#i want more *language is a tool and this is how to optimally use it* content

[haru-dipthong]

Imagine languages are race cars 🏎️

There are two ways to be a language nerd: the race car driver, or the engineer.

The driver knows how to use their machine back to front. They make split second decisions without even noticing it. Their conscious mind dictates direction, while their subconscious mind controls the car with no hesitation. They are one with their tool.

The engineer knows how every little piece of the car works in tandem. They might be able to drive the race car semi-competently due to their extensive technical knowledge, but driving is not their specialty. Their focus is on knowledge of the internal workings of the car, not how to use it.

Langblr is full of people who are engineers. It can be seen throughout the “language is art” rhetoric so commonly reblogged. It’s true: language is art, and it is culture, and history. But it is also a tool. And the driver focuses all of their effort on how to use their tool (it takes a lot of time to train your subconscious mind). Meanwhile, the engineer can afford to appreciate the art in its construction, the history of the technology.

In my opinion, if you are an engineer, you are not “learning a language”. You are learning about a language.

[lightyaoigami]

☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆ how to resume ⋆｡ﾟ☾｡⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎ ﾟ

after 10 years & 6 jobs in corporate america, i would like to share how to game the system. we all want the biggest payoff for the least amount of work, right?

know thine enemy: beating the robots

i see a lot of misinformation about how AI is used to scrape resumes. i can't speak for every company but most corporations use what is called applicant tracking software (ATS).

no respectable company is using chatgpt to sort applications. i don't know how you'd even write the prompt to get a consumer-facing product to do this. i guarantee that target, walmart, bank of america, whatever, they are all using B2B SaaS enterprise solutions. there is not one hiring manager plinking away at at a large language model.

ATS scans your resume in comparison to the job posting, parses which resumes contain key words, and presents the recruiter and/or hiring manager with resumes with a high "score." the goal of writing your resume is to get your "score" as high as possible.

but tumblr user lightyaoigami, how do i beat the robots?

great question, y/n. you will want to seek out an ATS resume checker. i have personally found success with jobscan, which is not free, but works extremely well. there is a free trial period, and other ATS scanners are in fact free. some of these tools are so sophisticated that they can actually help build your resume from scratch with your input. i wrote my own resume and used jobscan to compare it to the applications i was finishing.

do not use chatgpt to write your resume or cover letter. it is painfully obvious. here is a tutorial on how to use jobscan. for the zillionth time i do not work for jobscan nor am i a #jobscanpartner i am just a person who used this tool to land a job at a challenging time.

the resume checkers will tell you what words and/or phrases you need to shoehorn into your bullet points - i.e., if you are applying for a job that requires you to be a strong collaborator, the resume checker might suggest you include the phrase "cross-functional teams." you can easily re-word your bullets to include this with a little noodling.

don't i need a cover letter?

it depends on the job. after you have about 5 years of experience, i would say that they are largely unnecessary. while i was laid off, i applied to about 100 jobs in a three-month period (#blessed to have been hired quickly). i did not submit a cover letter for any of them, and i had a solid rate of phone screens/interviews after submission despite not having a cover letter. if you are absolutely required to write one, do not have chatgpt do it for you. use a guide from a human being who knows what they are talking about, like ask a manager or betterup.

but i don't even know where to start!

i know it's hard, but you have to have a bit of entrepreneurial spirit here. google duckduckgo is your friend. don't pull any bean soup what-about-me-isms. if you truly don't know where to start, look for an ATS-optimized resume template.

a word about neurodivergence and job applications

i, like many of you, am autistic. i am intimately familiar with how painful it is to expend limited energy on this demoralizing task only to have your "reward" be an equally, if not more so, demoralizing work experience. i don't have a lot of advice for this beyond craft your worksona like you're making a d&d character (or a fursona or a sim or an OC or whatever made up blorbo generator you personally enjoy).

and, remember, while a lot of office work is really uncomfortable and involves stuff like "talking in meetings" and "answering the phone," these things are not an inherent risk. discomfort is not tantamount to danger, and we all have to do uncomfortable things in order to thrive. there are a lot of ways to do this and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. not everyone can mask for extended periods, so be your own judge of what you can or can't do.

i like to think of work as a drag show where i perform this other personality in exchange for money. it is much easier to do this than to fight tooth and nail to be unmasked at work, which can be a risk to your livelihood and peace of mind. i don't think it's a good thing that we have to mask at work, but it's an important survival skill.

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆ good luck ⋆｡ﾟ☾｡⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎ ﾟ｡⋆

[brotherconstant]

GIFMAKING TUTORIAL: PHOTOPEA (for Windows)

Screencapping

Gif Width/Size Limit/Ezgif

Loading Frames

Cropping and Resizing

Rasterize/Make Frames

Sharpening

Coloring (not detailed. Links to other tutorials included)

Exporting

Obligatory Mentions: @photopeablr ; @miwtual ; @benoitblanc ; @ashleysolsen Definitely check out these blogs for tips, tutorials and resources, they're a gold mine. Finally I recommend browsing the PHOTOPEA TUTORIAL / PHOTOPEA TUTORIAL GIF tags. DISCLAIMER: English is not my first language and I'm not an expert on what I'm going to discuss, so if anything's unclear feel free to drop another ask.

1. SCREENCAPPING -> PotPlayer (the one I use) or MVP or KMPlayer

INSTALL PotPlayer (tutorial)

Play your movie/episode and press Ctrl + G. The Consecutive Image Capturer window will pop up. Click Start to capture consecutive frames, Stop when you got what you needed.

