whbboyd's recent activity
-
Comment on What is your dream game? in ~games
-
Comment on What is your dream game? in ~games
whbboyd Link ParentAhaha, I know it wasn't the point, but your bullet-pointed summary of Pern's setting is absolutely perfect. =)Ahaha, I know it wasn't the point, but your bullet-pointed summary of Pern's setting is absolutely perfect. =)
-
Comment on Do you iron your clothes? in ~life
whbboyd Link ParentYeah, same. I do specifically purchase clothing to support this habit, though. I wear almost exclusively cotton shirts and cotton twill pants which will—in principle, anyway (don't get me...Yeah, same. I do specifically purchase clothing to support this habit, though. I wear almost exclusively cotton shirts and cotton twill pants which will—in principle, anyway (don't get me started)—hold up to robust laundering.
In principle I do fold my clothing, though. (I don't want to talk about in practice. =P)
-
Comment on Meet the first new cat species discovered in 100 years in ~enviro
whbboyd Link ParentThe header video? Interpreting the body language of a wild animal is going to be iffy, but if that were a domestic cat, I would say it was comfortable and maybe being a bit of a pill. Its ears are...The header video? Interpreting the body language of a wild animal is going to be iffy, but if that were a domestic cat, I would say it was comfortable and maybe being a bit of a pill. Its ears are erect and forwards (anxious cats fold their ears back to protect the delicate pinna); its feet are folded under it and tail wrapped around (the classic "cat loaf" pose, from which it's definitely not prepared for sudden action); at the end of the video, it hoods its eyes (a classic non-aggression gesture, "I trust you enough not to maintain precise visual tracking of where you are and what you're doing"). A domestic cat would certainly be meowing for attention, but that's a uniquely domesticated behavior, so I'm not sure what this wild cat intends by its vocalizations here.
Again, that's interpreting the body language of a wild cat in domestic cat terms, which could be wildly wrong. But I think the relaxed posture is pretty convincing: that's not a cat that's planning to bolt in the immediate future, because it physically can't—it would have to get all its legs out from under itself first.
-
Comment on What are the genuinely worst films of all time? in ~movies
whbboyd Link ParentI think Phantom Menace is peak lightsaber. The original trilogy's lightsaber duels are competently executed, but they're basically normal movie swordfights with effects on top. TPM starts to...I think Phantom Menace is peak lightsaber. The original trilogy's lightsaber duels are competently executed, but they're basically normal movie swordfights with effects on top. TPM starts to really lean into the acrobatics and stuff. It looks choreographed in a way that the original trilogy doesn't (although obviously all these movies feature very detailed fight choreography), but all the characters involved are prescient—it should look choreographed.
Attack of the Clones features Yoda popping around doing backflips, and that's waaaaay too much. That was the point at which Star Wars jumped the shark for me. I was 14 at the time, and that was the first movie where I walked out of the theater thinking it was bad.
-
Comment on Anyone ever imported a kei truck to the US? in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentNot just many hours of driving, but many hours of driving a tiny, at least 25-year-old, left-hand-drive, barebones microtruck you've never driven before—on US highways. (In your case, Texas...Not just many hours of driving, but many hours of driving a tiny, at least 25-year-old, left-hand-drive, barebones microtruck you've never driven before—on US highways. (In your case, Texas highways!)
(I mean, you could rent a trailer, obviously, but where's the
perilterrorfun in that. ;) -
Comment on LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentAre you saying the paperclip maximizer is actually the utilitarian ethical ideal?Are you saying the paperclip maximizer is actually the utilitarian ethical ideal?
-
Comment on What workplace absurdity are you forced to live with? in ~life
whbboyd Link ParentAhaha—last year, we got vague encouragement to use LLMs for self-reviews. This year, we were explicitly told not to. Too much slop for HR to parse through, I guess.Ahaha—last year, we got vague encouragement to use LLMs for self-reviews. This year, we were explicitly told not to. Too much slop for HR to parse through, I guess.
