friendica

Night. Getting out of bed in time for work is hard enough. Showering in the morning would mean I need to get up even earlier.

What we do know is that the full title includes “as the Gravest Crime against Humanity” and I can fully respect countries having reservations against that when there are other similarly horrible crimes. I don’t know why Germany abstained but I figure that some people might be pretty angry at them if they declared the slave trade was worse than the holocaust.

The “Gravest Crime against Humanity” part honestly explains why so many countries abstained.

The slave trade was an absolute atrocity and certainly one of the gravest crimes against humanity but should we label it as the gravest crime? Do we really need to introduce a ranking between slavery, the holocaust and dozens of other genocides instead of agreeing that they are/were all bad without picking one as the worst?

Can we please stop measuring stolen data by size? That carries no interesting information at all. 1.1 TiB could literally be the uncompressed version of a single movie and nothing else or it could be the personal information of every single customer and employee with room to spare.

I’d need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.

No fabric at all, just metal rings and a bit of string. They are far from see-through though because they are pretty dense. If you’re close enough you can see a bit of… anatomy… but it’s more on the side of a coarsly knit sweater than transparent fabric.

I remember that Australia was the exact opposite. It has a single outside connection and once it reaches a stable state, it stays there. Every impulse that goes in will come out again and leave the inside unchanged.

Let’s see:

• Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
• I’ve created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn’t result in a well-defined solution but I’ve recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don’t have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
• My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I’ve acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
• I’ve made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.
• Edit: One more because it might be my magnum opus. Have you ever played KJumpingCube? That doesn’t only work on grids but on arbitrary graphs. My friends and I chose a Risk board. Not a digital one. A real life physical Risk board with actual dice on every country that need to be turned by hand. A single game took us about 6-7 hours with the winning move alone taking up the last hour.

That’s just what I comes to mind at the moment. I’m sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.

Well… I don’t think it would be the weirdest thing I’ve done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.

Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.

That’s VGA, it’s gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they’re also pretty robust against noise.

So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.

Yes. That’s literally the first point in my job description.

Yeah, good luck getting AI to follow such a complex prompt without plastering half the comic with unrecognizable cartoon mutants.

Every day the feeling grows that calling legitimate art AI slop has done even more harm to artists than actual AI slop.

I very much doubt that AI would have included Homer Simpson, Brain and several other characters as well as tons of tiny yet legible text as easter eggs.

Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

From the source I linked in my other coment:

By the time his victims came forward, the statute of limitations for his actions had expired.

I don’t know how long it would have been back then, but today, sexual assault of a minor has a maximum prison sentence of more than ten years but less than life, so the statute of limitations is 20 years.

For those looking for a source that doesn’t require a subscription: https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-with-pedophiles-for-30-years/a-53814208

It’s probably mostly a matter of getting used to the way Darktable does things and where it puts certain controls.

That’s what Camera Raw’s basic tab looks like (not my screenshot, I’m at the linux laptop right now). It has most of what I need for a photo to look “okay” before I dive into the other tabs for more in-depth edits. I’m sure Darktable has equivalent functions to all of those (they’re very basic after all) but at least with the default UI presets, I need to look through many different tabs and modules with unfamiliar names to find them.

Then there’s warnings like “White balance applied twice”. Apparently I’m not allowed to use the white balance sliders because the color calibration module already applies white balance? But that module doesn’t provide an intuitive way to select color temperature and tint?

I’m sure I could get used to all of that. But right now I don’t have the time or energy to learn a completely new editing workflow from scratch. Many open source tools suffer from programmer UI syndrome (I’m allowed to say that, I’m a programmer myself). They do everything the lead maintainer needs them to do but you often need to be intimately familiar with the software’s inner workings to understand what each control in the UI does. I don’t want to think about the differences between “linear Bradford (ICC v4)”, “non-linear Bradford” and “CAT16 (CIECAM16)” color calibration formulas, especially not when I’ve set my UI to “workflow: beginner”. I just want to make my photo a tiny bit warmer. Give me sensible defaults and put the super detailed settings out of the way until I need them.

I switched my laptop to Arch a bit over a year ago but my desktop is still on Windows 11.

The main thing that’s holding me back is the lack of raw photo editing software that matches my workflow. I’ve tried RawTherapee, Darktable, RapidRAW and a couple of others. So far, everything was either cumbersome to use, was missing important features or had suboptimal performance. With dozens if not hundreds of candidates, even one more minute of editing time per photo can quickly add up. Many of my gigs are event photography and my clients often want at least the roughly edited previews within 24-48 hours.

If any of you knows a tool that accurately replicates the UX, feature set and performance of (ideally) Adobe Camera Raw or (not so ideally) Lightroom, you’d make me the happiest photography nerd on the planet. Bonus points if it correctly imports existing development settings in case I need to re-edit or re-export older photos.

PSA: if you recommend I use GIMP, like so many before you did, I will block you. GIMP is not a raw editor and it can’t even open most raw formats without help from one of the tools I mentioned above.