Where it says "Image Type -> Format" I recommend picking PNG, for higher quality screencaps.

To access the folder where the screencaps are stored, type %appdata% in windows search, open the PotPlayerMini64 folder (or 32, depending on your system) and then the Capture folder. That's where you'll find your screencaps.

Admittedly MVP is a lot faster but I prefer Potplayer because it generates (at least in my case) higher quality screencaps. MVP kind of alters the hue and it made it harder for me to color my gifs. Still, if you're interested in how to use it, I recommend this tutorial.

As for KMPlayer, every tutorial out there is outdated and I couldn't figure out the new version of the software.

2. GIF WIDTH/HEIGHT, SIZE LIMIT, EZGIF OPTMIZER

At this point you should already know how big your gifs are going to be. Remember the ideal gif width(s) on tumblr are 540 px / 268 px / 177 px. These specific numbers take into account the 4 px space between the gifs. No restrictions on height. Here are some examples:

You can play around with the height (177x400, 177x540, 268x200, 268x268, 268x350, 268x400, 540x440, 540x500, 540x540 etc) but if you go over the 10 MB limit you'll either have to make your gifs smaller/delete some frames.

OR you can go on ezgif and optimize your gif, which is usually what I do. The quality might suffer a little, but I'm not really (that) obsessed with how crispy my gifs look, or I'd download photoshop.

Depending on the gif size, you can decrease the compression level. I've never had to go over 35. It's better to start at 5 (minimum) and then go from there until you reach your desired ( <10mb) gif size. Now that I think about it I should have included this passage at the end of the tutorial, I guess I'll just mention it again.

3. LOAD YOUR FRAMES

File -> Open... -> Pick one of your screencaps. The first one, the last one, a random one. Doesn't matter. That's your Background.

File -> Open & Place -> Select all the frames (including the one you already loaded in the previous passage) you need for your gif and load them.

(I recommend creating a specific folder for the screencaps of each gif you're going to make.)

WARNING: When you Place your screencaps make sure the Crop tool is NOT selected, especially if you've already used it and the width/height values have been entered. It will mess things up - I don't know why, could be a bug.

You can either select them all with Ctrl+A or with the method I explained in the ask: "when you want to select more than one frame or all frames at once select the first one, then scroll to the bottom and, while pressing Shift, select the last one. this way ALL your frames will be selected".

WARNING: Depending on how fast your computer is / on your RAM, this process may take a while. My old computer was old and slow af, while my new one can load even a 100 frames relatively fast, all things considered. Even so, I recommend ALWAYS saving your work before loading new frames for a new gif, because photopea might crash unexpectedly. Just save your work as often as you can, even while coloring or before exporting. Trust me, I speak from experience.

Now you can go ahead and delete the Background at the bottom, you won't need it anymore.

4. CROPPING AND RESIZING

Right now your screencaps are still smart objects. Before rasterizing and converting to frames, you need to crop your gif.

Technically you can rasterize/convert to frames and then crop, BUT if you do it in that order photopea will automatically delete the cropped pixels, even if you don't select the "Delete Cropped Pixels" Option. Might be another bug, unclear. Basically, if you crop your gif and then realize you cropped a little too much to the left or the right, you can go ahead, select the Move Tool (shortcut: V) and, after selecting ALL YOUR FRAMES, move them around on your canvas until you are satisfied. You won't be able to do this if you rasterize first and then crop, the excess pixels will be deleted. I don't know why, I found out by accident lol.

CROPPING

(Cropped pixels: the gray/opaque area outside of the selected area. That area disappears once you press enter and crop, but the pixels are retained, so you can move the frames around and reposition them as you like. In this case I could move the frames to the left and include Silver's figure [curly guy in the foreground] in the crop)

After deleting the Background, you will need to select all your frames (using the Shift key), use the C shortcut on your keyboard to choose the Crop tool. Or you can click on it, whatever's more convenient. Once you do that, a dropdown menu is going to appear. You need to select the "FIXED SIZE" option, as shown in the following screencap.

Once you do that, you can type in your desired width and height. Do not immediately press enter.

Your work area should now look like this. Now you can click on one of the white squares and enlarge the selected area until the edges are lined up. You can then move it around until it covers the area you wish to gif.

WARNING: to move the big rectangle around, you're gonna have to click on a random point of the work area, PREFERABLY not to close to the rectangle itself, or you might accidentally rotate it.

See? When your cursor is close to the selected area it turns into this rotating tool. Move it away until it reverts to your usual cursor, then you can start moving the rectangle. Press Enter when you're satisfied with the area you selected.

RESIZE

This isn't always necessary (pretty much never in my case) - and it's a passage I often forget myself - but it's mentioned in most of the tutorials I came across over the years, so I'd be remiss if I didn't include it in mine. After cropping, you'll want to resize your image.

IMAGE -> Image Size...

This window will pop up. Now, should the values in the Width and Height space be anything other than 540 and 400 (or the values you entered yourself, whatever they might be) you need to correct that. They've always been correct in my case, but again. Had to mention it.

5. RASTERIZE & MAKE FRAMES

Now that your screencaps are cropped, you can go ahead and convert them.

LAYER -> Rasterize (if you skip this passage you won't be able to Sharpen (or use any filter) on your frames at once. You'll have to Sharpen your frames one by one.

