Not sure if “bands” is necessarily the right word here. Most of the artists are solo producers, and them touching anything acoustic for their music is a rare sight these days.

There’s definitely still a huge scene out there for the Early Hardcore stuff, with most of the crowd going into their 40’s now. And a lot of the originals are still performing to this day. Most of the scene is concentrated around the Netherlands though, as loud, obnoxious music is definitely in our collective DNA. But we are seeing increasing amounts of tourists traveling from far away just to be part of the larger events like Thunderdome, Masters of Hardcore, Ground Zero, Defqon.1, Dominator and so on.

Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?

I don’t see this as a negative thing and it is absolutely true to some degree. Most of the incredibly talented low-level developers in the world (you know, those that are actually capable of making non-script kiddie hacks) have a tendency towards Linux.

So no, I’m not dropping the “Linux is a sign you might mean business” thing, especially if their idea of a desktop environment is just a collection of terminal windows neatly tiled together. We should be proud of the fact that some the most talented coders in de world choose freedom of software over anything else.

But luckily most of those people focus their efforts on different subjects. So yes, the problem is definitely on Windows with all the 14 year olds buying cheats off the darknet using their mom’s credit card (dramatized for effect).

those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.

Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.

• Laughs in Dutch EDM * 🤣

(Hardcore/Gabber starts at ~160 BPM and goes all the way up to ~300 BPM). Definitely too fast.

NVIDIA shareholders hate this post!

Wait, what does the onion do in this scenario? That seems oddly specific.

Definitely gives off Ramón Salazar vibes (Resident Evil 4). My gamer instincts are telling me “shoot it in the head before it does something nasty”.

I am absolutely baffled how this project wasn’t instantly shut down the moment it was announced.

Aside from the fact there’s no evidence any form of service will be provided, the whole thing seems like a giant breach of data waiting to happen. Nothing about this is ethical, nor a good idea.

Same goes for all of these crypto driven projects, they all follow the same pyramid scheme scam formula where the only one actually benefitting from it all is the creator of the project. Yet they all publish these buzzword filled whitepapers stating how they’re going to change the world.

When it comes to potentially sensitive information (which is especially true for any identifying information), the first rule of security is that everything is need-to-know only. You don’t need my biometric information in order to legally identify me, therefore you are not collecting my data.

I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

Looking back on the show years later, lots of stuff it portrayed was actually rather disturbing to the mind of the innocent young child.

10/10 would recommend, but holy shit did it feature some life lessons.

And this creepy walrus… fuck that guy!

Fun fact: The Frisian language (and Dutch by extension) has overlapping origin with both Danish and Swedish.

We can usually grasp a lot of conversational Danish and Swedish because a lot of the words are similar.

From a Dutch perspective, there’s always 5 new Flemmish words to memorize. You’d think we speak the same language, but we really don’t.

In some ways, Flemmish is more Dutch than the language anyone from the Netherlands speaks. Which seems especially true when it comes to loan-words from French, which some of you seem to avoid at all costs.

All of this leads to interesting situations where any conversation with our southern neighbours has a risk of needing a mental double take to make sure we derived the right meaning from your fancy words.

One example of how crazy things can get is the word for roundabout. The Dutch will generally refer such traffic control measures as rotonde, which is a French bastardization. The Flemmish, in turn, sometimes refer to them as rondpunt. …which the French seem to have adopted when they say rond-point.

The French definition of rotonde is actually from architecture. Where it is used for dome-shaped constructions, and is originally derived from the Latin rotondus, which just means “round”. Conclusion: Dutch is a weird language.

I usually associate yoink with playfully stealing something, whereas graaien in this context refers more to behaviour seen in landlords and high level executives. You know, the kinds of people that are so far up their shareholder’s butts that they can’t see the damage they’re causing.

Let’s just reserve yoink for stealing each other’s hoodies and similar endearing behaviour.

And it leads to a neverending stream of newly invented hype words.

We even have a yearly word of the year tradition, where the organisation behind our most famous dictionary picks one of these newly invented words based on coverage in media.

Last year’s word was “graaiflatie”, a combination between “graaien” (no direct translation, means to grab, but in a greedy way), and “inflatie” (inflation).

Transcoder here, if you’re looking to leverage quality/file size benefits of your codec, you don’t encode with hardware.

As a rule of fist hardware encoding is better served for streaming purposes where you need to crush a raw 1080p or 1440p stream into something that’s actually a sensible bandwith as fast as possible, especially if you’re streaming 60fps because your algorithm has a time limit of 16ms per frame.

If file size with preservation of quality is something you care about, you encode as slowly and thouroughly as you can, which is why x264 on your CPU will outperform encoders like NVENC any time.

When it comes to HEVC, software encoding is only really worth it if you have the time to spare, because x265 takes between 3x and 5x as long as encoding the same footage through x264, with a 15-20% smaller file size at best. It is also more intensive to decode, which is why you still see many files with a H.264 codec.

Excellent analysis. Especially this part:

It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.

Early cookie banners were a bad experience but they were manageable. But now thing have transitioned into content-blocking modals, dark patterns, forced individual consent/rejection for each and every one of the 943 partners they’re selling your data to, sites that refuse to serve content if you reject tracking and other ways to frustrate the end user.

I’m done with every piece of shit predatory actor inventing their own way of malicious compliance with the GDPR. You either implement the user-friendly consent API or you get no more tracking at all. Paywall your shit for all I care, at least then you’ll have a sustainable business model.

Slugs to be you then, I guess. :P

In all seriousness, the graph shows different species as fraction of total uses recorded. Since the paper is mostly about mice, and behavioural differences under different circumstances, it being unfair to the slugs is probably not such a big deal here.

Blender can help with lots of aspects in the game development workflow.

From simple low-poly modeling and texturing, to 3D sculpting highly detailed models, to procedurally generating geometry for massive worlds, animating game characters, baking different texture maps and much more.

If you can handle some python you can even automate pretty much anything the software can do, and build your own plugins.

There are tons of tutorials on youtube on how to make game assets and I would recommend Grant Abitt’s stuff when it comes to game development workflows.

Definitely try Blender, you’ll find it is probably all you will ever need to make assets for your game.

Nice job! Lighting looks really good!

Some friendly advice for improving the render quality even further: Be mindful of your UV’s and seams. Especially wood grain is particularly tricky to do well. This particular render works well when glancing at a distance, but it starts to fall apart when you zoom in on the details.

You did a really good job of faking the wool like material for the seat. I know from experience rendering fuzzy cloth materials that there isn’t an easy way to make them from scratch. Especially felt and wool are a bitch to make realistic shaders for. If you want realism for those, you have to simulate the actual material to some degree, which means diving into the rabbit hole that is geometry nodes.

For the floor and the wall materials: Imperfections are your best friend when aiming for realism. Mixing in different texture maps to add subtle stains, dust, rust, scratches and other kinds of damage can really help sell the illusion of real concrete or plaster. And while not really relevant when mimicking a near-perfect photo, adding subtle fingerprints, specks of dust/lint or stains to a reflective surface sometimes makes for a better render.

But most important of all: Remember that rendering things is always more art than science. There are multiple ways to achieve different effects and learning all the tricks by experimenting is going to really up your game. Keep going!

If someone has you wondering if they’re compensating for something, it’s probably true.