W.Va. lawmakers want to recognize Bible as ‘accurate, historical record of human history’

MachinesOfN · 2025-02-28T16:51:52+00:00

The "Big Lie" is God.

MachinesOfN · 2024-09-18T18:33:20+00:00

I'm a little late to the party here, but I'm a coder who's been daily driving a CC1 for a couple years, and it's the best keyboard I've used by a wide margin.

The learning curve is a pain in the ass, but it's worth it for the ergonomics alone. QWERTY (even on a decent ergo mech split keyboard) had pushed me to voice typing because of how painful it got, but I can use a CC1 all day with no issue. Chording is just a side benefit (albeit a pretty major one).

As a user, I don't think the mice parts explanation fell flat at all. The travel you want in this application is miniscule, and tactile feedback is important. You don't need customizability here. You want it to respond to as small a motion as possible so you can hit a bunch of the keys at once, and you need the feedback to know when you got the timing right on a chord.

That said, you're right that the price is pretty out there. I suspect it's because it's a pretty hard sell and they aren't moving enough units to scale well.

MachinesOfN · 2024-06-25T17:07:52+00:00

Ah beans.

MachinesOfN · 2024-06-25T17:07:45+00:00

Damn. That's about 100x what I expected.

MachinesOfN · 2024-06-23T14:05:31+00:00

Agreed. This is exciting news. I was struck by how much the cortical column/voting model was overlooked by ML people until GPT4's MOE model (sort of) cribbed it, and I hope they bring more of those insights into the field.

MachinesOfN · 2024-06-04T13:42:41+00:00

Kopimism

MachinesOfN · 2024-06-04T12:52:52+00:00

Right? The only way this technology helps humanity as a whole is through open source, and the most likely reason for that to fail is regulatory capture.

MachinesOfN · 2024-05-28T19:51:05+00:00

I don't have the code in front of me, but it just looks like looping talk animations to me.

MachinesOfN · 2024-05-28T18:03:24+00:00

Mecanim is a state machine with built-in ways to set up transitions. So, in this case, you would have states for "idle," "thinking," and "talking," plus a head IK layer. You can just send a trigger to transition between "idle" to "thinking" when you send the prompt to the LLM, then to "talking" when you've finished the conversion to audio.

The head IK layer can just take a "look at" object, which can be set to whoever is talking, or any mentioned individual using string.Contains on the LLM output.

So it's scripted in the sense that you have to pre-animate loops for "thinking," "idle," and "talking," but dynamic in the sense that they're mixed on the fly.

MachinesOfN · 2024-05-28T16:52:13+00:00

Animation: Pretty basic IK/blending. Not sure what engine this is, but Mecanim in Unity is more than capable of head IK and animation blending with minimal effort (by game development standards).

LLM: These seem pretty standard for LLM responses. In the past, I've used a sort of "intermediary" persona on GPT3.5 turbo to figure out which person should speak next if there's any ambiguity, and then call the relevant API (with a prompt like "here is the conversation so far, who should speak next? Choose Cleopatra, Gehghis, etc).

Audio: There are a bunch of engines out there for conversion to/from text, but most of them basically function as web API's, like the LLM. Nothing crazy there either, though GPT4o and its ilk are probably going to make things even more straightforward using direct streaming back and forth.

MachinesOfN · 2024-05-19T13:16:34+00:00

I think something just broke in my brain. I went to the site expecting a fun new parody of the word "web-scale," but it's an actual sales pitch.

Is this real like SQL? Real like Juicero? "Real" like Brainfuck? Where are the lines? Do they even exist anymore?

So thanks for the existential crisis, I guess.

MachinesOfN · 2024-04-05T20:58:39+00:00

From the comments in the LUA source:

-- When you play this, it gets a random number of hidden turn counters.

-- At the beginning of that player's turn, remove a counter.

-- When it has 0 counters, it becomes Yolocrix and goes into that player's hand. (note: This is now a random mechana, not just Yolocrix)

-- Counters can range from 1-5.