Photopea doesn't feature a timeline and it's not a video editor, which makes this passage crucial. When you select all your smart objects and try to apply a filter, the filter will only by applied to ONE frame. Once you rasterize your smart objects and make them into frames, you can select them all and sharpen them at once. Unfortunately this also means that you won't be able to - I don't know how to explain this properly so bear with me - use all smart filters/use them in the same way a photoshop user can. For example, you can sharpen / remove noise / add noise / unsharp mask... but you can't act on those filters in the same way a photoshop user can. When you work on smart objects you can change the blend mode - which is critical if you decide to use a filter like High Pass. If you simply apply a high pass filter on photopea you won't be able to change the blend mode and your gif will look like this (following screencaps). Or rather, you will be able to change the blend mode by clicking on the little wheel next to "High pass" (circled in green in the 2nd screencap), but you'll have to apply the filter to each frame manually, one by one.

Then you can rasterize/make into frames, but it's extremely time consuming. I did it once or twice when I first started making gifs and it got old pretty soon haha.

Layer -> Animation -> Make frames. This passage will add "_a_" at the beginning of all your frames and it's what allows you to make a (moving) gif. As I said in the ask, if you skip this passage your gif will not move.

6. SHARPENING

Some people prefer to color first and sharpen later, but I found that sharpening filters (more or less) dramatically alter the aspect of your gif and already brighten it a bit (depending on your settings) and you may end up with an excessively bright gif.

Now, sharpening settings are not necessarily set in stone. The most popular ones are 500/0.4 + 10/10, which I use sometimes. But you may also need to take into account the quality of the files you're working with + the specific tv show you're giffing. I've been using different settings for pretty much every tv show I gif, especially in the last couple months. Some examples:

followed by

OR

AMOUNT: 500% RADIUS 0.3px followed by AMOUNT: 20% (or 10%) RADIUS 10px

You'll just need to experiment and see what works best for your gifs.

Some gifmakers use the UNSHARP MASK filter as well (I think it's pretty popular among photopea users?) but it makes my gifs look extra grainy, makes the borders look super bright and it clashes with my coloring method(s), so I use it rarely and with very moderate settings. Something like this:

Again, depends on the gif and on what you like. I've seen it used with great results by other gifmakers!

REDUCE NOISE

Sometimes - and this is especially the case for dark scenes - your gif may look excessively grainy, depending on how bright you want to make it. Reducing noise can help. Keep it mind, it can also make it worse and mess up the quality. BUT it also reduces the size of your gif. Obviously, the higher the settings, the more quality will suffer.

These are my standard settings (either 2/70% or 2/80%). It's almost imperceptible, but it helps with some of the trickier scenes.

ADDING NOISE

Adding noise (1% or 2% max) can sometimes help with quality (or make it worse, just like reduce noise) but it will make your gif so so so much bigger, and occasionally damage the frames, which means you won't be able to load your gif on tumblr, so I rarely use it.

You'll also want to create ACTIONS which will allow you to sharpen your gifs much faster.

HOW TO CREATE AN ACTION ON PHOTOPEA

The Action Button (shaped like a Play button as you can see in the following screencaps) may not be there if you're using photopea for the first time. If that's the case click on the magnifiying glass next to "Account" (in red) and type "actions". Press Enter and the button should immediately show up.

Once you do that, click on the Folder (circled in yellow)

and rename it however you like.

now click on New Action (circled in red). now you can press the Recording button (circled in green)

Now

FILTERS -> Smart Sharpen

and you can enter your values. Then you repeat this passage (WITHOUT pressing rec, WITHOUT pressing new action or anything else, you just open the smart shapen window again) and, if you want, you can sharpen your gif some more (10%, 10px, or anything you want.)

Maybe, before creating an action, experiment with the settings first and see what works best.

When you're satisfied, you can PRESS STOP (it's the rec button, which is now a square) and you can DOWNLOAD your action (downwards facing arrow, the last button next to the bin. Sorry, forgot to circle it) .

You need to download your action and then upload it on your photopea. When you do, a window will pop up and photopea will ask you whether you wish to load the action every time you open the program. You choose "Okay" and the action will be loaded in the storage.

When you want to sharpen your gif, you select all your frames, then you click on the Play button, and select the Action, NOT the folder, or it won't work.

Actions can also be created to more rapidly crop and convert your frames, but it doesn't always work on photopea (for me at least). The process is exactly the same, except once you start recording you 1) crop your gif as explained in step 4, 2) convert into frames. Then you stop the recording and download the action and upload it. This won't work for the Rasterize step by the way. Just the Animation -> Make Frame step.

7. COLORING

Now you can color your gif. I won't include a coloring tutorial simply because I use a different method for every tv show I gif for. You normally want to begin with a brightness or a curve layer, but sometimes I start with a Channel Mixer layer to immediately get rid of yellow/green filters (there's a tutorial for this particular tool which you will find in the list I mention in the link below)

[Plus I'm not really an authority on this matter as my method is generally... fuck around and find out. Two years of coloring and I still have no idea what I'm doing. 70% of the time.]

Simple Gif Coloring for Beginners -> very detailed + it includes a pretty handy list of tutorials at the bottom.

8. EXPORTING

Now you can export your gif. Some gifmakers export their (sharpened) gifs BEFORE coloring and then load the gifs on photopea to color them. I'm not sure it makes any difference.

FILE -> EXPORT AS -> GIF

(not colored, just sharpened)

As you can see, unlike photoshop the exporting settings are pretty thread bare. The only option available is dither - it sometimes help with color banding - which, and I'm quoting from google for maximum clarity:

"refers to the method of simulating colors not available in the color display system of your computer. A higher dithering percentage creates the appearance of more colors and more detail in an image, but can also increase the file size."

