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On 6/19/2021 at 5:36 AM, Im_Unemployed said:

Just a friendly reminder that powershell and windblows should burn in hell. 

I sat down to write a script to bulk rename my Plex folders. Should have taken five minutes but I got stuck for an hour because of a gotcha surrounding -Path and

-LiteralPath. On Create-Item the former works perfectly, but not on Rename-Item you might as well tear your hair out. 

 

Thank God for cygwin/WSL

On 8/9/2021 at 1:29 PM, Rezalon said:

Bumping this. The clip of the actual outtake appears to be missing.

Pretty sure it's because Youtube privated all unlisted videos from before 2017.

Moved this to the machinima subforum (that's what I'm assuming this relates to).

No

I'm going to have to say System Shock 2, hands down (though System Shock's not too far off, I haven't completed it yet). The way the game handles the cyberpunk aesthetic is amazing, and so is the soundtrack (and I needn't mention the sound design[!]). Though at its core, it's a survival horror game, there's a good progression in that you get to be just that more imposing by the end. Sure, the game does get pretty tough, especially in Engineering, but that just makes it that much more worthwhile. Being an immersive sim, there are also lots of gameplay systems that all come together to form a great game.

I guess the “nah” in the ending is kind of a mismatch, but I like it for what it really is — giving SHODAN the middle finger.

5 hours ago, evatron said:

what was that example quake 2 game with lip sync ross used?

Not a game, a machinima:

It's pretty good.

Glad to have you back.

On 12/17/2020 at 2:01 PM, TheGmodNugget said:

3: The ability for digital media being pirated will skyrocket. I don't know if companies know this but there are things called capture cards, or screen recording software like Bandicam, OBS, etc. Not only will the services lose income from subscriptions but the studios will likely go bankrupt cause they have no budget anymore.

Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a service problem, and I think that applies to traditional media all the same. If the product is only available physically and has aggressive copy-protection, it's no wonder that piracy is the preferred option for many. Those kinds of restrictions only serve to restrict the potential audience. The only solution, then, is to provide a more valuable service, as Steam has been doing very successfully.

Election results at the time of posting (via The Wall Street Journal):

On 11/4/2020 at 11:13 AM, Eshanas said:

And as always 100,000,000 Americans decided to not vote this year, at all. Neither candidate has more than 70 million votes, out of an electorate in the 240,000,000 range. Thankfully however it does seem third parties were absolutely trashed, as they should be in this winner-take-all system.

Biden now has over 70 million votes, as shown on the image above.

…yeah, I'm not exactly seeing how he “lost his passion”. I think of all the episodes, Black Future ’88 and the Halloween sampler packs are my least favourite since there wasn’t much material for Ross to play off. The main thing I like about the videos is how smoothly he is able to go onto tangents, saying things no-one else has about the game he’s covering. I don’t think that has changed any. I guess his style has changed—just compare how much less energy he has in the oldest episodes—but not necessarily for the worse.

On 10/21/2020 at 1:33 AM, LegacyLeXSton said:

HI Accursed Farms Community, I'm new here and i was wondering if I will be able to get my hands and permission to use
this map as seen in Freeman's Mind 2: Episode 9 at the back of the barn house 2 houses constructed there.
i'm currently making a map and i would like to use that map for my jumbo map, that i'm making, thanks!

Best to probably send him an email about that: accursedfarms.com/contact

28 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

idk, beyond the fact that, the link alone screams, SHADY MALWARE SCAM, you have two big problems with this approach

 

1. nobody is going to use an external service just to watch closed captions, unless they are desperate, or deaf

2. that website is going to die one day, so bye bye captions, again

The website isn't exactly the best design-wise, I admit. I'd actually like to see it be open sourced, too. As you said, some contingency plan is definitely needed, such as publishing archives of their database (I'll ask them about that and if it could be open sourced). Anyway, all of your criticism is valid, but I do have hope in the project being improved on.

