Note that crt's did not have bad blacks, they were far better than lcd displays. I am currently using an ips display and it has pretty good blacks, notably better than a normal lcd display. But I remember crt's being even better(probably just me being nostalgic for the good ol days when we were staring straight into an electron beam with only an inch of leaded glass to protect us). I Don't think they were lying, oleds are very very good(except for the burn in issue, but that's solvable), but I would be wary about the conclusions of a demo designed to sell something.
For what it's worth, the display I liked best was a monochrome terminal, a vt220, Let me explain, a crt does not really have pixels as we think of them on an modern display, but they do have a shadow mask which is nearly the same thing. however a monochrome crt(as found in a terminal or oscilloscope) has no shadow mask, the text of those vt220 was tight, it was a surprisingly good reading experience.
One of the more obscure things OpenBSD man does is provide tags to the pager(less). So you can do things like ":t test" in man ksh and end up right at that section.
However while I think the feature is neat, a clever use of an existing feature, I never use it. I think it is sort of the same as info pages and why the technologically superior solution sort of lost to the stupider simpler man pages. Having a simple uniform interface "press / to search, all information in one document" is far less cognitively distracting than the better system.
And final thoughts: if unfamiliar the bsd's use the mdoc set of troff macros to build semantic man pages. sort of like how latex lets you build semantic documents on the tex typesetting engine. Where linux man pages are usually plain troff. OpenBSD actually went one step further and now uses a specific mandoc program to render them rather than the troff + mdoc macros that was used before.
What are the uniqueness requirements for titles, For the most part people are reasonable and don't want to stomp on each others names. however there are bad actors and this is usually where trademark law comes into play to help protect the name, but does steam impose additional uniqueness constraints on top of this?
That might be a fun list, games with the same name.
So what would a guided missile battleship look like?
my guess would be trident sized(2m) silos as the main battery and you fill them with vls cells as a working battery. for armor It needs to be able to defend agenst it's own gun right, so that would probably be a bunch of missile defense systems.
It is often said that aircraft carriers replaced battleships but I don't think that is the case, I think aircraft carriers are kind of their own thing and the battleship role was actually replaced by ballistic missile submarines. Think about it, where are the big guns in the navy located? And the more tenuous but fun argument, look how the ships are named, battleships got state names, SSBN's got state names coincidence, I think not.
Battleships are meant to fight other battleships. And you don't nuke ships. They are a relic from WWI when ships still had to engage each other directly.
They also filled a shore bombardment role. But you also don't use nukes for that (rather modern aircraft).
And the Iowa battle ships were later equipped to handle "special weapons"
But in seriousness, the restraint shown in the use of nuclear weapons is amazing, one day the genie will be let out of the lamp but it hasn't yes.
On the topic of genies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie (sigh) yes an air to air missile with a nuclear warhead was not only invented it was built and deployed... With how hard we were actively flirting with the demon that is nuclear war it is incredible that anyone is still alive.
Environment: I am currently playing with a pid control function for my gpu fan, that is instead of saying "map temp x to fanspeed y"(fan curve) say "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)
Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make pid control undesirable?
As a final thought, I have halfway convinced myself that in a predictable thermal system a map would match a set of pid parameters anyway.
> "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)
Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%.
I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better.
I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
In my case the gpu fan was not changing speed automatically, (something, something, linux) which I discovered after an embarrassingly long time of poking at other things trying to figure out why my system was crashing so much. And now instead of doing the sane thing and figuring out how to get the fan speed map to work, I thought about it and came to this conclusion "I want my temps to be set value, say 45C, why not use a closed loop controller to find the fan speed necessary for that temp at any load?"
And now am about halfway through building pid fan control software and a janky gpu temp simulator so I can get some intuition on tuning the pid parameters before I set it on my actual gpu. you know, the fun part of computing. But now I am worried that perhaps there is a real reason nobody does it this way.
Aren't you ultimately gonna have to figure out why you cannot change the speed on the GPU, regardless of the approach? And then you're just back at square one?
I think no one is doing it that way, because there is simply no need for it. Sure, when I'm 3D printing some material it sometimes need the heatbed to be exactly 45C or whatever, but why would I care about the specific temperature of my GPU? As long as it's not throttled when GPU utilization is at 100%, I'm good to go.