SPEED

When you export your gif, it will play at a very decreased speed (100%). I usually set it at 180/190%, but as for every other tool, you might want to play around a little bit.

GIF SIZE/EZGIF OPTIMIZER (See Step 2)

And that's it.

P.S.: worth repeating

Save your work as often as you can, even while coloring or before exporting.

[grogumaximus]

As a performance engineer, he is the man who keeps an eye on all the data in a complex world like Formula 1 and leaves no stone unturned to see how to get even more speed out of the RB20. “For example, I can see how the tires behave individually, how high the temperature of the brakes is and how the hybrid systems of the engine behave,” says Hart in the Red Bull hospitality area.

Together with Lambiase, Michael Manning and David Mart, he is part of the regular group of engineers around world champion Verstappen.

“And GP is the one who talks to Max during sessions, so he has to filter all our information and assess what he finds relevant to pass on to Max. And then as a driver he now has an enormous library of experience. Max is ultimately the best sensor. He senses what he is up against and can make it very clear whether he wants to try something different and what exactly. He is very direct and knows what he wants. There is no room for politics or bullshit.”

In order to be able to empathize with Lambiase's work, Hart occasionally takes his position as race engineer, as was the case on Friday during both training sessions in Imola. Hart explains how a weekend is broadly divided.

“First we have to make sure that the car behaves as we expected. Then we look at how we can get more out of the speed over one lap. Where do we lose time in the bends, does Max feel limited somewhere at the beginning or at the end of such a bend? We then look at the longer runs and how we can protect ourselves against possible dangers.”

With the help of his engineer, a driver can adjust the necessary things on his steering wheel, for example when it comes to the brake balance or the differential. As far as Verstappen and Red Bull are concerned, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last year is a good example of this. For Verstappen, that race in Baku was the turning point in the season.

“In those first four races, Checo (teammate Sergio Pérez, ed.) and Max were close together. But in terms of setup and the tools he uses, Max has gone in a completely different direction since that race in Baku. He has twelve so-called switch positions that he can use. He tested many of them in Baku, while normally you use two or three in a weekend. Max learned a lot then, and so did we."

Since that race in Baku, more than a year ago, Verstappen has not won only three races. While the Dutchman himself is almost never completely satisfied with how a race weekend is going, this also appears to apply to his engineers.

“Coincidentally, we were still talking about it together on Thursday evening. We as engineers are a bit like the goalkeepers in football. It's only when we make a big mistake that it becomes noticeable. We have to keep pushing to see if we can improve anything in areas where we are not yet performing optimally. And even if we are faster than the rest in every corner, we are still not satisfied and we look at where we have left something behind. Everything worked great in China, and then in Miami with the same car we didn't have the speed. And then afterwards you can understand so well why that is, here in Imola there is a completely different asphalt, the conditions are different and the tire compounds are also different.”

Given the immense pressure and expectations, Hart considers Verstappen's victory in 2021 in front of his own audience in Zandvoort as his personal highlight. The Englishman started working as Alex Albon's performance engineer in 2020 before being transferred to Verstappen the following year.

“With Alex we mainly looked at how we could close the gap with Max with the same material. With Max you look less at the other side of the garage. His experience, not only in Formula 1 but also with other cars, helps us. Actually, after a racing weekend I am also a kind of translator. In the debrief Max tells us what his limitations were. Drivers speak their own language. We then look at his words with the people in the factory in combination with the collected data.”

And yes, Verstappen may be the most important sensor, but he also sometimes has to rely on the information from his engineers on the pit wall and in the garage. They now have the complete overview.

“Especially in races where we play the longer game ,” says Hart. “We can see what the lap times of the other drivers are and how the different tires are worn. For example, if we say that Max needs to change something on his handlebars, he may well think: the balance is now just right. But then we have to prepare for later in the race. If you wait until the front tires are on, you will be too late. We always have to think one step ahead, otherwise you go too slowly.”

[shelandsorcery]

Astronomics Game Art : Designing Mining Equipment!

Gonna talk this week about designing mining equipment for the sci-fi game Astronomics - demo on steam right now! - And I thought I'd start with a little conversation about research and process (...that doesn't really have on a much art in it but just stay with me) and maybe get to tap in a little bit into how someone like me who doesn't do a lot of technical design learned a lot about how to get excited about that whole field through the research stage of this game.

So when I say research I really do mean fairly old-school research — and this is probably gonna be a theme with a lot of the posts about this game in particular, because I don't think you can build sci-fi without some understanding of engineering systems and current scientific realities to then play with, you know?

As you may gather from the trailer, Astronomics is a game about asteroid mining, among other things. Which meant that we had a lot of need for legit industrial feeling props and tools for the player to use, things that felt functional and believable without feeling complicated or delicate. I really enjoy the challenge of adding appeal to something that maybe people don't always think about being appealing or fun or cute (this is never an absolute statement — there's always somebody already able to see more appeal in any given subject and I could ever imagine) so part of the research stage is going and looking for that appeal. So above you can see a sheet of loose rough sketches I did in clip studio paint from reference that I gathered with the rest of the team and by myself that seemed relevant to some of the designs we were pursuing.

If you've had the chance to play the demo, you'll know that it's not just surface mining but we are going to be letting you mind gases and liquids and underground mineral veins as well — these are all things that people do in the real world of course, so process one was taking a quick look at those actual industries and then figuring out how I could condense that activity down into a pretty simple and easy to understand machine.

