• 2 Posts
  • 275 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
cake
Cake day: May 31st, 2020

help-circle
  • Good question. My best guess is that the buttons have become less important, because:

    • they try to auto-detect where a signal comes,
    • they have better defaults, so you don’t really need to change settings, and
    • even monitor brightness can partially be controlled by the OS.

    But yeah, I got a new monitor at work, and instead of buttons, it has a joystick on the backside. Now the monitor’s menu pops up every so often, I’m guessing because something shook the joystick just enough to trigger it.
    When I saw that joystick for the first time, I wondered how long it’ll take before it breaks, but it’s broken on day 1, so that’s great. 🫠







  • I’m weirdly deeply invested, like I’ve got decent headphones, I’ve composed songs before, I’ve played two instruments, and like someone else posted, I’ve also implemented my own music player program.

    But man, I struggle with feeling it as art. I don’t know, if that’s a case of music-maker being snobby about everyone else’s music, while being too critical of their own music. Maybe my expectations are just too high.
    Like, I’m trying to create lyric-less music where I feel a meaning. And at times, I’m amazed that I can evoke the sense of snowfall. But at many other times, it just sounds paperthin to me, and I still haven’t managed to really portray a deeper meaning.

    Maybe I’m just frustrated, because poems come more naturally to me (and yes, I am dense for not adding lyrics to my songs 🫠).




  • I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.

    Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
    For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
    Lighting without raytracing involves tons of smokes and mirrors hacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
    So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.

    Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…





  • The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:

    allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

    It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

    It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

    And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
    Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.







  • I’ve seen it argued that the best way to create lightweight software is to give devs old hardware to develop on.

    Which, yeah, I can see that. The problem is that as a dev, you might have some generic best practices in your head while coding, but beyond that, you don’t really concern yourself with performance until it becomes an issue. And on new hardware, you won’t notice the slowness until it’s already pretty bad for those on older hardware.

    But then, as the others said, there’s little incentive to actually give devs old hardware. In particular, it costs a lot of money to have your devs waiting for compilation on older hardware…