#Open Learning Programs

[dbuodl]

Open and Distance Learning Programs

At DBU Open and Distance Learning, we believe that education should be made accessible to all, wherever they may be and whatever their time schedule. Our university is NAAC A+ accredited and UGC approved. We have numerous undergraduate and postgraduate degrees that are of equal quality and challenge to on-campus education. Join a learning community that values new ideas, flexibility, and student success.

[muffinlance]

hellooo very cool person I am just now getting into the atla fandom and I know Nothing other than your fics are very cool and great and I was wondering if you have any recs (or links to posts with recs!!) bc I trust your judgment LOL

I hope this is ok to ask!! also I will add that I am not that picky but I will add that I am very much a longfic enjoyer so🫶🫶

My friend, may I open up to you the broad world of clicking an AO3 user's bookmarks. <3

AKA: literally click any ao3 username, "bookmarks" should appear towards the top of the resulting page. You can then voyage into the additionally wonderful waters of filtering by length, "recommended", fandom, etc.

Also: if the fic you like is in collections, try checking them out, especially if the title appeals to you. Can be a great way to find essentially a fic playlist.

Anyway all hail ao3's designers they done good work

[beebfreeb]

What THE BRUSH U USE IM DYINGGG TI KNOW MEOWWWW

What brush do I use? What brush do I use?

Me? Me??? My brush? The artist who draws exclusively teeny tiny drawings with visible pixels at small resolutions?

[the-punforgiven]

I fucking hate learning 3d modelling so much I hate watching shit that starts out like "Welcome to my blender tutorial! If you don't know what you're doing please go into the description and take our miniature online course for $99.96 a month!" Like man why the fuck even make a video that's a tutorial if you're just gonna try and sell me a course in the first 30 seconds of it

[bunnydevs]

[omnificent-orion]

It's August, so I wanted to start posting all the ko-fi commissions that I've done since last summer that have been sitting in my drafts.

I started on an anthology comic this time last year that is now in the coloring stage and that's been a very, very time consuming project; I was asked not to share details until artist announcements were made, so I've been vague about it the entire time (still waiting…) Also around the same time, I got several big batch orders (I'm still working on the last batch, but I won't be uploading it here to avoid spoilers for the project) so everything took more and more time…

Thank you everyone for supporting me and waiting patiently!

[code-tryperse]

Sky using all your CPU? It's more likely than you think.

I wrote this in a comment on a Reddit post of someone complaining that Sky isn't using their GPU properly and that it's stuttering for them. However, it's detailed enough that I feel like it deserves its own post in this blog. As always, this is a very technical post. But if you like seeing how games work behind the scenes, then this might be for you.

There are many reasons why Sky doesn't use your GPU as much compared to other games. It's actually a common issue in many games, and while the general reasoning is the same, the details of it can vary. The short version is that it uses the CPU a whole lot more than your GPU. Hence, it's not using a lot of power because increasing it won't have much of an effect. The bottleneck isn't on GPU speed, and that's what higher power draw tries to address. It also does most of its work on one thread, which means that it won't display a high CPU usage, as that counts work done on all logical processors. The long version is a technical explanation of how Sky was designed and the resulting implementation decisions that were done because of it.

Disclaimer: I cannot confirm these because I do not have access to Sky's source code. All of these are hypotheses based on the game's visible behavior and general development decision making.

Long version below the cut. (This isn't in the actual comment, but this is a blog post. Come on now.)

A lot of things that Sky does is CPU-bound. As an example, unless it's been updated along with the AURORA concert which used GPU-bound procedural animations, the animations of the butterflies are done on the CPU. They created the butterfly animation system long before the AURORA concert, and with only around 80 butterflies at any given time instead of 100 thousand, it doesn't make sense to go through the trouble of making their animations run on the GPU. Stuff that requires network requests to do (e.g.: forging candles, buying spirit items, etc.) are also done on the CPU because there's no way for it to be done on the GPU. This means that unless you have a weak GPU, your CPU usually dictates the frame rate of Sky.

As an additional point, Sky does not have a lot of advanced rendering features which will use the GPU more. Remember that Sky was first designed for iOS as a casual, social game. While the option for adding advanced rendering techniques like raytracing and HDR rendering are available, doing so used more power, which isn't good for a mobile game that you play with friends. Sure, you can play it with the phone plugged and have no issues with it running out of power, but that's not as fun as playing it with your friends around you. As such, there's not a lot of tasks for the GPU to run, reducing its power usage.

Sky also does not run some things asynchronously, even if it could. What this means is that, instead of performing some tasks in a separate thread, it does them in a single thread. This means that what really matters most for Sky is single-core performance rather than multi-core performance. It's not completely single-threaded; you can see that it uses more than one logical processor when you open Task Manager. However, it's not using multithreading to its maximum capability. In particular, it does not load resources asynchronously.

