NVIDIA shareholders hate this post!

Wait, what does the onion do in this scenario? That seems oddly specific.

Having dual-purposed my 3080 for both work (product marketing renders) and gaming, the cost was actually manageable and I’ve since earned back the costs. But it is what we’ve come to. Enthousiast hardware is only really feasible if you have a businesscase for it. If it doesn’t pay for itself, it doesn’t make sense.

Part of what got us into this mess is that GPUs started to become their own business case due to crypto mining. Which added a bunch of RoI value to the cards, which was ultimately reflected in their pricing. Now that consumer mining is pretty much unfeasable, we’re still seeing ridiculous pricing, and the only ways to make money using a GPU require a skillset or twisted morals (scalping).

If I were to buy something for gaming only, $1k definitely does not make any sense at all. And if that part requires at least $800 in other parts to make a full system it’s even less reasonable. Consoles are the other extreme though, and are usually sold at a loss to get you spending money on the platform instead.

On behalf of all of you in this community, fuck the status quo!

Honestly, this is probably a better solution than you might have guessed. Especially when it comes to fake inflation price hikes.

Companies have this way of shit-testing the economy to see what you’re willing to pay. If there isn’t a significant reduction in turnover rates, then say hello to the new prices!

Prime example being NVIDIA with their bogus GPU pricing. Turns out that their shit still sells at $2000 a GPU, and people seem way to quick to accept this as the new reality.

If we all agreed that $2000 GPUs, $3000 laptops and $1500 phones are bullshit, those price points wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately we live in a world where normies are more interested in fancy features and the general public is incapable of estimating specs based on their needs. Which leaves all of us being played for absolute fools by companies manipulating the supply chain.

There is valid criticism as well though. Mostly on the topic of software support duration and scope vs. consumer expectations. But there are also some realiability and hardware failure rate concerns.

It’s important to view those critiques in the context of Fairphone being an underdog company with a relatively small production volume onto which we project the same expectations we have of Apple and Samsung.

Ultimately it is viability of the business case determines how good of a value proposition the Fairphones will be long term. Which is a shame, because Fairphone’s vision is almost exactly what I want in a mobile device. It all leads to this catch-22 situation where the Fairphone is not quite the undisputed best choice it should be, and the only way for them to get there is that everyone pretends it is. It should be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but consumers don’t want to make concessions.

That’s my take on phones in general. It’s a “pick one” situation. You can either have fancy hardware features or you can have freedom in software, not both.

Hopefully my current phone holds out long enough for there to be a compelling choice that somehow has both.

As things are right now, it’ll either be a Fairphone 5 for the freedom it brings, Pixel as a compromise, or Samsung Galaxy for the features.

Looking back on the show years later, lots of stuff it portrayed was actually rather disturbing to the mind of the innocent young child.

10/10 would recommend, but holy shit did it feature some life lessons.

And this creepy walrus… fuck that guy!

Fun fact: The Frisian language (and Dutch by extension) has overlapping origin with both Danish and Swedish.

We can usually grasp a lot of conversational Danish and Swedish because a lot of the words are similar.

From a Dutch perspective, there’s always 5 new Flemmish words to memorize. You’d think we speak the same language, but we really don’t.

In some ways, Flemmish is more Dutch than the language anyone from the Netherlands speaks. Which seems especially true when it comes to loan-words from French, which some of you seem to avoid at all costs.

All of this leads to interesting situations where any conversation with our southern neighbours has a risk of needing a mental double take to make sure we derived the right meaning from your fancy words.

One example of how crazy things can get is the word for roundabout. The Dutch will generally refer such traffic control measures as rotonde, which is a French bastardization. The Flemmish, in turn, sometimes refer to them as rondpunt. …which the French seem to have adopted when they say rond-point.

The French definition of rotonde is actually from architecture. Where it is used for dome-shaped constructions, and is originally derived from the Latin rotondus, which just means “round”. Conclusion: Dutch is a weird language.

I usually associate yoink with playfully stealing something, whereas graaien in this context refers more to behaviour seen in landlords and high level executives. You know, the kinds of people that are so far up their shareholder’s butts that they can’t see the damage they’re causing.

Let’s just reserve yoink for stealing each other’s hoodies and similar endearing behaviour.

And it leads to a neverending stream of newly invented hype words.

We even have a yearly word of the year tradition, where the organisation behind our most famous dictionary picks one of these newly invented words based on coverage in media.

