What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don’t have to be media related (they still can be though).
Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.
Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.
The enormous differences between korean and japanese writing are interesting for someone who can read neither. Is it related to your factoid about the language’s relations?
Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided “nope, this sucks, I’m making a new thing”, and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.
There are two ways to learn them, you can try memorising a bunch of tables or learn with a lot of direct practice. Probably a bit of both. I am a native speaker of Lithuanian but I don’t even remember the cases, to be honest.
Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it’s more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it’s not an ancestor.
FPGAs, love the damn things. They’re circuits that you can re-program at will after they’ve been manufactured! If you build, like, a 2-input AND gate, that’s all it will ever be. It can only take in 2 inputs and AND them together. But with an FPGA, they’re manufactured to be versatile; you “program” the circuit you want to achieve onto the chip, and it will achieve that functionality! You can make a 2-input AND gate, slap it onto a bread board, and have yourself that nifty little AND gate, but if you later decide you wanted it to be a NAND gate, just reprogram the chip and like magic, what was once an AND gate is now a NAND gate. They’re great!
I wanted to get into FPGAs when I was making some custom boards with MCUs but I really had a hard time finding a good idea for a starter project with them. How did you get started? Any recommendations?
The “print hello world” equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA’s clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.
Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:
Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That’s the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It’s harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)
Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a “vending machine” state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would “vend” (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn’t be like, “well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110…, so I’m gonna start over”, because I could input “111111010” and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!
Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It’s a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you’re copying, you’ll pick up on it fast.
Really, the world’s your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.
And if you’d like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page
I’ve been working with fpgas for about 15 years. In that time, the projects have gone from pld style logic as you’ve described, to process algorithms, and now we’re implementing machine learning trained neural nets in hardware and running Linux on board.
Man, no kidding. We’ve got SoCs, we’ve got processors running on the FPGA fabric, we’ve got communications to Ethernet, PCIe, any AXI you like really. They can talk to RAM, storage, other processors, output graphics, kiss me on the forehead, and tuck me in at night. (I think.)
A coworker was telling me about the big shots in New York trading companies that are starting to implement FPGA architectures into their high-frequency trading algorithms, as the blazing high speed and great parallelization helps them squeeze out a couple extra microseconds in their algorithms. I think that’s a good sign of people wising up to this potential here.
I don’t know of any ML training on FPGAs, but I have no doubt that it can be / it is being done.
Edit: I just remembered the other day, I was shown a module that could take in a grey scale image, do edge dection, and output the edges as a new image file. Which isn’t that hard, it’s convolution on a sliding window, but what baffled me is that it was done in fewer cycles than could be compiled through C code, and the pipeline wasn’t even that deep. It’s crazy!
Ya, it’s fun stuff. We’re using ML for particle identification and tracking in high-energy physics. It’s magnitudes faster than anything a CPU/GPU can do…
do edge detection, and output the edges as a new image file.
your eyes do this, the cells in your eyes do a variety of edge detection and orientation detection before passing on this preprocessed image to the brain where the brain processes it further
For anyone reading this that is wondering what FPGA stands for, it’s Field Programmable Gate Array. Just figured I’d save some people the trouble of looking it up.
You should digitalise those and share them (I mean it would be very cool if you did!), I’m sure lots of people would like it, they just haven’t got the time/energy/possibility to find those kind of things.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don’t know anyone else who’s heard their album.
The older films I like aren’t really that obscure, I just don’t know any film nerds in real life. I’m a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It’s kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don’t know anyone else who’s seen them.
This is copied from my reply to another person here.
Most of the music is on Soulseek.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don’t know anyone else who’s heard their album.
The older films I like aren’t really that obscure, I just don’t know any film nerds in real life. I’m a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It’s kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don’t know anyone else who’s seen them.
Ah, I love Preston Sturges. I guess I'm lucky to know a few film and TV nerds in real life. ETA: The Lady Eve is one of my favorite movies. (When I'm asked what my favorite movies are, I say that and I Know Where I'm Going by Powell and Pressburger.)
Please check it out. I've seen it many times over the years, eventually owning a couple of copies. It's magical. P&P made some really great films - Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes really stand out.
