anengineerandacat

anengineerandacat t1_jegtytp wrote

Yeah... definitely will be dumbing down the smart phone for the lil one when it comes time to giving them one.

Internet Browser, Texting app, Phone app, Email app, Camera app, and that's about it.

No YouTube, No Facebook, No Instagram, No TikTok or anything similar to these apps.

I know even giving the browser might be much but in my own youth it was a great resource and I'll likely blacklist a whole host of sites if I can.

Seen plenty of kids with devices from friends & family and none of them seem honestly for the better for it; most have horrific attitudes or generally just struggle with some form of anxiety issue when the device is taken away.

Making the device utilitarian should help to prevent such behavior from occurring instead of allowing it to be an entertainment delivery mechanism.

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anengineerandacat t1_jd6chp6 wrote

It really depends... in my lil sports-car, 100% but in the SUV it's weird... almost like you are moving slower but somehow going faster.

I could go 120-130 mph in the wife's SUV and it would honestly feel like I was going 100-110 in my car.

Depends on what they were driving and how smooth it handled said speeds along with just how congested the highway was.

Largely empty highway? Don't think I would know if I was going 100-110 unless I was paying attention to the gauges (which when cruising... sorta isn't something I do).

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anengineerandacat t1_jb5h55i wrote

Hard to really call Pokemon Go an "MMO" it's a lite version for sure but I agree that a fully fledged Pokemon MMO is an untapped market.

The older Pokemon games had some great mechanics where at least duo'ing could easily be a thing for PvE content and obviously the whole PvP aspect would simply be what we have today (except wandering the world).

I think what? TemTem is the only real one in this space? I haven't played it so I don't know how good it is but perhaps Nintendo might one day partner-up to offer a spin-off if their engine is decent enough.

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anengineerandacat t1_jb5c3th wrote

Initially yeah, I generally agree with you; but at some point you start using tools to target and farm what you actually need and that exploration feeling largely gets lost pretty quickly once you start tapping into Pokemon Go Nest maps and such.

Then you start studying how spawning works, tap into some glitches there, etc.

Pokemon Go has like 700+ Pokemon... so you aren't going to catch them all by simply just walking around your town; in fact at some point all you get is your regional spawns until you actually fly abroad or utilize and tap into events.

Then you'll generally start using Bluestacks and some GPS mock tool to get whatever you need in different countries.

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anengineerandacat t1_jb58czx wrote

Eh, the dedicated games more than make up for it; Pokemon Go was fun for a bit to go outside and walk a bit but weirdly the stopping to do battles / etc slowed down the actual exercise portion of the thing.

I would much rather it just simply tracked where I went and then I could replay Pokemon encounters when I got home that I could just slowly churn through.

Still encourages folks to go outside, but now you don't have to stand around somewhere to wait for an encounter to pop up.

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anengineerandacat t1_jacn191 wrote

Retaliation would likely go way up, and I suspect this woman won't be unharmed for too long post his recovery.

This is one of those situations where you have severely harmed someone's QoL and I feel to the point where the consequences of retaliation are lower than the drive to perform it.

Can't say her action wasn't warranted but... on both sides actions have consequences and the likelihood he won't retaliate is low (especially if he can easily reach her).

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anengineerandacat t1_jab0ffh wrote

Video games are very "noisy" in terms of image output, tons and tons of approximations and high precision but limited "accurate" solutions are used to render out the result and as such tons of factors to consider, too many to really give you an "exact" one thing but a very very simple one is a natural anti-aliasing as a result of downsampling.

Much of this has to do with the fact that we are rendering out to "pixels" and geometry doesn't always fit perfectly and as such filtering is needed to clean up the artifacts.

If your game is running at say Full-HD (1920x1080) and you have absolutely nothing else being done to the image (no anti-aliasing, no mip-mapping, no anisotropic-filtering, etc.) you'll have a bit of a pixel soup of a scene (some textures will be blurry, others will be pixelated, and you'll have "jaggies" across most non-transparent objects in the game).

You can easily solve a lot of these problems by simply using a buffer that is 4x larger than your target output resolution, drawing your game scene to this and then sampling it down to the target resolution.