This could be total nonsense and I am definitely out on a limb here, but I remember from my amateur crypto mining days (almost 15 years ago wow) that keeping everything relatively consistent is better for the longevity of your hardware (GPU/CPU mainly). Some people obsessed over getting temps as low as possible but that’s not very productive, diminishing returns and all of that. There is just generally a healthy temperature to keep things operating at most of the time, coupled with how hard you push the component in question (while not putting too much strain on your fans either). Basically: swinging/fluctuating is not good, consistency is good.
Again though I could be totally off. I just remember that being spread around as “conventional wisdom.”
> Basically: swinging/fluctuating is not good, consistency is good.
Yeah, I'd understand not wanting to go between 0C and 90C over and over. But my GPU idles at around 35C, maxes out at 85C or something, and going back and fourth will surely be preferable than staying with a single temperature but voltage clock the card. Especially considering performance.
But again, I'm using my card for ML, number-crunching, simulations and VFX, you might be right that the use case of cryptocurrency mining prefers a different thermal profile.
You're speaking the truth, as this is not nonsense - it is correct. At the micro level, thermal expansion/contracting is occurring across the variety of the circuit board materials and components. Hot is fine (not too hot), but it is the consistency that makes for longetivity.
I limit power consumption profiles and clock speeds unless higher power is required, and combine that with an oversized cooling system - keeps regular temps consistent.
Yeah that was my understanding as well. Basically it comes down to how much you are warping/straining the materials. It all seems rather intuitive to me but this is not my area of expertise and just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s correct lol
> Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make pid control undesirable?
I've only every seen something like this in really high reliability equipment because they're worried about repeated thermal expansion causing cracks in the boards/solder joints. There is, often, heaters available for use if the temperature gets too low.
For most equipment I think that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze so it isn't done.
PID loops work best when you have active control for both heating and cooling. PIDs are also best when you have a single optimal point you’re aiming at, there’s a kind of fundamental mismatch here in that there isn’t really a “too cold” for your system, you’re just aiming to keep the system below an upper limit while hopefully keeping fan noise to a minimum (otherwise you’d just send it and run at max 24/7).
A simple PID wants to keep it at a setpoint, but it’s easy enough to layer a target change on top of it, some hysteresis so it’s not pulsing on and off, perhaps with control authority depending on the the target, etc. but then that gets complicated and usually manufacturers aren’t going to expose those sorts of tunings to the user.
For most people a fan curve is more obvious to work with and it’s largely good enough without the irritating behaviors insufficiently tuned control loops can exhibit.
> it is mechanically more sophisticated, even if not electronically. It can have greater value as a product of superb craftsmanship or as an object of art.
On any objective measurement axis a $15 Casio is more sophisticated than a $10_000 Rolex. I think what we value is the human scale of the Rolex, it operates and is manufactured at a scale we intuitively understand as humans, and we(or at least some people) value the sacrifices and effort needed to run at that scale.
Consider this, on your cheap Casio, the manufacturing tolerances are so tight and the parts are so complex and fine the only way to manufacture them are fully automated lines requiring a staggering capital investment of many millions, however because these lines have to be fully automated the economy of scale applies hard and the final product is very inexpensive.
All it takes to make a fine mechanical watch is a good watchmaker and several hundred thousand dollars of tooling.
One of my favorite watch repair videos is of a guy who rescues a smashed Casio, It has this fun combination of. it's a Casio, not worth even looking at. It is not designed to be serviced. Everything in it is super tiny, I mean watchmaking is already an exercise in frustration with how small everything is, which is why I enjoy watching them work but I have no real desire to do it myself, however in this Casio they were absurdly small. But this madlad did it. What a heroic fix.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
A picture is worth a thousand words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.
I vote the cardboard box, especially if it is a large appliance box, Unfortunately you can't really give someone a large cardboard box, but oh boy are they fun.
Cardboard box demolition ideas for kids [1] I like where this video is going, letting kids explore the structural capabilities of different geometries.
Thank you for writing about parenting. Today was a tough day with the kids, and reading your blog after they’ve gone to sleep helped things feel a little better.
For what it's worth, the display I liked best was a monochrome terminal, a vt220, Let me explain, a crt does not really have pixels as we think of them on an modern display, but they do have a shadow mask which is nearly the same thing. however a monochrome crt(as found in a terminal or oscilloscope) has no shadow mask, the text of those vt220 was tight, it was a surprisingly good reading experience.
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