5 hours ago, themadprogramer said:

A more long term solution is likely the http://youtubexternalcc.netlify.app/ project, which aims to host captions externally for free. Downside is that they don't automatically show up on YouTube, but neither do Amara's captions, requiring the uploader to add the files themselves.

 

As it so happens, I am compiling a more thorough list of resources called the "YouTube Captioner's Toolkit" where you can find out more. Spread the word!

That's great news! When I posted that, I was actually considering creating something like youtubexternalcc, but real life got in the way. I'm glad people have put in the effort for supporting community contributions, and I'll definitely be spreading the word.

Nobody's going to be missing Zenimax, but consolidation still sucks.

1 hour ago, ScumCoder said:

No need for that, I have the file.

 

 

The only thing I need is an announce URL.

The torrents you linked have no such URL; does that mean you just used DHT to seed them?

They're both trackerless torrents (DHT with PEX), yeah.

3 hours ago, ThatOneDraffan said:

Bumping an old post here, I would be interested if anyone happens to still have that higher-quality version on the episode on the system. I like to backup great shows to my own media server and a source file would be very desirable. I'd also be willing to seed a torrent of the files indefinitely (as long as my personal server is up, which I plan to keep for as long as possible).

I could ask Ross to re-upload it, actually. For now, you should seed these:

Freeman's Mind 1 Torrent

Here's the option for that:

44 minutes ago, Generic-User said:

Regarding the privacy concerns. usually most forums I've seen that have a "who's online" thing at the bottom also tend to have an option to just list you as a hidden user when you log in.

Also an option here, "Sign in anonymously". I've decided to enable it now since it appears most people want it. (Those who don't can voice their disapproval, I guess.)

There is a "Who's Online" feature I could have added to the footer of the forums if the people want it (probably up for @Luis and the other mods to decide, though). Alternatively you could see accursedfarms.com/online for the same thing.

You brought up that maybe, if we have starships, we could deal with infinite growth (we could just send some von Neumann probes to do our bidding for us, sure). Though that implies that the universe has infinite matter, which we don’t know for certain.

Assuming that isn’t the case and the universe is finite, I’d like to mention the game Universal Paperclips (also an article on it). Now, the presentation isn’t anything to write home about, but considering that it is an incremental game (the main draw is watching the numbers go up), the gameplay loop gives you some grasp on the end-game of infinite growth. In the game, you’re an AI making paperclips. You start off making just a few, then it spirals into becoming the main manufacturer of paperclips, placating humanity, and then terminating them to make way for more paperclips. Then you start building spaceships, all the while you attain an unthinkable number of paperclips, thanks to exponential growth. After a while, 100% of the universe is paperclips, and that’s it. It isn’t like you have any other goals, after all.

If you’re looking for another first contact story with aliens who are truly alien, you should read Peter Watts’s Blindsight. It features:

• Many-legged anaerobic aliens who inhabit the alien spaceship and are way smarter than us (their anatomy partly informed by the author being a marine biologist)
• Exploration of consciousness—something the book says was an evolutionary fluke—and our understanding of it (blindsight plays a role, so does the Chinese room)
• Scientifically plausible vampires (and the sociopolitical ramifications of resurrecting them in late 21st century society)
• Bleakness regarding the state of humanity
• And more!

I read it through just a few weeks ago, and I truly think it deserves all the praise it gets. The author even released it in PDF, EPUB, and HTML format on his website, so there’s really no excuse not to read it.

@CharlieHadron Sorry to hear that, can you DM me about it (preferrably with some proof because I don’t know if you’re a dog)? (Never mind, I can message you all the same.) Merging the accounts is perfectly doable.

That's terrible – especially for the foreign YouTubers who relied on it, their audiences no doubt being crippled by this. YouTube’s tools weren’t very good, but they were better than nothing. At least it’s a good thing this forum exists (YouTube can’t take that away from us).