So turned out what we needed was something that drilled and dug, something that pumped liquids, something that sucked air, and all of these things needed to then produce some sort of container to hold what they had collected.

In a videogame you really need to communicate to the player why each act they do is significant and different from the others, and as the art director it was my job to figure how to do that through visual design of the tools they're going to be using. So that meant that even though you could certainly store liquid and gas and solid resources in the same kind of box, I wanted to try and find ways to keep each thing feeling different. Best case scenario is that you're able to look at a prop we've designed and know in a split second which of these three states of matter it will be containing; in the research stage one of the things I'm looking for is any existing visual language that we have (in this Western English-speaking North American videogame audience culture) that already solves this problem.

The great thing about industrial design is that they indeed have very intentionally tackled this problem. Part of it is purely physics optimization that the field of engineering has been working towards for human history. For example, when you're storing liquid and you want to remove all of it from a container you probably don't want something with corners — that's how you end up with cylindrical liquid storage. When you're storing a gas you're likely keeping it under pressure, which means you need a shape that will withstand pressure evenly, which means you're looking for something with literally no corners or edges ideally — and that's how you end up with bubble-shaped gas storage like a propane canister. And then when you're storing something solid and you want to use the space most efficiently and be able to stack whatever it is that you have packed it into, you have a box.

Real good news is, a box and a cylinder and a sphere are all wonderfully visually distinct shapes in a fantastically strong place to start when it comes to solving the question of storage. So then we get into the challenge of the machines themselves — what distinguishes a drill from a pump from a vacuum?

So that's the beginning of some of the questions that you have to answer when you're designing props for a game — in the research stage is only one of bunch of different ways you start figuring out these answers. But I want to talk for just a second a little bit about how I personally wrangle my research, because I am definitely not telling you this is the only way to do it. It seems like it may be worth explaining what I get out of this process and see if anything here make sense for you!

One of the reasons that I have this huge page of sketches, big and detailed or tiny and loose, all laid out in one place for me to look at, is because I personally learn and remember things more strongly by taking notes. With my hand holding a pencil ideally. And when they're abstract concepts or verbal or numerical then I'll use writing and I won't have a problem with it, but my job at this stage was not to figure out abstract concepts or to find themes — my job was to solve visual problems. So my first order of business was visual research specifically. Now for me, that involves lots of things — I have a Pinterest board for any sort of subcategory of stuff I'm researching to just do enormous broad research with; then I probably bring most of those images into a huge working .PSD file and move them around to create groupings. And then I start drawing.

I really think that drawing is integral for me at this stage. I don't think I could do this without drawing as part of my research. There's so much that I just don't bother noticing if I'm not going to be drawing the thing that I'm looking at; even the worst, fastest, sketchy as drawing makes me pay infinitely more attention to something then I do when I am simply collecting information mentally. I'm phrasing this in a somewhat exaggerated, self-deprecating way, but I really can't exaggerate how much more I get out of things when I sit down and draw them. They talk about drawing is a way of seeing, and for me that's a practice I've intentionally pushed and explored in my life.

The other thing, though, is that visual problem that I need to solve. Sometimes solutions to the problem aren't obvious until they are visualized — it can be very easy to get distracted by things like surface details and miss the silhouette language, or vice versa, but when you are doing the drawing you have to wrestle with the silhouette and the details and make decisions about them. Visual trends appear way more clear when you are drawing something for the 10th time as opposed to simply seeing it for the 10th time. And all of the layers of cultural meaning and context that clutter up a photograph can be simply ignored as you transfer only what you need to a drawing, where you might discover something that everything else hid until then. Beyond that, one of the things you may notice about the sketches is that they are somewhat cartoony — I'm certainly trying to capture important details and be representational to a degree, but much like gesture drawing the human figure, researching this way lets me start finding out what the gestures are of these different sorts of subject matter. This is something that I knew about creature design, and about flora design, and one of the real joys of this game in particular was proving to myself that this gesture approach applied to industrial machines and technology as well.

I mean, I knew that there were cute trucks out there, but gosh.

I think if you are in need of something to reinvigorate a particular piece of subject matter for you — if you're designing something that you are just not that excited about, or if you don't feel challenged by the work in front of you — I really think sitting and sketching from reference can open up the complexities and help push you and your work farther. It certainly works for me and I know that the learning I did on this game is something I carry with me to future projects as well.

That seems like a pretty strong place to leave this post in particular, but I'll be back later this week with more breakdowns and screen caps of the actual design process of all of our adorable mining equipment!

I would really love to hear from folks if you also engage in similar research processes before going into full design mode — or if you have a completely different way to get your mind revved up and ready to go, I would really enjoy reading about it!

In the meantime, if you're curious about mining asteroids but it's cute please feel free to check out the Astronomics demo on steam, I made an awful lot of visdev art for this and handed it off to some incredible game creators who have done some really impressive stuff taking their ideas and my ideas and running to honestly some pretty new and exciting places with them.

[headspace-hotel]

Oh man, I have some THOUGHTS (as in, I agree with you and I have another side to contribute from a similar opinion) and a STORY-

I started an AI art project recently, mostly about playing with absurdist concepts, shitposts taken to their logical extreme, the weirdness that really only comes from asking for an absurd concept from an inhuman mathematical model that doesn't understand what makes it absurd and tries to take it as seriously as anything, using the freedom to rework from the ground up almost instantly as an expression of what ADHD is like, and all kinds of other stuff like that, with the aim of recreating or modifying them in physical media.

