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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

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  • Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you’re going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you’ll never hear the end of “gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol.”

    Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you’re not loading just one file, you’re loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you’ll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.

    And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn’t sound outlandish these days.



  • Let people enjoy things and set your games difficulty setting to where you have the most fun, now sit down.

    So install the mod and set your difficulty where you like it, while the rest of us don’t need to deal with any of that git gud shit.

    I have nothing against mods like that existing. I’m very much against having an official DLC that enforces it as the new default, which was the implication of your first post.




  • No. Just pointing out that a collision in LEO physically cannot create a situation where we’re locked in on Earth for more than a decade or two. The orbits will still have a perigee in LEO. They will still decay. The debris will still burn up eventually. Kessler syndrome is impossible in LEO. And in higher, larger volume orbits, it’s overblown, because we don’t even have enough mass there to create a notable debris field to lock ourselves in with.

    A Kessler cascade is one of those things that people read about and it sounds really scary and plausible and happening, like, in a week cause Starlink exists. And that’s where the thought process stops and the Chicken Little everyone has in their brain takes over.




  • My local PC hardware store offers assembly and setup services for ~20€. Includes installing and updating the OS and drivers, as well as stress testing to verify that the components perform as expected. More places should offer that option, really. Especially if they also sell pre-built PCs that are assembled in-house.






  • The Glenn’s first stage can hover. Even nearly empty, the booster is heavy enough and the BE-4 can throttle low enough that it doesn’t need to do a suicide burn. Instead, and as they just demonstrated, it can just gently lower itself down on the deck.

    Takes more prop to do so, but for a second attempt, the decision to play it safe was perfectly sound. It’s practically guaranteed that they’ll dial the margins in with more flights. This might be the softest landing that a New Glenn ever experiences.



  • I don’t understand why the exclusivity is a factor, but that doesn’t mean you’re somehow wrong to have that mindset. My own mindset just doesn’t jive with that idea.

    To draw more parallels between welding and painting, the process may be more accessible now, but you can still make your creations distinctly yours. A master of a craft can leave their mark on even the simplest expressions of their skill. Perhaps that’s an angle to take? Develop your own style and expression of your skill. Make the weld itself a part of the beauty of what you’ve created, not just there to hold it together. While others can make a basic weld with little practice, few if any can make a weld like yours. The stroke of the brush can be just as much a part of the art as the paint it lays down. Maybe getting to that level of skill is enough of a challenge to reignite your enjoyment.

    In any case, I do hope you find that spark again.


  • Way you talk about it, I get the impression that you’re taking the class mostly for your own fulfillment, not to get a solid-paying job in the industry. If that’s the case, what does it matter if laser welding is the new hotness? Laser welding might be “easier” for a rookie, but does that make your growing skill at TIG welding irrelevant? I wouldn’t say so. TIG is still a skill that not many have. Is the classical painter’s skill and the beauty of their work reduced by that of the digital artist?