Last year’s word was “graaiflatie”, a combination between “graaien” (no direct translation, means to grab, but in a greedy way), and “inflatie” (inflation).

Transcoder here, if you’re looking to leverage quality/file size benefits of your codec, you don’t encode with hardware.

As a rule of fist hardware encoding is better served for streaming purposes where you need to crush a raw 1080p or 1440p stream into something that’s actually a sensible bandwith as fast as possible, especially if you’re streaming 60fps because your algorithm has a time limit of 16ms per frame.

If file size with preservation of quality is something you care about, you encode as slowly and thouroughly as you can, which is why x264 on your CPU will outperform encoders like NVENC any time.

When it comes to HEVC, software encoding is only really worth it if you have the time to spare, because x265 takes between 3x and 5x as long as encoding the same footage through x264, with a 15-20% smaller file size at best. It is also more intensive to decode, which is why you still see many files with a H.264 codec.

Excellent analysis. Especially this part:

It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.

Early cookie banners were a bad experience but they were manageable. But now thing have transitioned into content-blocking modals, dark patterns, forced individual consent/rejection for each and every one of the 943 partners they’re selling your data to, sites that refuse to serve content if you reject tracking and other ways to frustrate the end user.

I’m done with every piece of shit predatory actor inventing their own way of malicious compliance with the GDPR. You either implement the user-friendly consent API or you get no more tracking at all. Paywall your shit for all I care, at least then you’ll have a sustainable business model.

Definitely 100% done with the resistance era, and any canon material that comes after it.

Kinda done with the clone wars era stuff, but at least there are still some niche avenues left unexplored.

Also definitely done with anything rule of two. The idea of it has ruined any chances of writing actually interesting dark side characters, because you’ll always see the same cycle of student-master power struggle.

It’s about time sith ideology was portrayed for what it is actually supposed to be, and not just “bad guys with red lightsabers”. Curious what this show will bring, but not quite convinced yet. Only thing that will definitely get that right is a truthful, both-sides, Old Republic era show covering all different factions of interest without presenting any one as morally superior.

Slugs to be you then, I guess. :P

In all seriousness, the graph shows different species as fraction of total uses recorded. Since the paper is mostly about mice, and behavioural differences under different circumstances, it being unfair to the slugs is probably not such a big deal here.

Blender can help with lots of aspects in the game development workflow.

From simple low-poly modeling and texturing, to 3D sculpting highly detailed models, to procedurally generating geometry for massive worlds, animating game characters, baking different texture maps and much more.

If you can handle some python you can even automate pretty much anything the software can do, and build your own plugins.

There are tons of tutorials on youtube on how to make game assets and I would recommend Grant Abitt’s stuff when it comes to game development workflows.

Definitely try Blender, you’ll find it is probably all you will ever need to make assets for your game.

Nice job! Lighting looks really good!

Some friendly advice for improving the render quality even further: Be mindful of your UV’s and seams. Especially wood grain is particularly tricky to do well. This particular render works well when glancing at a distance, but it starts to fall apart when you zoom in on the details.

You did a really good job of faking the wool like material for the seat. I know from experience rendering fuzzy cloth materials that there isn’t an easy way to make them from scratch. Especially felt and wool are a bitch to make realistic shaders for. If you want realism for those, you have to simulate the actual material to some degree, which means diving into the rabbit hole that is geometry nodes.

For the floor and the wall materials: Imperfections are your best friend when aiming for realism. Mixing in different texture maps to add subtle stains, dust, rust, scratches and other kinds of damage can really help sell the illusion of real concrete or plaster. And while not really relevant when mimicking a near-perfect photo, adding subtle fingerprints, specks of dust/lint or stains to a reflective surface sometimes makes for a better render.

But most important of all: Remember that rendering things is always more art than science. There are multiple ways to achieve different effects and learning all the tricks by experimenting is going to really up your game. Keep going!

If someone has you wondering if they’re compensating for something, it’s probably true.

You’re absolutely right, it’s seats, not percentage of votes.

Still a big increase from the current 23.5% of votes mandate netting them 37 seats.

I work in IT, and different definitions of what SaaS means are starting to wreak real havoc on the architecture as a whole.

We are better served just quitting the acronyms and taking the time to talk about a more detailed description of what the service actually adds in terms of value.

Amazon Prime is a subscription for shipping, video streaming, gaming benefits and more. Since software is not the primary goal, but a means of delivery for these other services, I will not consider Amazon Prime SaaS.