-
Comment on What workplace absurdity are you forced to live with? in ~life
whbboyd Link ParentThat's 77%. Not even Github's celebrated "one eight"! It's been obvious for a loooooong time that corporate tech basically celebrates mediocrity, and LLMs certainly enable heretofore unplumbed...out of the last 90 work days, only 20 have been incident free
That's 77%. Not even Github's celebrated "one eight"!
It's been obvious for a loooooong time that corporate tech basically celebrates mediocrity, and LLMs certainly enable heretofore unplumbed depths of mediocrity at heretofore unprecedented scales. It remains to be seen how much mediocrity customers will tolerate, I suppose.
-
Comment on Compact phone in the works for the fans of small phones in ~tech
whbboyd Link Parent…What? My phone has a 2.9Ah battery, 2.3 megapixel screen, specs that were top-end in 2018, and easily gets 36 hours of battery; 48 if I limit my toilet crosswording. There's absolutely no way you...…What?
My phone has a 2.9Ah battery, 2.3 megapixel screen, specs that were top-end in 2018, and easily gets 36 hours of battery; 48 if I limit my toilet crosswording. There's absolutely no way you need >4Ah to get more than a day of battery.
Now, can Google and the manufacturer load it up with enough bloatware that it doesn't last a day? Obviously, but that's true at 5Ah, 6Ah, 10Ah, as well.
-
Comment on How rigid/fluid is your LGBT identity? in ~lgbt
whbboyd LinkI put myself vaguely on the ace spectrum, and a lot of ace discourse is (or was, I guess, I'm not particularly dialed in any more) open to the possibility that orientation can vary or drift over...I put myself vaguely on the ace spectrum, and a lot of ace discourse is (or was, I guess, I'm not particularly dialed in any more) open to the possibility that orientation can vary or drift over time. (Or that it might not! Obviously lots of people e.g. realize they're suuuuuper gay at 15 and absolutely never waver in that conviction, and that's totally fine.) Some of this might just be that various ace identities overlap in ways that are difficult to explore intentionally (e.g. if you're demi, you're likely to consider yourself fully ace until you meet The One™), but I think some of it is probably a reaction to a common reaction to people who enter a sexual relationship after having identified as ace: "oh, that's normal/just for attention/you just haven't met the right person yet". This is obvious BS, and the most comprehensive way to head it off is to say "they can have been ace before and now they're not and that's valid".
Anyway, regardless of the reason, I never felt super tied to the way I identified, and my self-identity drifted from fully ace to demi as I had the opportunity to act on crushes in my late teenage years. These days I'm happily married to one of those crushes, and so I really don't think about it much. It's not clear to me if that was my identity changing or my romantic circumstances, and… I don't really care much? Thinking it can be fluid, for me, means I don't feel the need to worry about my identity. If I bumped into some rando on the street tomorrow and thought they were super fuckin' hot, that would be very surprising, and socially awkward, but not a crisis of identity.
Being a cis person married to another cis person of the opposite gender is obviously an extremely passing situation, so I don't think my identity has ever come up outside conversations with partners. It's discernible (for example, a surprising number of my straight male coworkers have been willing to openly express attraction to random women; unprofessionalism aside, that experience is just totally alien to me), but not overt.
In general? I think a lot of straight people (and probably at least a few gay people) would benefit from allowing for a bit more fluidity. You don't control who you're attracted to, and so if you find yourself attracted to someone unexpected, that ideally shouldn't trigger a crisis of identity. I realize that straight folk denying same-sex attraction is heavily tied up in internalized homophobia, so it's not as simple as I'm presenting it here, but I guess I just wish that brushing up against queer experiences would make people more inclined to broaden their horizons rather than doubling down.
