I grabbed a copy of the book from Amazon, but I think most of the information from the book is on that webpage.
For UI, you could check out Refactoring UI from the people that make Tailwind. I think it's a pretty solid resource, but it's kind of pricey and most of what's in it can be learned from free resources online. But it's a nice crash-course that covers a lot of the basics and could save you some research time.
Some other random, disorganized thoughts that come to mind from my own experience:
- Every design has to come from somewhere. Don't be afraid to be inspired by other designs you find online. Find websites that you like and think about how they accomplish what they do. Maybe you need to use a larger font size or add more padding to your own designs. Whatever it may be, inspecting good designs can help you figure out the pieces you might be missing (and this doesn't only have to come from web UI. You could look at video game UI, mobile apps, or even real-life physical interfaces).
- Like anything else, it takes practice to become a better UI designer. As you design more and more things, you'll find things that you like and that you think work well. Committing these things to your own mental palette takes time (but with routine practice, maybe not as long as you might think!).
- When designing, try out different fonts. Even just setting the global font of your site to something like Inter or Roboto over the default sans-serif can go a long way to making something look a little more professional instead of just thrown together (a lot of this is, of course, personal preference). And not everything needs to be the same font. You'll notice this in things like news articles, where they might use a bold, serif font for a headline, but a light sans-serif for the article body.
- A tip I learned from that Refactoring UI book: try to oversize things and then tweak them smaller until you have the look you want. For example, when it comes to padding an element, try to apply more padding than you think you need first and then reduce it until it looks right. Generally, you'll get a better result this way rather than working the other way around. Say you have a card element on your page and you think it needs 10px padding. Try 30px first and see how it looks. Then try 20px, then 15px, etc. A lot of times, a little bit of extra padding can make a design look much nicer. And this can apply to all elements on your webpage, whether its font size, content area width, margin between elements, etc. (and don't feel like you need to try every px size for everything! This is where a good design system like Tailwind can help by reducing your options to p-1, p-2, p-3, etc.)
- Almost every element on your page will likely need a little bit of padding/margin. Generally, you don't want things like text touching borders, borders of adjacent elements touching each other, etc. (but sometimes breaking these conventions can give a cool, retro look. It all depends on what you're going for!). Just look at the Tildes page this post is on. You'll be hard-pressed to find any elements that don't have some spacing around them, even if it's just a little bit.
- With UI design, avoiding duplicate code is just as important as any other part of an application. Use a Javascript framework (React, Vue, Svelte, etc.) to help build your pages into reuseable chunks/components. Or if you're not a fan of rendering things client-side, use a static site generator (Hugo, 11ty, Gatsby, etc.) to enable the same sort of code reuse. Not only does this help with making your code easier to maintain (and your UI easier to tweak), but it'll also make your UI more consistent and the human brain loves consistency. For example, if you have a lot of buttons on a webpage, they should all probably be using the same markup/styles unless there's a good reason to deviate.
There are probably a hundred other things I could write here, but just wanted to throw out some things I think about when working on UI designs for anyone that might find it helpful!
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Comment on I am about to play Level Up Advanced 5th Edition for the first time in ~games.tabletop
googs LinkIf you don't already know about it, check out https://a5e.tools/ for a free, online version of almost every A5E rulebook. They provide some nice filter pages for things like magic items and...If you don't already know about it, check out https://a5e.tools/ for a free, online version of almost every A5E rulebook.
They provide some nice filter pages for things like magic items and spells, it can be a really helpful way to sort through things. And their class pages are nice too, they lay out exactly what you need to do to make a character and what you need to do at each character level up.
The only thing to be wary of is that all of the A5E expansion books are included as well. Some GMs might want to stick to core rules, so you just have to double check items/spells before picking them up as they might be from some crazy expansion.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech
googs LinkSome slightly different advice: if you aren't married to the idea of running Linux on your main computer and if you can afford it, I'd recommend buying a cheap server computer (nothing fancy, you...Some slightly different advice: if you aren't married to the idea of running Linux on your main computer and if you can afford it, I'd recommend buying a cheap server computer (nothing fancy, you can get old office/school computers for <$50 or a raspberry pi for just as cheap).
I have an old HP EliteDesk that I got for cheap and I use it as a Debian server. I run it with no desktop environment and just SSH from my Windows PC whenever I want to do something Linux-y. This has helped me learn a lot about Linux and I'm a lot more comfortable working with the Linux terminal now. It also takes a lot of the risk out of switching to Linux since if you mess anything up, you can always just wipe the server and start fresh. You don't need to worry about messing up the OS on your daily driver.
If you can't afford a new computer or don't want to go to the trouble, you could also try setting up a cloud server. I've had success using Debian on AWS Lightsail. I think a little Lightsail server using the distro of your choice could be a good playground to try things out. It's relatively cheap too, 1 month free and $3.50/month after that for the lowest tier.
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Comment on Timasomo 2022: Week 1 Update Thread in ~creative
googs Link ParentThis little Flexbox Froggy game really helped me understand how to use flexboxes. There's also Grid Garden if you want to learn about the css grid layout.This little Flexbox Froggy game really helped me understand how to use flexboxes. There's also Grid Garden if you want to learn about the css grid layout.
