• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2024

help-circle
  • I dunno, I think you may be underestimating ARM here. I’ve heard that the overhead from translating the machine code is a lot lower than you might think, because so much X86 code is optimized down to a RISC-like subset of the instruction set already. And if that overhead isn’t too daunting in the common cases, the more robust power management on the ARM side of the chip market might be able to make up the difference in a handheld environment for most users. Obviously it’s a huge amount of work to nail the software, and it would be on top of the work they were already doing on Linux, so I’m not saying it’ll definitely be in the next iteration, but I could definitely imagine it happening eventually.



  • It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

    Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.




  • Sound doesn’t travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn’t dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren’t as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.



  • “No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”

    “Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”

    “Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”

    “Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”

    “At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”

    “There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”

    “You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”

    “The author himself said jackets don’t work.”

    “He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”

    “Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”

    “Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”

    “BRAAAAIINSSS…”

    “You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”

    “Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”

    “That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”

    “Bye Mom, love you…ow!”

    “She just bit you, didn’t she.”

    “Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”









  • Yeah, I’ve thought about this, but I think you need more than one degree of freedom for the chair to help with motion sickness. Like, if your character is in a car and accelerates, you need to tilt (pitch) backwards a bit, to emulate the way the acceleration pushes you back into your seat on the car (well, really it’s the corresponding motion in the inner ear we need to worry about, but a tilt is the correct solution for both). When you go around a corner, it needs to tilt (roll) sideways a bit, to match the feeling of being pulled to the outside of the turn by centrifugal force. Etc. Those are the forces our inner ears are expecting, and without those, there’s still a mismatch. And even with the hardware to do those movements, you need software to calculate the right motions ahead of time so you can reach the right positions in time to match the visuals, which is also quite difficult, and makes it pretty hard to picture doing this as a peripheral rather than as an integrated system. And the cost would be prohibitive.

    Honestly I think we may not get this until we can fake it all with electrical signals to the brain, which is quite a long way off.


  • If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”

    Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.