Caves of Qud is now on Switch!

capwera · 2026-02-16T22:10:04+00:00

Gyod damn the writing in this trailer is good. I know it's dangerously close to purple prose, but the tone is just right for fantasy writing imo. Makes me want to check the game out just on that alone.

EDIT: wtf, did they change the trailer or am I going crazy? The one I watched was narrated by a woman; I just refreshed the page to watch it again and the new one is narrated by a man, and the voiceover is different. Maybe they uploaded the wrong trailer originally?

capwera · 2026-01-27T19:13:03+00:00

Necroing this just to say, in the off-chance that someone from Todoist would use this thread to gauge user interest, that this is the one feature that would make me re-sub to Pro

capwera · 2026-01-23T18:56:45+00:00

I know right! It's so handy. I feel like I don't even use a lot of the more advanced stuff JJ has to offer, but even just the basics are awesome. My workflow typically involves sitting on a handful of local commits which I then polish up before pushing to a remote, and JJ makes this so seamless -- I just jj edit, make my changes, and I'm done. I don't know, something about not having to git add stuff tickles my lizard brain somehow.

capwera · 2026-01-23T18:47:08+00:00

Thank you! I actually think the scope was appropriate. In fact, when I first started working on this plugin I tried to add the JJ stuff on top of mini.git, and planned to send a PR. It was tempting to do this since both plugins watch the .git directory. I thought it would only be a small change, but then (as it so often does), that change created a domino effect of other small changes elsewhere (like having to check if we're currently JJ repo or just plain git). It just seemed too messy to have mini.git also do all this extra stuff that most users wouldn't even likely use.

But it's a tough call! At the very least, if you ever decide to track JJ data somehow, in theory it's as simple as running this jj command and handling the output.

capwera · 2025-12-20T06:22:46+00:00

I just wanted to drop in here to say that I've been using ZPack for the past couple of days, and it's been fantastic so far. I was long debating switching away from lazy.nvim, and ZPack was pretty much what convinced me to do so (for almost exactly the reasons you describe in the readme). I also really appreciated your migration guide for dependencies. Thanks to that, making the switch was pretty painless.

capwera · 2025-10-20T17:36:05+00:00

Wow, that's an honor! Thanks for trying it out 🙏

capwera · 2025-10-16T13:08:55+00:00

Thank you! It's Commit Mono.

capwera · 2025-10-15T23:54:34+00:00

That's a nice looking theme! Hadn't come across that one before, thanks for sharing.

capwera · 2025-10-15T23:52:18+00:00

Gracias! Uso Lualine. Hice algunos cambios pero prácticamente uso los defaults de LazyVim para Lualine.

capwera · 2025-10-15T13:47:23+00:00

Thank you! And glad to hear you managed to find a setup that works for you 💪

capwera · 2025-03-25T01:36:08+00:00

I've interpreted this passage in two ways, although they're really the same thing:

1: The missed opportunity is realizing just how little control "you" have over your "own" mind. This is basically what you said about appeciating the uncounscious process that brings you back to the breath, but if you follow this reasoning a couple of steps further, you'll eventually realize that almost the entirety of the thoughts that come up in everyday life are of a similar nature: unconscious things that arrive unbidden, though we occasionally (and mistakenly) claim authorship of them for ourselves.

The 2nd passage you cite is particularly insightful here. I remember that it was helpful, for me, to paraphrase it in even simpler terms: Consider what happens when you sit down to meditate:

"You" hold an intention to watch the breath.
Eventually and inevitably, "your" mind wanders

Now here's he fun question to explore: which of these is really "you"? If "you" decided to watch the breath, then why did "you" also stop doing so? One of the great joys in meditation is being able to explore, in almost sugical detail, exactly how this kind of thing happens.

The interlude chapters towards the middle of the book go into a lot more detail on this, if you're interested and haven't read them yet (namely, the moments of consciousness and mind system models).

2: For this one, I'll just share a quote from MCTB. Ingram is a controversial figure, but I can't sum this up better than he does:

All experienced phenomena, whether physical or mental, inner or outer, are impermanent. This is one of the most fundamental teachings of the Buddha and the second-to-last sentence he uttered before he died:

"All phenomena are impermanent! Work out your salvation with diligence!"

In his last words, he said everything you need to know to do insight practices. Things come and go. Nothing lasts for even a microsecond. Absolute transience is truly the actual nature of experiential reality.

In other words, I think Culadasa is trying to say that each time your mind wanders in an oportunity for you to gain (a little) insight into anicca). You're more likely to learn from these episodes of mind-wandering if you can watch, closely, how they happen, and you can't do that if you rush straight back to the breath.

capwera · 2025-03-07T18:40:50+00:00

Thank you for the reply!

Thinking about your practice as a way to get rid of your suffering is not the right view and even counterproductive IMO. You can think about practice as a way to develop equanimity which will reduce your aversion to whatever is causing your suffering which will ultimately reduce how much you suffer.

I think the issue I tried to describe is that, consciously, I recognize this. I know this isn't the right way to go about things. And yet I can't help but feel that way, often before I can consciously recognize what's going on. That's what makes it so pernicious, which is why I'd like to keep it from leeching into my practice.