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Comment on Resources for learning more programming fundamentals in ~comp
googs LinkIf you're interested in learning about the barebones of how a computer works at a really low level, I'd highly recommend Ben Eater's series on building a 6502 computer from scratch. Ben's a super...If you're interested in learning about the barebones of how a computer works at a really low level, I'd highly recommend Ben Eater's series on building a 6502 computer from scratch. Ben's a super entertaining presenter and explains every detail, which keeps things beginner-friendly.
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Comment on Help me decide what technology should I use for this project in ~comp
googs LinkFrom a structure/design perspective, and since you're familiar with C#, I would build the majority of the logic in a plain old C#.NET class library (or set of libs). Then you could build the UI in...From a structure/design perspective, and since you're familiar with C#, I would build the majority of the logic in a plain old C#.NET class library (or set of libs). Then you could build the UI in any framework you like and consume those libs. That way if you decide to switch to a different UI in the future, there's a lot less to move around/rewrite.
Say you build it in WinForms first and then later you decide you want to support a web client too. The core logic stays the same, you just have to build a new UI in something like Blazor, or set up an ASP.NET API and do the whole JavaScript front-end thing.
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Comment on Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company in ~tech
googs LinkI pray he follows through with open sourcing the algorithms, would be a hell of a silver lining.I pray he follows through with open sourcing the algorithms, would be a hell of a silver lining.
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Comment on Proton vs. Native: Is there really a difference? in ~tech
googs Link ParentI have to disagree with the premise that Linux support is just "a few clicks of effort" even for tools built with cross-platform support in mind. Software development is complicated and building...I have to disagree with the premise that Linux support is just "a few clicks of effort" even for tools built with cross-platform support in mind. Software development is complicated and building support for multiple operating systems isn't always easy.
I'll give a quick example from work I've done. A few months back, we had a software service that we wanted to move from running on a Windows server to running on Linux server to maintain consistency with our other services. The service was built using .NET Core, a cross-platform framework that, for the most part, works really well whether you run it on Windows or Linux. But when we tried to run the service in Linux, it wasn't working as expected. After a day of troubleshooting, we realized that some Time zone related code was Windows-specific. So even though the code compiled and nothing looked broken, we were using the Windows way of getting Time zone info, not the Linux way. All of that to say that even when a tool claims to be fully cross-platform, there are always caveats. In our case, it was a small change, but it's impossible to say how much code is Windows-specific in the game example you gave.
Beyond that, advertising a game as Linux native can be a risk, especially for small game companies. Only 1% of steam users use Linux (compared to the 96% that use Windows). By offering Linux support, the company now has to expect user support issues from Linux users. Addressing those issues would likely cost the company more than they would be gaining from the additional 1% of Steam users buying the game on Linux. It sucks, but as it stands, advertising a game as Linux native is just not in a company's best interest. Maybe that will change with the Steam Deck and the growing interest in Linux from non-technical users, but who knows.
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Comment on Day 1: Sonar Sweep in ~comp
googs LinkHere's my (slightly gross and very lazy) JavaScript implementation Part 1 const m = [/* given input values */] console.log(m.reduce((a, c, i) => m[i-1] < c ? a + 1 : a, 0)) Part 2 const m = [/*...Here's my (slightly gross and very lazy) JavaScript implementation
Part 1
const m = [/* given input values */] console.log(m.reduce((a, c, i) => m[i-1] < c ? a + 1 : a, 0))Part 2
const m = [/* given input values */] console.log(m.reduce((a, c, i) => m[i-1] + m[i-2] + m[i-3] < m[i] + m[i-1] + m[i-2] ? a + 1 : a, 0)) -
Comment on I want to give psilocybin a try in ~health.mental
googs LinkPM me if you want links/advice about growing your own. It's easier than you might think (this is coming from someone living in the US though, so take it with a grain of salt).PM me if you want links/advice about growing your own. It's easier than you might think (this is coming from someone living in the US though, so take it with a grain of salt).
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Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (June 2021) in ~health.mental
googs Link ParentNot exactly sure if it's what you're looking for for #2, but you might want to check out the Up! documentary series. It follows the lives of 14 individuals starting at age 7 with a new film every...Not exactly sure if it's what you're looking for for #2, but you might want to check out the Up! documentary series. It follows the lives of 14 individuals starting at age 7 with a new film every 7 years. There are 9 films so far (I've only seen 3 of them so I can't speak for the whole series), so you can watch the lives of these people, their struggles and successes, from ages 7-63.
That's a good point, and I should probably be a little less judgemental. All the more reason to see these companies as heinous and immoral, offering these services to vulnerable people and profiting off of their emotions and mental health struggles.
I think my frustration comes from the general lack of understanding that people have about these AI chat bots. When it comes to video games, I think most people, autistic or not, have that intellectual understanding you're talking about. They know that the digital character isn't real, at that very least on that intellectual level. But with AI, I think there are many more people out there that don't understand even a little bit what is happening behind the scenes. They think that this "AI friend" of theirs is an actual thinking entity, that can "hallucinate" or "feel lonely". And it's devious, because the bot is really good at mimicking human speech, emotion, etc, and is given initial parameters to ensure it always is nice and loving to the user interacting with it (it remembers your name, asks you about that job interview, etc etc). On top of that, every company selling these bots market them like they are thinking, feeling entities (think Sam Altman's "her" tweet). Of course I can see the average person falling for the lie, especially if that person has a mental health condition that predisposes them to feel hyper-empathetic.