• 8 Posts
  • 187 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle
  • There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

    On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.



  • “Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

    This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.


  • Legitimate? Basically none. Illegitimate? First, lazily fixing a fuckup on putting up strings of Christmas lights where you can’t daisy chain them properly, with bonus points for the likeliehood of needing to break off the grounding pin. Second, injecting power from a generator into a single circuit of your house if the power is out.

    In one sense, you could argue conductors are conductors and if you think through every eventuality you can mitigate risk, but on the other, if you find you’re in a situation where one of these seems useful, you are not the type of person thinks through every eventuality.






  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFact
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    30 days ago

    I doubt I’m saying anything novel here, but good lord Kilmer stole that movie for himself, and he’s therefore a big part of the reason nobody gives a shit about the Costner one, the rest being that anything “epic” that Costner did after Dances with Wolves was a self-indulgent and overlong toboggan-ride over the top-most surface of whatever theme he claimed to be exploring.

    Not that the rest of the Tombstone cast didn’t have their moments, but they were all dancing to Doc’s tune. Without him, it’s a B-movie that punches slightly above its weight and gets filed away with the likes of Young Guns 2.


  • Yeah, not the best angle. The PS/2 port is that little silver box. The USB-C port is on the PCB. This was assembled to go inside a vintage keyboard to semi-permanently convert it, but I’ve been using it to test other boards. If a board is fully intact, I’ll just use an external converter, but there used to be a practice of snipping the cables on hardware that businesses retired for accounting purposes if they were written off, which can be a good, if risky, way to get an eBay buy for cheap.



  • Well, I fell pretty deep into that rabbit hole, where I’ve even designed a couple of primitive circuit boards and hand-wired a bunch of keyboards. I also mess around with vintage stuff a bit.

    This particular converter is programmable and meant to be used with a not mechanical 122-key terminal keyboard made by the company that took over IBM’s US keyboard factory, but it’s been hanging out with several DuPont wires shoved into it to connect it to a molex connector to test a different old board.






  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldMichael
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    You provide physical inputs, which are sensitive to timing and agility, to a rule-based competition. It’s at least as much a sport as golf or curling or bowling. And I say that as someone who doesn’t find eSports particularly compelling. It requires a sophisticated technal infrastructure and doesn’t require superhuman levels of strength or endurance (though the latter in particular could be helpful), but those are merely “sliders on the configuration screen” for whether a certain sport is to your interest.

    Michael probably agrees.



  • This one is way below $100, but about ten years ago I bought a roll of twist tie wire at a dollar store. It’s fifty or a hundred feet, with a little guillotine cutter. It’s still just a bunch of twist tie, but it punches WAY above its weight with quality of life improvement. No more hunting for the one you dropped, or wondering how you’ll close up a veggie bag. Also good for (fairly light) pictures that use wire instead of sawtooth hardware, and I’ve used it in a pinch when I didn’t have cable ties. I dunno. It’s just an oddly useful substance to have lying in your junk drawer.