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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

    Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that’s meant to be used by humans.

    I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn’t arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them “if you don’t like the UI use another tool”.


  • And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

    You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

    I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

    EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.






  • I recently played Metro Exodus and I felt like it was a drag at the beginning of the game instead. It was one of the few times in my life in which 1 hour into the game I was so bored I was googling whether the game would eventually get going and become fun. The story “twist” at the beginning felt extremely rushed and out of nowhere and it sort of put me off. But as the game got going I got very into it and I was the one “dragging” it by doing every secondary objective.


  • I’ve been playing Cities Skylines a lot - got pulled back in with all the talk about the new one - and also Going Under.

    Going Under is one of those games I bought a while ago because it seemed fun, played for a bit, got my ass kicked more than what I was used to with roguelites and stopped for a while. I started playing it again recently and think it finally made sense to me. Looking back, I probably wasn’t paying much attention to the game the first time I tried it because I didn’t understand there was an indication for weapon damage on different weapons - which made weapon choice feel random - and I also didn’t understand how the mentor system worked - which is a big part of the strategy of the game. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it now, though.


  • I tried to play the original System Shock two/three years ago but gave up at a stage that felt very close to the end. I basically had a save at a weird spot, when I was low on ammo and anything else useful, right between two complicated rooms. I reloaded a ton of times and always died trying to go forwards or backwards before giving up.

    Anyway, would you recommend System Shock Remaster for someone who likely almost completed the original one, gave up, but still liked it overall? Or is there something shockingly different about the original’s ending I’ll be missing?


  • But people are definitely less productive working from home

    How so? I personally think it’s a somewhat personal matter, but people who are less productive are home seem to be people who can’t focus in general. I am far more productive working from home, mostly because I don’t get distracted by others. I have colleagues who spend hours bantering only to then stay in the company until later to compensate for the banter - I’d rather get my work done so I can end my day on time and go home do the fun stuff. But I do have colleagues who say they get distracted easily when working at home and they’d rather work at the office.

    Overall though, my company used to be very against working from home, but after the period of mandatory work from home, management admitted overall productivity had increased. They still insist people should come to the office every now and then to maintain the “friendly” environment the company is supposed to have, though, which is fair I guess.



  • While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.

    I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.

    Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.



  • I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

    As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.



  • It’s not pedantry, it’s just that RAID and instant data duplication or synchronization aren’t meant to protect you from many of the situations in which you would need a backup. If a drive fails, you can restore the information from wherever you duplicated the data to. If, however, your data is corrupted somehow, the corruption is just duplicated over and you have no way to restore the data to a state before the corruption happened. If you accidentally delete files you didn’t want to delete, the deletion is replicated over and, again, no way to restore them. RAID wasn’t built to solve the problems a backup tries to solve.


  • I like writing things by hand. I don’t do it because of the supposed brain activation, but I genuinely like the feeling of writing. That’s most of it, honestly.

    On a more practical note, I find that I’d rather have more organized information in electronic format, but writing by hand is much simpler for quick notes - so I’ll usually jot down stuff I need to last a few days, meeting notes and such, and I might type those things out in a tidier manner if I feel like the information warrants it, if it’s something I might need to come back to in a few months or years.

    While yes, I technically do type faster than I write by hand, when I’m taking notes of something, I usually mix sentences with quick sketches and diagrams - and I can do that much faster by hand than using some sketching software.