Asynchronous resource loading just means that resources (e.g.: models, terrain data, textures, etc.) are loaded in a background thread, allowing the main thread to continue updating the game and continuing rendering. You can tell this behavior is happening because, when you switch areas, the game becomes unresponsive for a moment while it's loading the next area. The main thread is occupied with loading the resources, which means that it's not responding to window events and it's not rendering anything. This could actually be the reason for some stuttering that happens. When the game tries to load something, it will freeze because the game stops doing any updates and renders. I don't think this happens a lot — Sky seems to always load all resources it will need for an area when you enter it — but it's a possibility.

Because the GPU isn't being used as much, it's also not drawing as much power as other games. Doing so would just be wasteful since it'll still do just as much work for higher power usage, lowering its utilization. Better to have lower power draw but higher utilization since that gives you more power efficiency, which is beneficial for a laptop.

There's not much you can do to improve Sky's performance in this case. A lot of the bottlenecks here are on Sky's implementation rather than its settings. Most you can do is lower the game's target frame rate down to 30 FPS, but that's not going to help much. Frame rate limiting is generally done to reduce GPU load, not CPU. Plus, gaming in 30 FPS nowadays generally isn't desirable. It's still in the realm of "playable", but I wouldn't recommend playing in 30 FPS unless there's a specific reason to.

[baskeigh-ball]

Ignoring the fact that ibis had the ai paint feature a couple years before this whole ai fiasco, after seeing your post, I decided to try it out to see if it really held up. I already knew what you said made no sense, as even stuff like ai painting requires heavy human input that isn't just someone typing a prompt in a thing and looking through thousands of images and somehow still calling it 'art'. Really, it's just some weird advanced bucket.

The ibis ai paint... really sucks. I'm pretty sure it hasn't even been touched since it was added. No matter what I did, I got random colours and whatever colours I had put there looked like it were from a filter, not to mention how my lineart bled everywhere like it was blurred out.

Ibis isn't problematic for adding that feature as not only was it added ages ago, but it was also just a gimmick only added because a few more popular paid programs added them, like Clip Studio Paint. I highly doubt even the company took it seriously considering how poorly built it is. This is actually the one time I'm glad some feature in an app sucks so much.

Another reason why ibis isn't problematic by the mere feature alone is that, when you look at the artists making content during the time of that update, it was received with humour. It was something fun to try, but ultimately dismissed for actual artwork, as nobody would use it to fully paint their works. Nowadays we see something slapped with the words 'ai' and think that it's instantly bad due to the latest issues with it and big corperations/ certain production companies but it isn't. It's just a lot of people abusing what was previously some fun gimmick, which it can still be, and for certain apps, still is. Nobody throws pitchforks at character ai, after all.

You can tell just by the size of this that I'm procrastinating on something. Ima go and let this rot away in your askbox now lol

You really thought this would fade away in my ask box, mwahahaha /j

I wanna start off by saying thank you for holding me accountable, I will admit that I got buzzworded pretty hard in this situation lmao

This information came as a surprise to me-- I was seeing posts pop up within the past week complaining about the ai feature on ibis, so I assumed it was recent. As it turns out, after reading your ask, I discovered that I got a few wires crossed! Because yes, the auto paint feature I referred to in my post has been around for years now, and was never taken seriously anyways

So that was my bad (and yea ur right it's completely unusable, lmao)

But as it turns out, the feature that people have been complaining about DID come out recently. It was called the AI Example feature, I think the idea was that you make a simple drawing and the AI adds 99% of the detail and color, which I've seen a bunch of other programs do.

...and then it was immediately removed due to some pretty major backlash, which, duh

^ This is the only evidence I can find of the 11.2.0 update that included the AI feature on the actual site; their update history stops at 11.1.0. But there's also the news page about the removal of the update, so it's not like they're trying to pretend it never happened.

So tl;dr, I jumped on the hate train a little too quickly and never did enough research to figure out what the actual update was, and that it's been removed by now anyway (which I couldn't have known until today, ofc, but i did kinda post that thing about ibis today so it's still a pretty major oopsie)

I think I can say with confidence now that I agree, ibis paint isn't problematic to use-- they made a mistake with this update, but they actually listened to their users and removed it LITERALLY the next day. So, thanks for letting me know! I'll also edit my last post to prevent any misinformation, just in case people make the same mistake I did :]

[heart-ghost-studyblr]

Some screen sharing of challenging backend Java code that I was testing, although it was quite basic, to be honest.

Additionally, my notebook contained a pretty basic code base for a producer class that I wrote by hand. I want to become very skilled in creating Java classes based on the producer-consumer pattern using Kafka.

