For anyone else that followed the "buy a device" link on the docs page, and found yourself on the (ended) Kickstarter page, editing the URL to https://usetrmnl.com/ works :)
(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)
I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!
It's not Rodin, but the game Horizon: Forbidden West has a segment where you get to view + interact with renderings of some paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've seen some of these in person at a museum in San Francisco, but somehow the experience was more meaningful in the game, despite having comparative potato quality compared to real life. I think what made the difference was that in the game, each painting had several lines of dialogue about what the painting represented, or elements thereof represented, about what was going on when the artist created it, etc, and the dialogue choices included questions I would never have thought to ask about in person.
I know that museums have virtual tours that have ausio descriptions like that about the art pieces, but I've never managed to take advantage of them. Can you imagine being able to take a high-detail virtual tour (even if not in VR) of a museum like the one in the article, or the Louvre, where you could spend as long as you want looking at every painting, zoom in at details like brushwork or how the light hits it, and have an expanding set of accessible narration (or readable text) about each item?
> I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!
Outside of virtual tours, death match in a museum would be fun too. It might be cool to see where popular works of art end up in post-apocalyptic/future settings too.
Even less popular artworks could help add to the art that appears in video games. It can help cut down on the costs of using stock images or creating "generic" art in-house and hopefully create more impressive and immersive environments.
I don't know why, but I could NOT get into it. I read what felt like 2/3 or 3/4 of the first book, and still felt like I had no clue what was going on, and it felt like a difficult slog (for reasons I don't understand), much like how the Silmarillion felt to me. I wish I had enjoyed it, because every review or bit of spoilers I've seen about it sounds like a fantastic story, so I don't understand why it was so unenjoyable to read.
Meanwhile I'll read any chapter of a Neal Stephenson book and feel the comfort of a tea and warm blanket on an (imaginary) dreary day, and never care about the overall plot, and only feel remotely bad about not finishing the book.
No that's perfectly understandable! I actually didn't like the first book either tbh. But the second book and especially the third book were chef's kiss
Good grief, Gwern is a treasure. Every time I stumble across a link to something they've written, it's chock-full of side quest links to things that are _absolutely amazing_. I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI, as well as showcasing all sorts of stuff.
"Thank you for making such awesome stuff" seems so pedestrian of a reaction. This is like looking at a fractal cathedral made by one person, where every time I look at it it's a hologram of something amazing and beautiful that I didn't even know was possible.
> I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI
I'm very pleased to read that! I pushed Achmiz to implement that - "can we make all the dropcaps instances popup the https://gwern.net/dropcap page? "uh, probably, but why would you want to do that?" "because someone might be interested in one of the dropcaps and hover over it and otherwise they'll never know!" - and this is the first I've seen anyone mention it, but it sounds like it worked. It is one of the many touches few will ever notice, but I hope the ones who do will love it.
I have a shell alias that I use sometimes when running long-running test suites locally, or doing some long task that is blocking my work (building Docker images, installing libraries). It echoes something for the shell, shows a success/failure image in the terminal, and playes an audio clip (loud and annoying ;)) when tests pass. The only way I could make it better would be to play a sad trombone on failure:
Thanks for linking this! I also learned that support for `\p{}` syntax isn't supported in the Python `re` library, and they recommend the api-compatible `regex` library, which does have support for that.
2.5 million users : 24 support staff
1 billion users : 9600 support staff
If it scales linearly, that's about 10k support per billion users. I was going to say that a 10,000 person department for handling customer support sounds like it doesn't scale, but maybe I'm wrong, given that that is only about 5% of google's headcount.
Also in terms of costs: if those support staff cost 100 grand a year in salary and other costs, staffing the 2.5M-user company with those 24 support crew 24/7 (3 shifts, let's pretend it's equally busy at 3AM) results in some 25 cents per month per user that need to be priced into the product. The transaction fees on a monthly billing system are likely higher than that of a skilled support team if this is a representative scale for the industry
I frankly doubt the numbers, surely it costs more than this for an average company?
This is only tangentially related, but have you played the video game "Control"? That and Alan Wake (both from Remedy) seem to relate very well with the SCP genre.
Will I forget holding my first child?
Will I have forgotten cuddling up in my mom’s lap?
Will I miss having forgotten these things?
If I can still remember all those moments ... will I still be human in any sense?
I've already forgotten most of those things, aside from a few fleeting glimpses. I absolutely miss being able to remember details about things like childhood, middle school, the first months of my kids' lives, the smell of their hair etc. But life is still rewarding, my kids and family bring me endless joy _right now_, and I don't feel any less human.
If I were able to live another hundred years, I am sure I'd forget things from my time now, forget even more details about my early life, but would still have plenty of things to keep me interested in continuing to live. There are such an abundance of things I can think of that would be worth spending decades mastering, each of which are less important than my current needs, and which I generally have discarded because "it's too late by now...". Swordfighting, glass blowing, painting, creating music, etc. Imagine being able to find something new and interesting, and being able to devote forty or fifty years to developing a (current) lifetime's level of expertise in it. That sounds like science fiction to me, but if such were possible, I'd pick it every time over not having the opportunity.
Will I still be human in any sense?
I feel like we would redefine what "human" means to include our new selves. I can't imagine not feeling human, even if it is Very Far from my current conceptualization of humanity.
My LG refrigerator had similarly priced replacement parts for the removable shelves in the doors, several of which cracked. It was bonkers. Is this partly because the demand for these specific parts is relatively low?
It's entirely because the demand for replacement parts cannibalizes the demand for new refrigerators. If they can sell you a plastic shelf for $100 with a 99% margin, for them that's like selling you half a refrigerator.
Just wait until your model has been long discontinued but the remaining replacement parts have been sitting on the shelf experiencing every across-the-board price increase for years.
When prices started out not just expensive but beyond that overpriced to boot.
(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)
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