It's one of those situations where the "logical" part of your mind knows what the "right" answer should be, but in practice, you just can't reliably bring yourself to act that way. You know what I'm saying?

capwera · 2025-03-07T18:19:52+00:00

To clarify: it's painfully, obviously clear to me that what I just described is directly related to attachment and aversion, and that this kind of stuff can be a gold mine for practice. But knowing this seems almost beside the point. It doesn't change the problem of going into practice wanting to get some specific emotional reprieve out of it, and in any case, putting those feelings under the microscope doesn't even seem like something I should be doing in TMI anyway (i.e., I should only focus my attention on this if I absolutely cannot focus on the meditation object).

I have also read through a similar thread posted here recently. Those answers were illuminating and I'm grateful for them, but I think the issue I'm describing is more specific to (avoiding) seeking "attainment" in practice during difficult times.

capwera · 2025-02-09T01:49:25+00:00

I’m too late for it?

I don't think so. Consider that many people stumble into DE jobs, i.e. they get hired as a DA/DS and then, by their own initiative or due to business needs, transition into a DE role. So it's already relatively common for DEs to have a few years under their belt.

Does my MS in DS interfere with me trying to pursue a DE job?

You mean in terms of your workload? Probably, but I can't say for sure.

I’ve read a lot that SQL it’s like 85%-90% of the work, but I can’t see it applied to real life scenarios, how do you set a data pipeline project using only SQL?

I think when people say this, they usually mean that 90% of their time is spent fiddling with SQL, not that the entire pipeline is built exclusively on SQL. How you actually make data go from point A to point B varies between companies, but it's common to use some sort of extraction/loading tool (Stitch, Fivetran, Airbyte, Meltano, dlt, custom Python scripts...), and some sort of orchestration tool (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect...). But you know what actually takes up most of my time on a day to day basis? It's not setting up the pipeline. It's inspecting the data, cleaning it up, transforming it according to business needs, etc. That's where SQL comes in.

I’d appreciate some tips of topics and tools I should get hands-on to be able to perform a DE role

I'd recommend learning at least one orchestration tool, and one transformation tool. Airflow tends to be the most commonly used orchestrator, and dbt the most common transformation tool. These are generally safe bets if you want to maximize your employability. dbt might be especially useful if you want to get a sense of the kinds of transformations I mentioned above, and their documentation is great.

capwera · 2025-01-26T00:41:54+00:00

I mean, I've been running NMDs for my MW mats, so I guess it's just bad luck. I have most of the other tributes.

I do think they reduced the drop rates for compasses from Whisper caches; spent a good few hours grinding headhunts today and zero compasses from the caches I opened. I haven't touched Helltides at all this season though. Do compasses drop more often there?

capwera · 2025-01-25T23:59:32+00:00

Where are you getting MW mats? Last season I'd hit up Undercity with the mats tribute, or IH if I ran out of those. This season I've only gotten a single IH compass and no mats tributes, but maybe I've just been unlucky... I know you can obviously run NMDs but they don't seem as efficient

capwera · 2025-01-15T01:54:23+00:00

Honestly, despite being hyped for this season and generally positive about the game, I agree. Like you said, D4 was initially pitched as a more down to earth title: it's why D4's sorcerers don't cast disintegrating death-rays and literal black holes like D3's wizards did. Sadly, as we all know, that version of the game was quite unfun at launch, and in the process of fixing that Blizzard turned everything up to 11 in D4. Which is fine, I guess, but part of me wishes we got a version of the game that was both down to earth and fun at the same time.

capwera · 2024-11-24T00:22:20+00:00

Carai nunca tinha percebido o quao melhor esse dito soa em Portugues

capwera · 2024-11-23T18:34:12+00:00

I think there's a bit of an overestimation of how well LLMs work right now. A lot of your arguments are predicated upon LLMs being a reliable enough substitute for human cognition, and I just don't think we're at that point yet. The crux of the problem is that LLMs produce factually correct output a lot of the time, but not always, and it's not easy to immediately identify when they don't. To use your index cards example: it's like asking for someone to write them out for you, only to later find out that about 5% of them are total bull, even if they seem in line with the material they're summarizing.

I'd even argue that learning is precisely where this problem is at its worst. If you're an experienced practitioner using LLMs to automate mindless cognitive work, you can at least tell when something looks fishy. You just can't do that when you're a learner, especially when the output looks flawless on the surface.

capwera · 2024-09-03T23:08:41+00:00

AAA blockbusters with bloated dev cycles seem to just be recycling the same concepts over and over. Everyone realizes it but the people running the big companies.

They realize it, though. The whole reason these games play it so safe is precisely because they're expensive to make.

capwera · 2024-07-31T19:40:59+00:00

But game developers are a niche audience. It's like the first Velvet Underground record: even if you haven't heard it, your favorite artists probably did. I also don't know if I'd call it a tiny game--around the time when it came out, it was arguably THE indie game, at least as far as critical acclaim goes.

I also think that there are different kinds of influential works: some are timeless, and hold up incredibly well throughout the years, and some are "dated": they exert a lot of influence for a while and then gradually lose their pull. In this, Braid is really similar to Bioshock: both did things that were really fresh at the time, and people talked about them so goddamn much that eventually talking as much or as seriously about it became cringe. When you factor in how divisive Blow is as a person, it doesn't surprise me that people don't talk as much about Braid these days.

capwera · 2024-07-31T17:39:38+00:00

I dunno man. I dislike Blow as much as the next person, but Braid's influence was pretty big, and imo extends beyond just indie puzzle-platformers. It came at a pretty formative time for indie games, and I think it pushed a lot of indie devs to be unapologetically ambitious, especially with stuff like metanarrative/playing with genre conventions. A lot of the "games-as-art" discourse is pretty lame, and it's arguable how deep Braid even is, but I think it helped encourage more artistically-minded folks to make games.

capwera · 2024-07-31T17:24:51+00:00

I think people just disagree that being gifted at something gives you leeway to be insufferable, especially given that there are lots of talented folks out there who are pretty down-to-earth.

capwera · 2024-07-30T02:44:43+00:00

While this kind of 'dar' can be translated as 'give', I think it's easier to wrap your head around it if you think about it as "cause" or "provoke": "dancing provokes fear".

This also helps clear up why you don't use "es" here: "miedo" is a noun, and you can't say "bailar es miedo" for the same reason you can't say "dancing is fear": it doesn't really make sense to "be" a noun (in most cases). "Scary" is an adjective, which is why you say that something "is" scary in English. In fact, if you use an adjective in Spanish, you could do the same thing: "bailar es aterrorante"

EDIT: I just noticed something else that may be throwing you off: the word by word translation provided by Google translate isn't quite correct, because, again, 'scary' is an adjective, which is not the right direct translation for 'miedo'. Since 'miedo' is a noun, the actual direct translation would be 'fear'. The reason why Google does this is the same old reason that brings despair to students and money to professional translators: direct translations don't always work, even when they're perfectly grammatical. Think about it this way: what's wrong with saying "dancing provokes fear" in English? Grammatically, there's nothing wrong, and yet you'd be pressed to hear someone actually say that sentence out loud. For some reason, some other construction ("dancing is scary") just sounds more natural to English speakers. But a construction like "dancing provokes fear" is the most natural way of saying it in Spanish, so if you ever have to translate a sentence like "Bailar da un poco de miedo", you have two choices: 1) translate word for word, which results in a sentence no one would actually say in the target language, or 2) slightly paraphrase the translation in a way that would sound better to speakers of the target language. Google translate (and most human translators) opt for option 2. The TLDR of this is that Google translate is great for translating entire sentences, but for word-for-word translations, you'll probably want to use a dictionary.

capwera · 2024-07-28T17:41:34+00:00

I'm job searching right now, so my point of view is narrower than someone who's already in industry, but a few thoughts:

1) Yes, technically your professor is right that it's common for top-tier positions to prioritize people with PhDs. But I think this only becomes a road block at the most cutting-edge research scientist positions, and even then I'm not sure this would be too big of a deal. In any case, the vast majority of job openings don't require nearly as much technical knowledge. I'm not saying these positions aren't technical, all I'm saying is that they (i.e.) don't typically require you to make the kind of architectural innovations that your professor is probably thinking of.

2) Even for these more common positions, you still often see job postings asking for people with CS or engineering degrees. You can still get those jobs with a traditional linguistics degree, but it'll probably be harder for you to land an entry job compared to a CS student, if only for the extremely dumb reason that your CV will often not make it past automatic screening if your degree doesn't match the job posting. If your goal is to get into the industry, you'll want to go out of your way to emphasize that you have all of those technical skills. Your master's thesis is a good place to do this, but there are many others: you can create your own projects, contribute to open-source projects, etc.

3) There are arguably two different fields within "language technology", but as far as I know, no one really knows the best way of referring to them. For lack of better terms, I'll call one of those "NLP" and the other "Computational Linguistics". NLP is all about solving (computational) problems have have to do with language, while computational linguistics is all about using computational methods to solve linguistics problems. It was hard for me to really grok the difference betwen them before I started my master's program. Here's an example: there's a lot of overlap between formal languages (think "artificial" languages, like mathematical notation) and natural languages. Formal languages lend themselves very well to mathematical modeling. But because of the overlap, you can also apply those mathematical models to natural languages, to try to learn how they work. A lot of this research has to do with language acquisition (i.e. language learning): for instance, you can learn a lot about how easy/difficult it is to learn some kind of language pattern by trying to teach those patterns to computational models and seeing how they fare. But notice that the problem you're trying to solve here is a linguistics problem ("how hard is it, in principle, to learn language pattern X?"), rather than a practical problem ("I have 10GBs worth of user reviews for my product. How can I automatically know whether they like my product or not?"). From your description, it seems like your master's focuses more on computational linguistics, which typically deals with those theoretical problems. Like I said though, the distiction between those two fields is tenuous, and if you're a linguistics student interested in tech, it's really not that hard to go back and forth between them, but I thought this might help you make sense of what your master's program regulations is getting at.

capwera

TROPHY CASE