YouTube appears to be promoting Amara as an alternative for community subtitles (source):

Quote

We are working with Amara to offer YouTube Creators a comprehensive alternative to our Community Contribution feature, which enables crowd sourced captions. 

 

Amara has extensive experience working with creators to crowd-source captions and translations for their content and has built a streamlined integration with the YouTube platform that enables real-time updates to creator videos.

 

YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara Community for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days (more details coming soon). We hope this helps support Creators during this transition, as well as benefit those who have been contributing captions (as this is a crowd sourced option). Creators who don’t qualify for the subsidy are still able and encouraged to use Amara’s tools, including their free subtitle editor.

(The privilege of having community subtitles now appears to cost the creator $12 per month.)

Really, it shouldn’t be too hard just to let another user other than the creator upload subtitles. Unfortunately, that’s impossible, so here we are. It might be possible to use the API for that purpose, though that might just be too much effort. Do let me know if that is possible in any way.

That does sound exactly like the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" phrase to me, though that may be a bit outdated now. Also, the Linux kernel is GPLv2, so there's only so much they could do. That only becomes a problem with permissive licenses, e.g. MIT (like FreeBSD has). I don't think changing the kernel outright would be very feasible for consumer builds of Windows, since backwards compatability is still extremely important for Microsoft (feel free to prove me wrong, however; they did want to change the ecosystem with UWP).

I hope to have this site archived, should something of that nature happen. (Memento mori.)

3 hours ago, Isaiah said:

For example, in your video you complained about small GUI elements that demand too much precision from the user and recommended a kind of runway vs helipad approach, reasoning that "the less precise you need to be the faster you our". Okay, fair enough. But here in the forums you complain about increased travel distances being inefficient, which your very own "runway" concept would actually produce. The very mouse gestures you love being the perfect example of that.

If we are considering the "runway vs helipad approach", then Fitts's law is something that is very important. It provides a fundamental model of UX interaction and states that "the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." It can easily be used to justify some of Ross's ideas, such as pie menus and hot corners (the browser shortcut he showed).

I would argue that the efficiency of mouse gestures is very dependent on their design. For one, they are able to match the user's actual motions to what they intend to motion. They also need to be considered in terms of (a) what are the most commonly used gestures and (b) what are the easiest gestures to motion. I think that where mouse gestures tend to suffer is in discoverability (like CLI commands), but demanding too much precision I think is a non-issue in a well thought-out system.

3 hours ago, Isaiah said:

But for the sake of argument let's assume for a moment that greater travel distances are less efficient. Well with the alt-tab method I mentioned you instantly see all open app names at once with very helpful preview images, which is an objectively faster way to identify them than your method of moving the cursor all the way down to the bottom of the screen and across each icon to see the name of each, one at a time. And there displayed in the center of the screen closer to where the cursor most likely already is. And finally you only have to move your cursor to the exact app you want once identified. Meaning the alt-tab method is faster either way because it requires less travel distance and precision overall.

An interesting result of Fitts's law is that the edges of computer monitors can be considered to have infinite width (that also goes for double with corners, where the edges effectively collide and have infinite dimensions). So effectively, the dock shortcuts are infinitely tall because they do not require a deceleration phase.  This means that one can be very efficient with orienting their mouse to the given application and opening it. The edges, along with the corners, are your most valuable real estate.

Anecdotally I would also like to add that I don't ever use the Alt-Tab menu in conjunction with the mouse, rather I use it one-dimensionally with the keyboard, mainly because that would require me to (a) hold down Alt-Tab and release Tab, (b) look at the previews and identify what I want, and (c) orient my mouse to the application and press the button to open it. That is much more complicated than just pressing Alt-Tab however many times until I see the application I want.

Recommended reading on Fitts's law:

Visualizing Fitts's Law — A good introduction

When You Shouldn’t Use Fitts's Law To Measure User Experience — Some pitfalls and possible solutions

A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts — This article uses examples to give you a great understanding of the underlying concepts