This is usually what we call "super-sampling" and there are several ways to do this when you downsample down you merge or exclude information downwards and much of the sub-pixel information from the source information is transformed.

If you have a camera at your home you can effectively do this yourself in the real-world; take a photo, open said photo in say photoshop, resize photo down 33% and you'll notice image quality on the resized photo is usually improved (this is also for a variety of reasons, mostly ISO noise though is reduced heavily).

It's just not widely utilized because it's computationally expensive and it isn't always the case that all of a games shaders scale with the increased resolution (or in rarer cases, certain targets can't be created because some shaders could already be overdrawing).

If you want just overall a... "glimpse" into how complicated it is to render a game scene I highly recommend this post by Adrian Courrèges which will give you a deep but IMHO high level explanation from a semi-modern game: https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/

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anengineerandacat t1_ja2zbd1 wrote

Very mild argument that one could ship something valuable and have the boys rob the shipper and the one who shipped can get their product back and claim on the shipping insurance.

Personally though I feel the pros outweigh the cons and folks just really get upset because it shows incompetence in actually shipping something.

Folks have been throwing these into luggages and finding out their shit is stuck in a hallway somewhere nearby rather than where the airliner thinks it is.

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anengineerandacat t1_j9xoy79 wrote

Tesla doesn't exactly have an A+ for build quality; it's like rolling the dice on whether you have panel gaps or not.

In terms of performance though it's entirely likely that the Tesla would be better but at this price... I don't know.

It's likely single motor, 20-30% reduced range, no FSD capabilities, and the same crappy interior or worse as they cut costs.

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anengineerandacat t1_j9pq5qg wrote

>A new bill has been proposed in Florida that would enact a series of animal protections and guidelines, such as banning cat declawing, animal testing for cosmetics and dogs hanging their heads out of windows.

The bill overall is filled with a lot of good... and I generally understand the concern for not having the dogs in these places in a vehicle (in the event of an accident you can 100% guarantee the dog isn't going to make it if they are in these positions).

I feel like it's just a "bit" of overreach.

I also haven't read the bill entirely but do these restrictions also apply to cats? Because having a cat in your lap, or a window cat bed isn't exactly "uncommon" for some cat owners while driving to and from the vet or long trips.

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anengineerandacat t1_j4uyezl wrote

Wouldn't kill it but... a good chunk of that experience is the incredibly loud noises of what only a combustion engine can muster.

EVs have their whine but IMHO it's not the same.

That being said Rally is already on it's conversion over and F1 has hybrid systems too so it's just a matter of time.

Suspect endurance races will end or be highly dependent on battery quick releases of some sort.

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anengineerandacat t1_j2aroj5 wrote

Not really an individual that would push back against technology typically.

Even in the car space and I am a huge gear-head but I generally welcome EVs and am just sad that exhaust noises will be going away.

What I dislike is when technology generally isn't the answer and it's forced in; using the same car example for instance it's stuffing easily accessible vehicle features deep into a capacitive UI (that usually isn't that well thought out).

Things like the AC settings, Radio, Cruise Control, Windshield or even Lights should be tactile and easily accessible because generally speaking the automation isn't that great and voice commands take more overall thought time than using a button or dial.

So as long as technology actually improves our quality of life I am all for it.

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anengineerandacat t1_j21u0r6 wrote

I am communicating with myself; when I read I basically verbalize in-my-head what I am reading (and what I am typing). It mostly sounds like my physical voice but sometimes it could be in another's voice depending on the context and situation.

As far as to "whom" it's like talking into a room with an empty audience, sometimes I can visualize an audience to talk too and make-up things / situations for them to say but most often it's just me.

I am genuinely curious how you actually plan-ahead without having an inner voice, do you just "talk" to people without verbalizing it internally?

As to "why" I can't explain, it's been there since as long as I can remember... perhaps the voice has gotten louder over the years as I have learned to do "more" with it; I work as a Software Engineer day-to-day so most of my day is spent building mental structures and models of applications in my head and walking through where I'll do certain things next or even talking with my inner voice about said things in a form of rubber duck debugging.

Even this post, and your post are basically read back aloud and if I knew what you sounded like I would likely read the post back in your actual voice.