Chess! I suck ass at it so I don’t fit in with actual chess players, and everyone I know is totally disinterested in the game. I can only fuel my love for the game by watching Gotham trash talk 1200 rated players when I know that I’m a lichess 700
Astronomy! Not astrology! No, that’s not a smudge on the lens, that’s M3, and it took me an hour to find it in this Bortle class 7 suburb with my 4.5" dob, and I’m damn proud of myself for that
Anime! No, I haven’t seen Naruto, or DBZ, and I ain’t got time for One Piece. How’s about Shinsekai Yori, Haibanei Renmei, or ACCA? Nah, nobody I know has seen those, even though we’re in our late 20s and are a bit old for shounen at this point
I am surprised by morrowind memes more often than I would expect(never), but I mean in real life. Even gamers that I meet in GameStop have rarely ever played Morrowind. But it’s cool, I can take it way too seriously online anyway.
I think Morrowind is one of those, “you had to be there,” things. It’s hard to get someone who was a kid when Skyrim came out to understand what made Morrowind special, or what sets Morrowind apart from later Bethesda games other than clunky controls.
Whatever you grow up with has such a strong hold for sure, although I think that with Morrowind, throw on the hi res body/texture, controls and sky mods, with just a few clicks the game feels and looks like a modern game, and the game itself already has a way stronger lore and immersive in-game universe than any open-world game I’ve played since.
Oh, Morrowind is easily my favorite, and the absurdly detailed lore and interlinked world is a huge part of that. When you suddenly realize that almost everything is interconnected and even the most out-of-the-way characters are usually connected to a major faction or overarching plot in some way is fantastic. But where Morrowind really starts to shine is on the third or fourth run when you really start to realize that scope and it’s hard to convince someone now to put that kind of commitment into a game, especially one that’s kind of clunky by modern standards. There are just so many games now that people will play something that big once or twice and move on, but that’s barely scratching the surface of the world Morrowind offers; even if you do everything you can in one run, mutually exclusive factions and mutually exclusive routes within factions mean that you’ll need to play again and again and again to really see how deep it all goes.
I feel the same way, just the depth of literally every single route they’ve created, and I’ve collected the entire library of in-game books more than once and just read through all of the books I can find after I finally get to the end of a run because I know I’ll want some sort of epilogue, but there isn’t really an epilogue if you’ve done all of the side quests that you can on a particular run, so I’ll read through the in-game books they have, or I’ll even go through the game manual and just read about the different star signs and what they mean and trying to figure out how they enter into the game and if there’s obvious tells like which npc has which star sign. The game just has a fascinating depth that has not been matched by another game that I’ve played so far. And other games are fantastic and deep and broad like Mass effect and even the other elder scrolls games, but I think the more run down atmosphere with siltstriders and temples made of crumbling sandstone rather than broken granite like in oblivion, the depth and the physical atmosphere and the seemingly unending retinue of characters that even after three playthroughs, you’re like wait, who is this guy? He’s the nephew of who? And then it turns out there’s an extra story there that you never heard of before, or a reference to him in a in-game political biography, or this extra cave behind a waterfall, that’s as large as seyda neen that comtains four books detailing the lost history of whatever the crap that you’ve never heard of before. And I know that they have a lot of information like the number of words are also very large in subsequent elder scrolls games, but their lore is not as comprehensive and convincing and compelling, even if the reflection on the snow is prettier or the vanilla fireballs have better sparks haloing around them.
I just hope eventually I get to see a recreated Morrowind in elder scrolls 9: tamriel when I’m 70 and all of the provinces are there or something.
I go back to morrowind every couple few years because the amazing dedication and man hours that the modders have put into it, it’s such an absolutely beautiful game, like you can add in fantasy style street lights along the walkways that lead in and out of cities, amazing night sky is with true constellations and extra moons or planets, just so much dedication and appropriately stylized changes that modders have made to this game, that have not abated in the two decades since it’s been released that even if an official morrowind never gets redone, the Morrowind you can revisit right now with the appropriate mods installed is as exciting and more beautiful than the original world that was already enthralling.
If you haven’t checked out OpenMW already, definitely do so. It’s a replacement engine that doesn’t impact the gameplay, but does add features that the original lacks, even with MGE and the Code Patch, and greatly improves performance and stability. Their distant land implementation is so well optimized that the last time I played I could set the draw distance arbitrarily far with minimal performance impact. The latest release also added support for some very well done and appropriately atmospheric shaders, such as one that adds gorgeous volumetric fog.
Skywind is also making headway and seems to be made by people who really got Morrowind. When it releases in who knows how many years, it should provide a version of the game with more dynamic gameplay, but the same world faithfully recreated.
Thanks. I did check both of those out but couldn’t get OW stable and once I realized how many regular mods there were for morrowind I had never tried, I just went hog wild with those with the mod manager, I’ll probably try OW again next play through.
I’m also waiting for skywind, that project looks amazing too! And like you say, it’s just dedicated fans.
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