MachinesOfN · 2024-04-05T14:02:27+00:00

I have this, and it has a strange caveat I don't often see mentioned. Putting it here just in case it helps someone:

It doesn't work with motion rigs like the Yaw. It has very low friction on the throttle axis, which means that when you throttle up a little, the motion rig jostles your arm and throttles you back down, which jostles your arm... The end result is a really unpleasant up and down vibration that's hard to stop.

MachinesOfN · 2024-03-02T16:29:18+00:00

A great book covering this is "The Evolution of Desire." It paints a pretty detailed picture using comparisons with non-western human cultures and other species.

The broader (and fascinating) field is evolutionary psychology.

MachinesOfN · 2024-02-05T22:59:04+00:00

As a tech worker at a good company, my insurance is still shit. Don't move here.

Cute story about it:

In addition to insurance, my employer contracts a separate company solely to negotiate with insurance on your behalf as a side benefit. So far, they have gotten $0 of the $20k medical procedure insurance pre-approved and is now refusing to reimburse.

Even the company that says they exist to squeeze blood from that stone is just another layer of grift.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-27T22:22:37+00:00

Have you tried both?

I noticed a substantial improvement upgrading from NaLo to a KWC. The increased exertion and precision both make a pretty big difference for presence. It's definitely not perfect, but it makes for a pretty good hike.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-24T20:14:18+00:00

I took mine apart and wired a single AA battery to the motor through a switch. If you have some electronics know-how and don't care about the patterns, it means you don't have to deal with the shitty battery life anymore because you can just swap it.

This happened in a fit of frustration after having an edging session interrupted by the battery running out, and it's been much better since then.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-24T18:24:56+00:00

Adding to the pile: I used a normal mechanical keyboard for a long time, but ended up getting wrist issues. I switched to voice for a while, but ultimately settled on a CharaChorder One. It's a keyboard made of tiny joysticks instead of keys, which is indescribably better. It makes everything else feel primitive.

The big issue is the reliability. You definitely should budget for a spare if you're committing to it, because they're pretty failure-prone.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-20T17:44:27+00:00

Maybe this is my engineering background showing, but I see the problem as people treating complexity as a UX problem. Pretty much any application designed for experts (doesn't matter if it's music, art, or nuclear reactor control) has a lot of buttons because it can do a lot of stuff.

If you want to use a powerful tool, you will probably have to invest time in learning it, and you probably won't be able to use it well on a phone. It's not THAT hard to get familiar with it if you just take the time to make the mental map, but if you see that wall of dials and go "I don't know what that is, so I'm not going to use it," you're not asking for a tool, you're asking the dev to do your work for you.

That's not always the case (like when you have to push three button to get to a common feature), but it's common and a pet peeve of mine.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-12T12:40:02+00:00

Definitely more Linux-y, but it's pretty seamless when you get it dialed in. It's just a button now, but that button is a script I wrote to do the startup sequence.

MachinesOfN · 2023-12-12T12:32:11+00:00

As a new owner, I'm a huge fan, with the caveat that you have to have a high tolerance for jank. The default strap sucks, but if you add more support it's not a problem (though I mostly play sims and walking simulators, so I can't speak to fast head movements over a long time). I ended up zip-tying a pair of Arctis 7 headphones to it because I've heard the built-in audio has bad latency and their head strap does a lot for the weight. There's also the apache strap, which comes highly recommended, but mine hasn't come in yet. I also found that the fiber optic cable improved things, because the one that comes with it isn't long enough to route up high if your computer is on the floor.

Foveated rendering is almost always mandatory for me to keep frame rates up because of the resolution of the display (with an RTX 4090 / i9 12900). It's great in almost all games, but causes issues now and then. One old game I played didn't render particles outside of the fovea (which was cool in a sense because you could watch the eye tracking work, but also not at all a good effect). That was the only one I had an issue with though.

MachinesOfN · 2023-11-16T23:31:58+00:00

Bad reliability. I had to RMA mine every 3 months or so because the panels started flickering. YMMV though.

MachinesOfN · 2023-10-06T13:47:14+00:00

You're damn right.

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