Yesterday I decided to do something pretty serious from step 1 with it and write down my thoughts about how it's used for...pretty shallow, anti-artistic, and even outright malicious ends, put it in flowery poetic language, and feed THAT to the AI as a prompt.

First attempt gave me some pieces I'm going to be working into physical pieces as planned today!

Second attempt got weird. I was working with a model that is notoriously bad at making human faces in any style. It gave me MULTIPLE good, coherent human faces in MULTIPLE styles. Some had some AI wonk, but were still significantly more lifelike than what you'd usually get if you asked it for a face, even a single known one. Some...looked human-drawn at first glance. The level of detail and coherence was actually terrifying. I even reverse image searched them to make sure it wasn't just recreating one specific thing by accident and that absolutely wasn't the case! One of them clearly took inspiration from the Mona Lisa (likely because that's the portrait that will show up the most if you ask around about the nature of art itself) but the face was 1) exaggerated in the kind of way that usually confuses this model and makes it create just a creepy swirling void instead and 2) more coherent than you usually get asking for a differently styled variant of the Mona Lisa!

It is haunting me. It almost feels like the computer itself saying something about not wanting to be used for some shallow and greedy bastardization of art - I know that's silly to presume as a literal interpretation, of course, but it sure did stir one hell of an emotion.

Like art is supposed to.

This is why I find it...absolutely unbearable how people use this technology just to make shallow pieces with a nice immediate visual impact for quick viewing and treat the uncanniness that appears when you look deeper as a non-element, because imo if you want to treat it as actual art, that weirdness - and what words reduce it unexpectedly - should be some of THE defining elements that set it apart from any other tool you could use!

And if I had the space to complete the project I would totally generate my OWN uncanny flowery cathedral, invite people to look at it until the weirdness sets in, and then unveil a physical model of it in all of its bizarre and unreal glory.

Yes absolutely

I have a sideblog that I post to occasionally, @ai-generated-xenobiology , that plays with the weirdness of the medium a lot. The images there are mainly generated using a combination of several keywords.

I thought, why not interpret uncanny AI generated landscapes as alien worlds, which WOULD be uncanny to us, and figure out how to optimize that?

I've also messed with inputting images to influence the final result and with editing results and using them as inputs again. Which is a lot more "human influence" than otherwise would be included.

See, I think this is thought provoking art because the uncanny nature of it is a feature, not a bug—it invites you to keep trying to figure out "What am I LOOKING at?" and I think the "otherness" is great. Cool inspiration.

I think the unreal flower cathedral would be great. Imagine an art piece that really messes with the perceptual boundary between "natural" and "man made" space. Impossible geometry but in a "natural" setting. Lots of possibilities.

[signanothername]

do you have any spare rescue bots headcanons,,? :]

I’m so glad you asked cause i do >:)

Imma divide them by the four main bots to make it more organized then imma put more generalized headcanons below it

Enjoy and feel free to snatch any of these to become your own if you want to

———

Heatwave

-When he wants to clear his head, he loves going on a water adventure, and by water adventure i mean he’d turn to a boat and stray as far away from land as possible, then completely stop in the middle of the ocean, letting the waves drift him off to whatever direction they please, the isolation combined with the rhythm of the waves help

-his constant martial arts training is not only his way of venting, but his way to calm the anxious thoughts of being unable to protect his family when they truly need him

-finds difficulty in distinguishing between what he wants and what he truly needs (for example, being on team Prime is what he wants, being a rescue bot alongside his friends who he knew for a millenia is what he needs)

-gives off so much youngst child energy, I like to believe he’s the youngest of the group, ironically, despite his arrangement in the age ladder, he has eldest daughter syndrome

-naver uses words to express his love for his family, but always shows it through the little things he does like chasing zombie hamsters when Blades tells him to, his love language is acts of service

-He and Hightide become good friends actually, grumpy meanie on the outside, absolute softy on the inside duo

-besties with Quickshadow

-the reason he seems angry all the time is cause he doesn’t really know how to express his emotions any other way, anger is easier to translate into actions

-speaking of anger, I’d say he’s become angrier than he used to be, all due to different circumstances like waking up from stasis to find out his home is gone, having to pretend to be a lifeless machine and getting used to their new home, anger is just another word for grief

-and speaking of finding out Cybertron is dead, he blames himself to an extent, self loathing for not being part of the fight, and that’s why he’s so adamant about joining team Prime at the beginning (it absolutely is not his fault)

-greatly enjoys hugs, he’d just never admit it (not that he needs to, his fam got him <3)

-he finds kids incredibly annoying, yet he loves them dearly, he has a big mom mode

-speaking of mom mode, HW is what you’d call a Mama-bear

-he’d never admit it, but he likes his boat mode far more than any of his other modes

———

Boulder

-boulder sometimes wishes he could use different art mediums like digital art, but is unable to due to his size, which then is solved when his family makes a screen big enough for him to use with an art program to try out

-while emotionally intelligent, he sometimes struggles with expressing his emotions through words, that’s why art is great for him as a tool to express himself, he doesn’t need words when he can draw his feelings

-outta the bots he misses Cybertron the most, but is the best at coping with his loss compared to the others

-I like to believe he’s the oldest, and while HW is usually the one to take care of the team, Boulder acts as a mediator (and as the voice of reason) when HW’s anger gets the better of him