Without my inner voice... I don't think I would feel like I exist as a person, the bones / muscle / flesh surrounding my body are just what give me mobility but that "voice" is "me".

Which is why perhaps when I say you could clone the brain, since you can't clone my inner voice "I" will cease to exist. To my friends and family I might still exist but it'll be a different "me".

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anengineerandacat t1_j21a64j wrote

Inner voice fMRI: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02019/full

Consciousness can't be artificially stimulated: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0361923009003657?casa_token=71CCXG8979oAAAAA:B9dF0u65Zs-S2PVeN2gg_Ik4thZ56PP6Qtuglt7L5fanVKRBcPw4CQmqXx7BBb-6iHZPJQO54w

The thing is that your "inner voice" is a brain activity, not something that is biologically wired but instead triggered from outside stimuli.

The consciousness can even be triggered in individuals whom are in coma's:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02207-1

Very little research in this space sadly, it's all theory and conjecture which I mean the entire conversation is about that considering we have no means to verify any of what is presented.

Hell, some individuals can be missing 50% of their brain cells and still live very normal lives: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141216-can-you-live-with-half-a-brain

In short, you can copy all the neurons / receptors / chemical makeup all you want but the activity of consciousness and their inner voice is unique to the individual.

You as /u/Docpot13 would cease to exist, only your clone and whereas they might communicate in a very similar fashion for some time the "you" that went through the procedure is long gone.

Starting to think you might be one of the 7% that doesn't have a typical inner voice lol.

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anengineerandacat t1_j21137c wrote

I view them as neural activity too.

The newer you would have their own conscious and be free to make their own decisions and to be honest would already likely be pretty divergent because of the procedure alone.

Your consciousness is unique to your very specific brain, it's an activity from all the impulses that fire not something that you just map that region and copy.

If you asked both beings a very complex psychological question, you would likely get slightly different answers; the words used, the makeup of the sentence, perhaps even the tone.

This is why I stated it's really dependent on what the desired outcome is... if you wanted to become immortal to continue living "your" life then brain copying isn't the way.

If the idea is to preserve yourself for others, than yes it's likely a valid-ish strategy; your clone's self would have all the wordly experiences you did and even more (as you yourself won't know what it's like to be a clone).

This is a topic that's somewhat both scientific and spiritual to some extent and it's not exactly easy for me to articulate what is being lost but I hope this made it slightly more clear?

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anengineerandacat t1_j20ocdr wrote

Generally speaking, yes which is why I stated it really depends on what the outcome you seek really is.

If it's the preservation of the individuals ability to share ideas and knowledge, then we could likely clone that individual state and continue to utilize them in society.

To put it very simply, you are asking to effectively create two batteries and want them to store the same exact electrons; it's just not possible.

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anengineerandacat t1_j20ck9g wrote

It really depends on what the desired "outcome" is.

Do you want to keep your lover alive? Then copying might just be the thing to do this for you.

Do you want to keep yourself alive? Copying will be where your life ends and your copies life begins. Your own conscious is now lost, you can't likely copy that as there is no connection from the old to the new.

You can likely cyberize bits and pieces but the cerebral cortex is thought to control your conscious which is basically the bulk of the brain.

Frontal lobe:

  • Decision-making, problem-solving.
  • Conscious thought.
  • Attention.
  • Emotional and behavioral control.
  • Speech production.
  • Personality.
  • Intelligence.
  • Body movement.

Occipital lobe:

  • Visual processing and interpretation.
  • Visual data collection regarding color, motion and orientation.
  • Object and facial recognition.
  • Depth and distance perception.
  • Visual world mapping.

Parietal lobe:

  • Sensory information processing.
  • Spatial processing and spatial manipulation.

Temporal lobe:

  • Language comprehension, speech formation, learning.
  • Memory.
  • Hearing.
  • Nonverbal interpretation.
  • Sound-to-visual image conversion.

You could perhaps replace everything but the Frontal Lobe with digital versions but you would likely need "tuning" or some bridged interface to translate from "your" signals to the standardized inputs and then convert those standardized outputs to "your" inputs.

It's hard to really say if this still makes the individual the same... a simple stroke is enough to completely change a person... this is way more destructive than a stroke.

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