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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Well written.

    I think an important concept to introduce is Pulse Width Modulation, or PWM for short.

    Normal AC Power coming out of wall looks like a sine wave, in that it smoothly cycles between +110/240V and -110/240V. This means that 50% of the time the voltage is positive and 50% of the time the voltage is negative.

    PWM usually deals with signals which are either entirely on or off, with no transiton between them. This way, you can vary the amount of “power” delivered by varying how much of the time the signal is on and how much of the time it’s off.

    Dimmers usually modify the sine way in a way that tries to accomplish the same thing, by chopping up the signal to make the effective “on” time be shorter than 50%.

    With non-dimmable LEDs, this messes with the AC to DC circuitry in the lamp in the way slazer2au says, because the lamp doesn’t retain enough power between two on-cycles to stay on.


  • The verticality is absolutely the best part. My biggest gripe with Elden Rings world is that it’s an “open world” game in kind of the same way Ubi games are. Traversal is largely trivial, so you stop paying attention to the map after you’ve reached major areas.

    In my opinion, Dark Souls I is also an open world game, but instead of a 2D map all the zones are tangled up together in a confusing but interesting web.

    Shadow of the Erdtree brought some of that back by having zones stacked on top of each other to a much heavier degree than the base game, while also segmenting off geographically close regions.

    I wanted to be a level designer for a lot of years, so this is admittedly a bit of a soft spot for me, but I absolutely loved having the game world come at you as as a challenge, almost a character to be fought and bested, outside the legacy dungeons.











  • That’s the important bit that everybody is missing:

    Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model

    Clicking through to the paywalled article, the headlines reads as follows:

    Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in Late 2025.

    I am as unoptimistic on the future of VR as everybody else here, but can we please leave the nuance in? Apple are not turning the key on VR, at least not yet, they are simply doing the predicable thing that everybody said their would: Release a VR headset that isn’t targeted at developers only.


  • Personally I enjoyed both the storyline and characters in BG3, but I also highly recommend Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

    The gameplay is tighter, owing to a more mechanically sound system (Pathfinder 1e versus D&D 5e), but also not as “free” as BG3. It’s a lot more difficult, but it scales better too.

    With that out of the way, both the story and the characters are absolutely excellent. The game is an adaptation of the official Pathfinder adventure path of the same name published by Paizo. For the uninitiated, Paizo started out as the team within Wizards of the Coast that wrote and designed adventure modules. Wizards fired them, so they set up their own shop to keep writing kickass d&d campaigns.

    Wrath of the Righeous is no exception. The scope is enormous, and you really get that classic journey from lowly adventurer to god-killing hero. The characters are excellent and many, both in the party and supporting cast. I loved BG3, but I must admit that I find the villains and plot more compelling in Wrath.