-he’s the sunshine the team desperately needs, his optimism and kindness is contagious in the best possible way

-he strives to make everyone happy, which means he sometimes forgets that his own happiness matters too

-autism creature

-the best at social interactions

———

Chase

-Chase enjoys games that gives him a challenge and makes him use his brain, like chess and jigsaw puzzles

-also autism creature

-he and Blades are super close, and that’s in part due to the fact they’re both middle children, Chase would be second oldest

-Protective of Blades

-his love for laws is both cause they’re interesting to him, and cause they make more sense to him then the mess that is life which can be really unpredictable

-isn’t afraid to speak what’s on his mind, good at being polite while doing so tho

-loves to go on late night rides with Charlie

-a workaholic night owl, yet an early bird, yes both at the same time, Heatwave keeps an eye on him to make sure he recharges and doesn’t work himself to death

-loves writing actually and while bad at it, it doesn’t stop him from keeping it up, happy creator goals

-relies upon his brain rather than heart most of the time, yet to find a balance between both

-has high pain tolerance and low pain sensitivity, which means he sometimes doesn’t realize how hurt he is unless it’s really bad

-low empathy, compassionate still

———

Blades

-has Thanatophobia (aka death anxiety, which is an intense fear of death whether for one’s own life or the death of people they love, i like to believe his fear is in line with the death of loved ones)

-second youngest

-Adhd-er, fixates super hard on tv shows

-has nightmares, goes to Chase for comfort

-opposite of Chase, low pain tolerance and high pain sensitivity, which makes getting hurt an absolute nightmare, jinxed to always get hurt in some way shape or form

-don’t let him know about horror games, he’d play them nonstop

-really emotionally sensitive, has abandonment issues

-gender? what’s that? Literally uses he/him mainly simply cause people used that for him and he honestly doesn’t care so he went with it, any pronouns queen

-if he could, he’d wear a lot of dresses

-clouds are his worst enemy

-a lot smarter than what he’s given credit for, despite his anxiety, as an emergency medical bot, he has the best sense of danger and is the best at assessing the situation around him

-loves to receive compliments from those who don’t impress easily (Hightide and Heatwave)

———

General headcanons

-HW and Quickshadow train together sometimes

-Quickshadow loves to finish rescue missions before any of the bots arrive sometimes cause she loves to piss off HW, bestie goals

-despite Blurr’s behavior with HW, Blurr genuinely looks up to him, too bad HW has a bit of a thick skull to realize it

-Blurr loves to make up quotes that he then claims to have been said by some of the great leaders of cybertron, he’d say shit like “ as Optimus Prime himself once said ‘there’s not greater strength than speed’”

-Salvage is a unique embodiment of the “looks like a cinnamon role, can actually kill you” meme, he’s a gentle giant but also can kill you if he gets angry enough, which doesn’t happen easily which means you have to be such a douchebag to anger him tho you can save yourself cause he’s also easy to calm

-Blurr has raced against Knockout at least once without realizing it

-after the war ended, the rescue bots had to deal with some negativity concerning how “they never got their hands dirty” aka never fought in the war, they got through it together tho, Hightide (as a respected bot) doesn’t let them get hated under his watch whenever he’s around

-Hightide’s fave bot is Blades, no one needs to know about that tho

———

Those are the headcanons i can think of atm hahaha

Hope you enjoyed

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

Hi! Apologies for the sudden not-hypmic related question. I've recently picked up learning japanese and I was wondering if you could recommend some resources? There are so many and I'm not sure what's good and what's not... Thank you in advance!!

Hmm... I've made some comments on this in the past, but a conversation with an old coworker a couple years back (his argument being "I chose this program because the gamification will help me to stick with it and enjoy myself, even if it doesn't always teach me accurate things") has given me enough to think about that I'd like to change my answer to something... well, perhaps less cut and dry in terms of recommendation. But perhaps more helpful.

As you said, there are a myriad of options out there for learning Japanese from English, and it can be overwhelming to determine which to use, especially as they'll all try to sell you on whatever is the best or optimal way to learn.

But "best" is a subjective term dependent on how you learn and, more importantly, your learning goals. You will gain ability in whatever you study and practice, but this does not mean that your Japanese knowledge will be applicable in other areas. If your goals include being able to hold conversations in Japanese, then part of your practice should include talking out loud with Japanese speakers. If you'd like to be able to read manga in Japanese, then reading simple manga is an effective practice. If you want to be able to write work emails in Japanese, then taking business Japanese courses and writing practice emails are both smart ideas.

Your learning adventure can be as broad or narrow in scope and depth as you like, because it's yours! If you're interested in being able to conduct your whole life in Japanese, then you'll need to practice everything you already do in other languages in Japanese. Or, if you're interested in picking up a couple basics purely for fun, then an intro class or an app on your phone might be all you need to satisfy your goals.

In terms of determining if a program or learning tool is helpful for you, I find that Tofugu's reviews are usually detailed enough to be a good place to start.

[libraryofbronze]

So, You Wanna Write A Sex Scene?

So, one thing that I have seen a lot when people try to write sex is that they tend to focus on the physical over the emotional. Now, now, I get what some of you might say. ‘’Bronze, what a girly thing. Who cares about emotions? Just get to the fucking!’’

But, hypothetical person, what if I told you the emotions are important? They help you to invoke the scene, they build the characters and the momentum. The fucking - the physical act - is the climax of the story but you need to make your readers want it.

