• 0 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle



  • Reminds me of an early application of AI where scientists were training an AI to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog. It got really good at it in the training data, but it wasn’t working correctly in actual application. So they got the AI to give them a heatmap of which pixels it was using more than any other to determine if a canine is a dog or a wolf and they discovered that the AI wasn’t even looking at the animal, it was looking at the surrounding environment. If there was snow on the ground, it said “wolf”, otherwise it said “dog”.


  • It’s weird, but I suspect that Act 2 and Act 3 were swapped originally. It makes more sense to have Act 2 be where you go to Baldur’s Gate, learn more about your companions, resolve their personal stories, explore a large open map, and THEN move on to the big confrontation against the Absolute at the tower.

    From a story perspective it’s really weird how you confront the Absolute and then go on to sort of aimlessly do all that other stuff in Baldur’s Gate. It makes more sense if the story acts are swapped, imo.





  • LTS just means Long Term Support in case you weren’t aware. It means no new development is happening, but security exploits will be patched as soon as they arise.

    If you just want stability, LTS is the way to go. If you want all the cutting edge bells and whistles and are okay with potentially some instability (but probably not much) then use the latest version.

    If your device isn’t connected to the internet during general use then I wouldn’t worry too much about updating anything. Security fixes aren’t important if there’s no way to connect to your device.



  • Looks like an article paid for by Epic.

    Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:

    My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

    There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.

    As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

    Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

    They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.



  • I’m not super familiar with VLC but I asked a chatbot, does this help at all?

    1. Open your video with VLC.
    2. Navigate to the scene that you want to capture. You can use VLC’s frame-by-frame feature to access a specific frame in your video.
    3. Capture the screenshot by pressing Shift+S (Windows and Linux) or Command+Alt+S (Mac).
    4. Alternatively, from VLC’s menu bar, select Video > Take Snapshot.
    
    If you’d like to use advanced controls to capture the screenshot, then from VLC’s menu bar, select View > Advanced Controls to enable those controls. Then, in VLC’s bottom-left corner, click the camera icon to take a snapshot1.
    
    Your screenshot is now captured and saved in a folder on your computer. The default location for the screenshots is as follows:
    
    1. Windows: C:\\Users\\username\\Pictures
    2. Mac: Desktop/
    3. Linux: ~/Pictures
    
    If you’d like to change where VLC stores your screenshots, or you’d like to change the file format, then select Tools > Preferences from VLC’s menu bar. On the “Simple Preferences” window that opens, select the “Video” tab. To change the default screenshot directory, then in the “Video Snapshots” section, click “Browse” next to “Directory.” Then, choose the new folder that you want to set as the default for your screenshots. If you’d like to use a different image format (the default is PNG) for your snapshots, then click the “Format” drop-down menu and choose a new format. Your options include PNG, JPG, and TIFF. After you’ve made the changes, at the bottom of the “Simple Preferences” window, click “Save” to save your changes.