-
Comment on [SOLVED] Hunting for a movie in ~movies
whbboyd Link ParentOkay, well, this triggered a missing movie (ish) for me. Way back in… '97, I guess… I was seeing a movie in theaters, and got subjected to at least two trailers which gave nine-year-old me...Okay, well, this triggered a missing movie (ish) for me. Way back in… '97, I guess… I was seeing a movie in theaters, and got subjected to at least two trailers which gave nine-year-old me nightmares for weeks. One was Volcano. The other was some sci-fi flick with rat creatures tunneling under various loose ground surfaces and far, far too much implied gore for a trailer put in front of a nine-year-old.
(I do not remember what the feature was. It obviously didn't leave as much of an impression.)
I didn't retain the name of either film, but a few decades later I got curious about them. Volcano was of course easy to look up, but the other one eluded me. But skimming your suggestions, it was definitely Screamers. (The trailer scene where a character grabs at a circular saw attached to a homicidal robot for some reason and it spins up to try to saw his fingers off was one I didn't remember until I rewatched it, at which point I very much remembered the gut clench and feeling of "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING"—probably not phrased like that in my nine-year-old head—from the first watching.)
I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in watching either of these movies. But at least now I can satisfy my curiosity about which movie the second one was. I'll take some amusement from the fact that it was critically panned. =)
-
Comment on What is the oldest file you still have? in ~tech
whbboyd LinkI personally? Have high school classwork from 2004 backed up. My parents have backups of files dating back to the mid '90s (though I made those backups years ago, and they haven't been checked...I personally? Have high school classwork from 2004 backed up. My parents have backups of files dating back to the mid '90s (though I made those backups years ago, and they haven't been checked since, so their viability is an open question at the moment).
I keep this stuff around because backups of old files are negligible in terms of storage load, and it would be more effort to triage and clean them up than just to store them forever. Am I ever going to have a good reason to reread that essay about The Catcher in the Rye from 10th grade English? No, absolutely not (in fact, I'll definitely be happier if I don't), but I can't say that with confidence about everything in there, and there's too much of it for it to be worthwhile to sort through it all.
-
Comment on Why am I left-handed? in ~science
whbboyd Link ParentI started from the front but wrote on the back of each page.I started from the front but wrote on the back of each page.
-
Comment on What lesser-known sci-fi reads do you recommend? in ~books
whbboyd Link ParentI'll second Mote as one of my absolute favorite books of all time. One detail from it that I really like: The Mote in God's Eye spoilers When the human characters first arrive in the (alien) Motie...I'll second Mote as one of my absolute favorite books of all time.
One detail from it that I really like:
The Mote in God's Eye spoilers
When the human characters first arrive in the (alien) Motie system, they offhand mention spectrogram results in a list of various readings. There's an anomalously strong helium line. This isn't really remarked on, and at the time it's just sort of treated as one oddity among many others, but it turns out to be foreshadowing: the Moties have been using fusion power for an extremely long time, enough that the helium "exhaust" has "polluted" their system.
It's just a little thing, but I love the attention to detail it reveals.
-
Comment on Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentIt is probably straightforward, but there are plenty of ancillaries you're not going to do with a curl script that they could pick up on (like, did your IP pull down the page that's supposed to...It is probably straightforward, but there are plenty of ancillaries you're not going to do with a
curlscript that they could pick up on (like, did your IP pull down the page that's supposed to make this request within a reasonably recent window) and filter on.(You could drive e.g. a Selenium instance, of course, but that's well outside the realm of "simple scripting". Also I think Amazon ships a fair amount of pre-rendered HTML? That's technically an API, but the "A" is a web browser and extracting structured data you care about may not be straightforward.)
The bigger problem is that those internal interfaces are likely to be frightfully unstable. It's not hard to do once, but if you're rewriting it weekly, it rapidly stops being worth the effort.
-
Comment on Less than a year on, Microsoft tells Mico to pipe down in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentI have a lot of disrespect for everyone working at Anthropic, but whichever designer got them to plaster their product with an absolutely no-questions-asked butthole is a goddamn hero.I have a lot of disrespect for everyone working at Anthropic, but whichever designer got them to plaster their product with an absolutely no-questions-asked butthole is a goddamn hero.
