Personal anecdote: I connected my guitar to my shitty sound card a few weeks ago, ran guitarix (because real DAWs are overwhelmingly complicated and I just want an amp, a compressor, and some reverb), and thanks to PipeWire and pipewire-jack everything ran perfectly. Low latency, no crackling, no messing with jackd or ALSA, no restarting audio daemons, I could simultaneously play audio through Firefox and hear my guitar. I dare say that that part of the audio stack is now a solved problem.
I’m not a musician though so I can’t comment on hardware support for exotic sound/midi cards or the maturity of FOSS DAWs.
Overkill? Maybe. Quite nice to have a dark country road lit up well enough to light up the road close AND far (most headlights have a tight beam that only does either).
Also I like the reusability/repairability of productd based on 18650 cells
“Lofi” as it is understood nowadays is more about background music that aims not to be distracting when working/studying. Basically lofi == “lofi (to study to)”.
Trip-hop like Portishead does it, while it is “low fidelity” (as in it uses warm tones, crackling, record scratching, etc), it is not lofi, in the same way that Sabaton is Rock but not Rock&Roll.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
So fucking what? My government’s official stance is not that they are a bunch of dickheads, yet here we are.
Outside of SOME official government communication (Western governments will happily send official delegations to Taiwan from time to time just to piss off the CCP) and other matters of strategic ambiguity like the Olympics, Taiwan is a country. Everybody but China and a few lonesome tankies agrees on that.
So when a private entity shows Taiwan as part of the PRC, it can only be assumed that they are tankies, Chinese propagandists, or incompetent. Either way, probably not trustworthy.
Main problem I see is that as it stands it’s insanely easy to forge a SEPA mandate. Ever had to fill one out? It’s literally just a piece of paper saying “I, John Doe, allow XXX to take money for services rendered from my acount AB1234. [signature]”. The wonder of legacy processes built for companies with fax-based workflows…
I believe only some “trusted” commercial customers are authorized to turn in SEPA mandates (I know my ISP went into some bankruptcy proceedings and lost their ability to use their SEPA mandates for instance), but still, that makes me somewhat wary about who I give my IBAN to. I’d certainly not put it up online for anyone to see.
There’s a very good reason you don’t want the entire country to go off-grid, and that net-metering is a plague that only serves as a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
A large chunk of electric costs are fixed costs. Wiring, power station upkeep, more wiring, transformers, storm damage, etc. Whether you personally use twice or half as much power as the median household does not matter for this. So every net-metered kWh you send on the grid, everybody ELSE ends up ponying up the infrastructure costs for (nevermind the enormous production-side costs of fighting against the duck curve).
A partial solution to make this fairer is therefore to either tax solar installations, use non-net-metering (with digital meters), or make grid connectivity a fixed cost in the electric bill.
For people who are completely off-grid (meaning not only do they not pull any electricity from the grid ever, they are not connected AT ALL and therefore do not incur infrastructure cost on everyone else), it’s not as bad but sill not great because the grid operates on economies of scale. So in (semi-)urban areas it’s still a net loss for society when someone goes off-grid.
I’m sure that there are tools to automate some of the work, but my understanding is that in most cases modelling artists want some kind of control over the generated LODs to ensure they don’t look like shit. Removing vertices on a 3d textured object is not nearly as simple as scaling a 2d picture as far as I understand it. You need to avoid mismapped textures, clipping vertices, the wrong missing details causing obvious pop-in, etc. A triangle in one place can be redundant but another triangle elsewhere may be a critical detail whose removal will be obviously missing from a distance (for example if you model the white house, you really want to keep the small flagpole up top at ALL levels of detail, but automated systems might remove it).
TBF part of the problem is that modern graphics cards mostly can shrug off insane amounts of geometry and badly optimized models, so management must have heard “high prio but not strictly blocking for release” and said “put it in the backlog” (aka “lmao whatever nerd I don’t care then, please focus on Marketing’s feature list happy please and thank you”).
Name any other country with that large of a per-capita healthcare budget. The US has the money, it just all goes into the pockets of insurers. Your issues aren’t budgetary.
The actions of the UN pre-vietnam war are essentially a one-off “oops we were figuring out the rules” type deal. The fact that the UN and the world at large survived the Cold War, happened in large part because all major nuclear powers had veto power, giving them a rare opportunity for open dialogue that doesn’t threaten their sovereignty. Avoiding nuclear war and/or WWIII is the UN’s Prime Directive, everything else is just a bonus. Unfortunately the only way you’ll get Putin, Biden, and Xi Xinping to sit at the same table is by assuring them that no binding decision will be taken, so that is what the UN guarantees by design.
BMW’s is alright IMO. Unorthodox in its layout but it actually works well with the center console knob thingy and has historically been low-latency even back when every other manufacturer had a 2 second delay for every action on their awful touch screens.
Of course even BMW’s system is still going to end up being an overly expensive Android Auto/Apple CarPlay launcher because what people want is Waze & Spotify, not random traffic updates from last week & DAB.
catholic countries are actually more religious now
In South America and Africa, somewhat maybe depending on the country and what you’re comparing to (current day America maybe, Middle Ages catholicism definitely not).
In Western Europe, L. M. F. A. O. I don’t think there’s a single catholic (or formerly catholic, now secular) country in Europe that comes close to being as religious as the US, by any useful metric.
Within Europe we can try to compare Catholicism vs Protestantism, but let’s be real, most of these guys were murdered, converted, or sailed off to the new world centuries ago.
Game dev is not my wheelhouse but from what I gather in the article it is supposed to do some things better but the engine features (HDRP, DOTS, etc.) are still missing important features that led to a low of low-level re-implementations by Paradox…
However AFAIK game engines will not create LODs for you (and certainly won’t prevent you from using overly detailed models) so that part is squarely on Paradox.
At the end of the day a game engine is like any framework, it can make things a lot faster and easier but will not prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t know what it is doing.
That guy hella sexy. But yeah, in general women are WAY more sexualized than men, both in real life and consequently in media. Which is terrible. This is why I am campaigning to sexualize men more, in the name of equality. All movies should go in front of a panel of bisexuals who will deliberate how to best distribute the crop-tops, cheek-pulling pants, and gratuitous nude scenes amongst the characters. In the name of feminism, of course.
Also there are cameras contemporary to some already deadly firearms (late 19th/early 20th century at a guess). You’d think at the very least a musket would work, or more likely a bolt-action rifle.
My headcannon is that wizard society is so fascist that they just find it too horrifyingly distasteful to use muggle technology (even against Voldermort himself), but also it’s why they try so hard to stay hidden because deep down they know they stand no chance against anything resembling a modern muggle army, despite their claims of superiority. I mean, even if Hogwarts itself is protected against technology, an artillery shell is hardly technologically advanced and could be fired from tens of km away.