[crow-musings]

I desprately need someone to talk to about this

I've been working on a system to allow a genetic algorithm to create DNA code which can create self-organising organisms. Someone I know has created a very effective genetic algorithm which blows NEAT out of the water in my opinion. So, this algorithm is very good at using food values to determine which organisms to breed, how to breed them, and the multitude of different biologically inspired mutation mechanisms which allow for things like meta genes and meta-meta genes, and a whole other slew of things. I am building a translation system, basically a compiler on top of it, and designing an instruction set and genetic repair mechanisms to allow it to convert ANY hexadecimal string into a valid, operable program. I'm doing this by having an organism with, so far, 5 planned chromosomes. The first and second chromosome are the INITIAL STATE of a neural network. The number and configuration of input nodes, the number and configuration of output nodes, whatever code it needs for a fitness function, and the configuration and weights of the layers. This neural network is not used at all in the fitness evaluation of the organism, but purely something the organism itself can manage, train, and utilize how it sees fit.

The third is the complete code of the program which runs the organism. Its basically a list of ASM opcodes and arguments written in hexadecimal. It is comprised of codons which represent the different hexadecimal characters, as well as a start and stop codon. This program will be compiled into executable machine code using LLVM IR and a custom instruction set I've designed for the organisms to give them a turing complete programming language and some helper functions to make certain processes simpler to evolve. This includes messages between the organisms, reproduction methods, and all the methods necessary for the organisms to develop sight, hearing, and recieve various other inputs, and also to output audio, video, and various outputs like mouse, keyboard, or a gamepad output. The fourth is a blank slate, which the organism can evolve whatever data it wants. The first half will be the complete contents of the organisms ROM after the important information, and the second half will be the initial state of the organisms memory. This will likely be stored as base 64 of its hash and unfolded into binary on compilation.

The 5th chromosome is one I just came up with and I am very excited about, it will be a translation dictionary. It will be 512 individual codons exactly, with each codon pair being mapped between 00 and FF hex. When evaulating the hex of the other chromosomes, this dictionary will be used to determine the equivalent instruction of any given hex pair. When evolving, each hex pair in the 5th organism will be guaranteed to be a valid opcode in the instruction set by using modulus to constrain each pair to the 55 instructions currently available. This will allow an organism to evolve its own instruction distribution, and try to prevent random instructions which might be harmful or inneficient from springing up as often, and instead more often select for efficient or safer instructions.

[transbutchblues]

i should probably apply to some classics summer school/program/whatever. i have no money though. and it’d have to be online… but maybe it’d save me from this stupid french university whose classics degree is absolutely useless because we’re not learning anything at all. i need an intensive program or something

idk where to apply though :/ and i’m scared it’ll be even harder to understand latin/ancient greek if it’s taught in english. we don’t even learn declensions with cases in the same order… but i really need to do something that’ll make me feel like i’m actually learning classics and not just wasting my fucking time

[unheavenlycreatures]

update: local lesbian forced to learn at least very basic coding. 7 dead 32 injured

[aealzx]

what do you use for your art? ❤️

Hello person~ I hope you don't mind a lot of info dumping instead of a short answer. XD

For 90% of my art (the digital stuff) I use Paint Tool Sai 2, and a Wacom Intuos Pro medium.

Here's my brush settings in Sai, and I have my stabilizer on 10.

I prefer Sai because I haven't found any other program that does lines as good. And since lineart is my favorite part of drawing I stick with Sai even though it doesn't have all those fancy custom brushes like other programs. Sai is also pretty cheap compared to other programs (like 50-60 usd one time payment).

I do have Clip Studio EX, which I use for anything Sai doesn't work for. I use CSP instead of Photoshop because I find subscription based programs to be bullshet, and I also just like CSP's interface and feel more. CSP also tends to go on sale quite often. (I do acknowledge that professional artists in the industry need to know how to use photoshop to survive, but I am a decided hobbyist and do not care about industry standards |P )

I also picked up digital art back when screen drawing tablets didn't exist, and have gotten so used to not seeing my hand when I draw that I actually struggle with screen tablets X'D My hand is in the way, I can't see.

For traditional art I just use whatever sketchbook I've been given and like or can tolerate the paper texture of. Then my main tool pack is this:

I do have prisma colored pencils, a few alcohol markers, and some water color markers. But I hardly use them because I'm too scared to color my traditional art X'DDD

I also use SketchUp to help with backgrounds.

And of course there's my right hand, and about 19 years of obsessive practice X'DD

[alphagodith]

i think 9 times outta 10 when someone is frustrated with a tool/machine/program, it's because they are stubbornly trying to force it to do something the way THEY think it should work, instead of trying to just see how it ACTUALLY works.

like it's hardly ever a case of the thing actually not doing what it's supposed to, or what you're telling it to do. it's almost always you just telling it to do something that isn't what you really want, because you haven't bothered to experiment and observe what action results in what change.

you have to admit you don't know what you're doing and just fuck around and LEARN before you can use tools effectively. and it ain't the tool's fault if you keep just assuming and looking for specific things instead of just SEEING/ASKING what does what.

[volfoss]

update- these blender tutorials feel like they are just saying really scary words at me and i do not like it. it WILL be worth it but dear god what does literally ANY of this mean. i can understand now why theres jokes abt how difficult it is

[aidenwaites]

Started a course I found for learning programming earlier and did you guys know. It's all math