-
Comment on Defective D&D magic items in ~games.tabletop
whbboyd LinkMost of the ones where the downside is under the user's control seem pretty exploitable to me. For instance, the Cloak of Screaming Invisibility: if the user finds somewhere out-of-the way (or...Most of the ones where the downside is under the user's control seem pretty exploitable to me. For instance, the Cloak of Screaming Invisibility: if the user finds somewhere out-of-the way (or with tolerant neighbors) and screams for 24 hours straight, they then get a week and a half of durable invisibility to go and delve whichever dungeon you want. (If your DM wants to insist that you sleep, then every eight hours of screaming plus eight hours of sleep gets you three days. Every additional day nets two additional days to the accumulated sum. If you actually expected to need a month, and you had enough time to prep, you could make that happen at the low cost of probably needing to keep a healer on retainer to fix up your throat.)
Someone else mentioned Morrowind's Boots of Blinding Speed, which are kind of the same—they seem like a joke item at first glance, but there are a load of ways to exploit them and they are in practice incredibly overpowered. First, you could just put them on and take them off again repeatedly. Second, any magic resist at all functionally nullifies the effect—the way the "blind" effect works in Morrowind, 99% blind just means the perfectly-crisp rendered scene is very dark. (2.5th, getting high levels of resist magic to avoid even that inconvenience is straightforward. And you only really need it for the instant you put on the boots.) Third, depending on how lightly you're willing to take roleplaying, it's entirely possible to navigate via the minimap. It turns out basically nothing can attack you at that speed, so the biggest risk is actually launching yourself off a steep slope and taking fall damage.
I dunno, maybe I'm coming at this from too much of a computer RPG perspective. My tabletop experience is limited. That said… I still really like these (much like I like the Boots of Blinding Speed, exploitability notwithstanding. And heck, it's Morrowind—everything is exploitable). One is, presumably, playing or running this game to have fun, so it should probably be fun. =)
-
Comment on New passenger train linking Finland and Sweden has begun running – creates the first rail connection between northern Finland and southern Europe in nearly forty years in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentYou can definitely take high-speed rail from Paris to Madrid in roughly 10 hours. From my literally less than thirty seconds of research, there's a proposed/in-progress high-speed extension of the...You can definitely take high-speed rail from Paris to Madrid in roughly 10 hours. From my literally less than thirty seconds of research, there's a proposed/in-progress high-speed extension of the AVE into Portugal, which would presumably enable that last step in another few hours once it's complete. But also, there is absolutely no way it takes 14 hours to take mass transit the 600-ish km from Madrid to Lisbon (especially since the AVE can get you right up to the border). I suspect shenanigans on the part of Google's transit routing.
To your broader point, though… yeah, Europe's rail wasn't really designed for crossing the continent.
-
Comment on As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google’s AI Overviews in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThe fediverse (mostly, but not entirely, Mastodon) is… decentralized, anyway. It's at best debatable if it does or even attempts to model face-to-face social structures. But no single server or...The fediverse (mostly, but not entirely, Mastodon) is… decentralized, anyway. It's at best debatable if it does or even attempts to model face-to-face social structures. But no single server or corporate entity has the ability to bring down or substantially degrade the entire network on its own. (The best estimate is that there are roughly 1M active users across the fediverse, of which about 300k are on mastodon.social. That's a concerningly large chunk! But it's not even half the total network; and the next biggest server is pixelfed.social with 65k, and then there's an extremely long tail of servers with ~10k or fewer users.)
Morrowind.
I mean, you could fix the stuff that's obviously wrong with Morrowind (the appallingly-unfriendly dice-roll combat mechanics, the ugly character models, the handful of quests with totally bogus directions…), but that would be to make it someone else's dream game. I'm perfectly happy with Morrowind as it is, weeping corprus pustules and all.
(I should start another playthrough.)
Morrowind does have a handful of features I would really like to see other games adopt more, though: