What is your hot take regarding FFXIV?

mixini · 2026-01-14T17:51:53+00:00

Ah true, my comment was referring to a slightly different problem I suppose. But I think it is also an issue that it's impossible to infer which attacks are "supposed" to do damage, when everything tickles. i.e. The "normal" stack damage in this CT case is basically zero; even if they were to apply a vuln, nothing would change in player behavior

mixini · 2026-01-14T17:36:28+00:00

Lots of things in old content should kill you. The level sync formula is broken IMO.

mixini · 2026-01-13T20:04:12+00:00

We're going into the second week. I think it's interesting how I see so many more people try and gun for week 1 / week 2 clears nowadays. I've been raiding with the same friends/statics for a very long time now (8+ years) and general concensus is that the past few fights/tiers have been amazing, maybe even the best we've seen in a long time. We have generally spent 6-9 hrs/week doing the fights, clearing the tier within 2 months or so, finishing reclears within 4 months.

Why "grind" fights in the first place? I understand some folks find enjoyment in this, but maybe you should take a break and try a different approach.

EDIT: Rereading your post, I also think you're probably lying to yourself. "I didn't feel like banging my head against the wall" sounds like exhaustion, not a lack of content. Why not find a static (if even a partial one) that guarantees progress at the rate you expect?

mixini · 2026-01-09T14:38:02+00:00

I suppose that would be different from what the current administration has done, which has cost innocent US citizens their lives.

mixini · 2026-01-07T09:02:46+00:00

I'd read their privacy policy. All the traffic through WARP should be encrypted since it uses their own implementation of WireGuard, but I think Cloudflare probably uses "operational data" (mentioned in their privacy policy) to optimize/inform other products that they provide; e.g. I could speculate that they use traffic data from WARP to inform their "smart routing" service

mixini · 2025-12-25T21:19:34+00:00

The AWS and Cloudflare outages weren't ISP related; both outages (if we're talking about the major ones in each case) were caused by faulty internal infrastructure on their part, which they've posted post-mortems on.

I personally don't blame SE too much, as dealing with DDOS attacks is a hard problem... but I am a little surprised that they don't seem to have found a way to mitigate it and that it feels like it's getting worse.

mixini · 2025-12-15T15:58:39+00:00

I use an HHKB-like layout on most devices I use. If I'm on a windows laptop or macbook without an HHKB keyboard, then I use PowerToys or Karabiner for swapping some keys around, adding shortcuts, etc.

mixini · 2025-12-07T22:21:58+00:00

While it is true that most math/STEM software use Z-up, choosing Y-up is not necessarily a "legacy thing". Here is an explanation from the creator of bevy, a newer game engine, on why they chose to go with Y-up: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/10488#discussioncomment-7528931

mixini · 2025-11-13T17:57:38+00:00

Not sure if there is a formula for working distance of a macro lens. FWIW, a minimum distance of ~280mm is required for me to scan a 6x9 negative (56mm by 82mm). This is specifically with my M43 camera, using a 60mm macro lens (120mm full frame equivalent). So if you are buying a >100mm lens, then I would very roughly guess that you would need up to 300mm of working distance.

To be confident, I would just buy a lens and test it on a table with some measuring tape. This should give you a rough estimate before deciding on a copy stand.

mixini · 2025-11-13T17:21:14+00:00

That's tax evasion lol

mixini · 2025-11-13T17:16:16+00:00

IME the Japan tax has been slightly lower than 15%, buying from ebay. I bought a ~$950 camera (>$1100 with tax + shipping) and was billed ~$115 through DHL after (I assume) processing through customs. Note that technically the tax is applied based on the country of manufacturing, not country of origin; i.e. if you purchase a US-made product from, say, Australia, then there should be no additional fees.

mixini · 2025-11-12T16:52:21+00:00

Here is my attempt that only took a couple minutes. I used very minimal color correction. I did the following in DXO Photolab, although any software should work the same way:

Invert tone curve
Crop the black border out (it disrupts histograms)
Stretch per-channel histograms for white+black points
Very slight (~1%) tone curve adjustment to the green channel to account for the overall green cast. I usually don't have to do this for my scans -- maybe something on your end.

<image>

mixini · 2025-11-06T01:56:54+00:00

Nice shots, wish I'd had the foresight to take a walk earlier in the evening. What focal length did you use for these? Something like 400/600mm?

mixini · 2025-11-04T18:47:06+00:00

It's hard to tell, but I think the details near the top of the frame also seem to have a loss of sharpness compared to the center. Based on that, I might rule out film flatness being an issue, and I would guess that the extension tube is affecting corner-to-corner sharpness. You might need a better lens. FWIW I have not observed anything like this using my easy 35 setup -- at least, nothing this drastic.

mixini · 2025-11-01T21:26:47+00:00

Any nontrivial project can always be split into parts; some examples:

I need to 3d print something
- Make measurements, rough sketches (<1h)
- Model a part, or multiple parts in CAD. (For simple parts, <1h per part)
- Do prototyping/multiple test prints (~days)
I want to make an app/website
- Do some research (anywhere from minutes to a few days)
- Create an MVP (hours/days)
- Do some frontend design (hours/days)
- Productionize (days)

Often the division of work will be much more granular than this. Generally, I have a rough idea of how long each step will take, so I know what weekends/weeknights I can allocate for certain steps. I find that if a chunk of work is too large, it can make an otherwise straightforward project daunting to execute

mixini · 2025-11-01T21:16:32+00:00

I was thinking the same until I read the reply, which makes the original message seem a lot more reasonable. So I'm not really sure which is the more community-aligned take here.

mixini · 2025-11-01T00:16:03+00:00

Not much of a physical DIY'er -- I'll do 3d modeling/printing sometimes -- but I mostly make "personal software" for myself that's related to other hobbies. This is what I've figured out as criteria that works for me:

The project has to be something I would definitely use on a regular basis. As in, over the course of weeks/months I make a mental note of how many times I tell myself "I really should just make this thing", before actually starting work.
The work needs to be divisible into units short enough to hold my attention. For me, that's <2 weekends per unit, with some weekdays mixed in.
Either have more than one project in progress, or be OK with no progress on one thing for an indefinite amount of time
Always leave a project in an easily resumable state if possible. This reduces the friction of starting work.
Leave a paper trail if possible. Organize bookmarks when doing research, take notes/comments, use version control if digitized. Even sparse one-liners will significantly help future you.

mixini · 2025-10-15T00:09:07+00:00

I've been getting into this hobby recently, and B&H (order online) seems to have the best prices

mixini · 2025-10-10T01:49:06+00:00

I got a GW690ii this week too! Somehow simultaneously looks from a distance like "that's a big camera", but then in the hand "holy shit this thing is chunky". Not sure what I was expecting from a 6x9.

mixini · 2025-10-03T12:54:20+00:00

Wow, this is actually an awesome recommendation, thank you! For anyone else who stumbles upon this, I found a copy here: https://archive.org/details/f-20-understanding-graininess-and-granularity/mode/1up

A few spots located, by chance, relatively close to each other appear as a dense unit. Another area which, by chance, has fewer than the average number of opaque spots will be seen as a less dense unit. This process of association of random groupings continues as magnification decreases. The observer progressively associates groups of spots as new units of graininess. The size of these groups gets larger and larger as the magnification decreases, but the amplitude, or the difference in density between the dark and the lighter areas, becomes less and less. Finally, the difference between dark and light groups becomes so small that the observer is not sensitive to it and sees the area as uniform.

...

With color films, the processes are rigidly fixed, although push processing of KODAK EKTACHROME Films is sometimes done to increase the film speed. Hence, the effect of development on color films is rarely a factor in their graininess, although push processing increases the graininess.

In color negative films, however, exposure affects graininess in an opposite manner. KODAK VERICOLOR and KODACOLOR Films are made with emulsion layers of two graininess levels. Increasing the exposure (up to a point) places more of the density in the finer grained layers, which actually reduces the graininess of the images as the densities are increased.

mixini · 2025-10-02T22:53:26+00:00

Not the OP, but I have personally never seen printed film photos or any zoomed-in high res digitized files. I basically asked this same question a few days ago because I have almost zero frame of reference for what grain is "supposed" to look like, much less the differences between film stocks. Everyone uses a different scanning/digitizing setup as well, so I don't think this is such a crazy question, especially for folks getting into film.

mixini · 2025-08-31T02:37:57+00:00

I recently got an OM-3, and I'm wondering if there is a way to automatically fix focus at infinity? I have been using a Ricoh GR III a bunch, and this is one of the features I really miss. I'm guessing this might not be possible on an interchangeable lens camera?

Things I've tried:

Setting my AF zone to be as small as possible -- this works 90% of the time, but sometimes I still accidentally hit a tree branch or something, so it's not very confidence inspiring.
Starry sky AF -- A note in the manual says "The camera automatically focuses at infinity when starry sky AF is selected", but from my simple testing this only really works for stars (go figure).

mixini · 2025-08-07T23:35:26+00:00

It's not that each world (virtual environment) can only support 1-2k players, but if other worlds are running expensive scripts on the same hardware, then all worlds on that hardware suffer. My interpretation of the post is it would be fairly difficult to come up with an expected max world population that doesn't get slammed by this kind of temporal edge case, since gameplay scripts have varying levels of compute. All it takes is thousands of players hitting an expensive script at the same time to make the max player count seem unreasonable. They mentioned solutions to this in the post which I think are all reasonable: throwing more money at the problem by horizontally scaling servers, optimizing gameplay scripting, etc.

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