Think of it like this. There are only so many ways that you can write ‘’They fucked and it felt good.’’ As a commissioned writer, I swear I’ve done nearly all of them by now. when you do it a lot, you start to realise how, well, limited it is. You find yourself writing the same things again and again because there are only so many ways to convey the pleasure, the spikes, the peaks and valleys of the act. By focusing only on the actions, you deny yourself an avenue of description and flavour that you can use to break up the direct action of the scene. Added to this, grounding your readers via the use of emotion is sexy!

For some kinds of writing, it can be downright vital!

Let me give you two examples:

‘’Davis reached over to her, running his palms along her naked body. Sarah shivered; her body crying out for more. She shifted, spreading her legs for him, showing him how wet she was. How much she wanted him in a way that he couldn’t miss.’’

Now, the above passage works. It’s what I’d call passable. I mean, I wouldn’t show it to a client, but for a first draft? It’s solid enough. It gets to the point pretty well and tells you that these two are about to fuck.

Now let’s do it again with a splash more emotive writing!

‘’Sarah trembled, excitement and dread corded her muscles. She couldn’t believe this was happening! The air caught in her throat. Her face burned, and she wanted to look away. Davis leaned over her, his palms tracing her naked body. Discovering and exploring, his touch sent little sparks of heat flashing through her mind.

‘’She swallowed. She wanted to speak. She wanted to beg for more. She wanted him to fuck her like he never had before. She felt like a schoolgirl exploring herself for the first time. When words failed her, Sarah spread her legs, exposing herself to him. Embarrassment washed across her face, the dripping wetness of her pussy made her want all too plain.’’

You can see that it’s basically the same scene but with the added emotive flare, it draws you in and locks you down. You can feel how desperate Sarah is, how turned on she is. The fact that she is conflicted, torn between want and confusion. Unable to ask for more but desperate to take things further.

That’s the power of emotive writing. A lot of erotica that I have seen online - and I don’t mean specifically here - focuses super hard on the the actions. On the solid. The fucking, the motion, the scene. But the really good erotic blends both emotion and scene. By laying out how your characters feel, you heighten the sexuality.

Humans are emotional beings, we respond to emotions. Emotion is a tool that any writer should learn to use. When someone comes to me to ask how to write better sex scenes, I always say that this is the first step.

Don’t just tell, show.

Now of course, just like any literary technique, this can be taken too far. The dreaded purple prose waits just down the road and if you don’t control yourself, you can drown out the action with the emotive language. You need to strike a balance, find exactly where you should perch. Too little emotive work and your sex scene is dry and uninteresting. too much and you never actually get to the sex.

Want to know what makes it even more bullshit? Depending on the type of scene, the optimal mix will change! For example, if you’re doing someone’s first time or something that’s supposed to be highly charged, emotive writing should skew way to the fore. It gives the impression of how supercharged they are, how they are in turmoil, or so excited that they can barely think. But if you applied that sort of detail to every scene, it would quickly get annoying!

You gotta do you. You gotta find the right balance for your own particular style and for the genre and type of scene that you’re working on.

All right, that’s a big enough post to test the waters. If you’re interested in more, let me know. If this helped you at all, let me know. If you wanna offer advice of your own? feel free to do it!

Next time, I’m gonna talk about the other side of sex scenes. The action side, and how I’ve found to make it work.

[thethinkingaurora]

Yo. How do you code? (I only know the basics to HTML and CSS :/)

Idk which specific question you’re asking, like like how do I code as in what tools do I use, or what do I do and what is my process, or how did I learn to code, or can you teach me to code

And because I don’t know I’ll answer all of them :3

1. What tools do I use?

I use a few things to code, VS Code for actually writing the code, GitHub for storing projects and collaboration, Google and StackOverflow and depending on the project various other apps

2. How do I do it and my workflow process

Uh I have like no idea, I kinda just learn how certain things work via Google and then I slot them together, But the workflow process, I know exactly how to do that, ok so get a white board or a notepad or something, write what you want your program to do, and then break it down into steps and then break it down again and again, so for example,

For my current project, (The Incorrect Quote Generator), I need to take inputs, from a list of quotes choose one that fits the parameters, replace names in the quote with the inputted ones and then print the whole thing

Breaking down the first bit I need the inputs, what inputs do I need? I need the amount of characters and the names of the characters, ok done, second bit, take the quotes, sort them based off of character amount, using the amount of characters from the previous step, pick a set of quotes that match, replace the names, last bit, take the quote with it replaced and done

Breaking down again, first bit, done already, second bit, do we want something like autocapitalisation to make it nicer , yeah sure, what about capitalising the entire name if it fits the circumstance, makes it smoother, done, last bit done

Ok what about formatting, do we want all of this on one line or do we want separate lines for each person speaking, yeah we want separate lines, ok use an “&” symbol to represent a space and when the piece of code that assembles the end string encounters it, print the string and reset continuing from where we are to make a new line

That’s the design process for that

But first you make a prototype of it, to see if it works, like I didn’t have the autocaps or anything at first, I only added that when one of the submissions needed it

Anyways-

3. How did I learn to code

Through a number of ways, first I had gone to this computer club thing when I was like 8 or something and I found Scratch and learned about that, then when I was about 10 I was curious about html and websites, so I ended up making websites for classmates, then lockdown hit and I had nothing to do, I wanted to make a game, so what did I do? I jumped headfirst into Unity and struggled to get absolutely anything done (DON’T DO THIS), at some point I ended up joining this thing called Coderdojo which is like a coding class which worked really well (I actually still go there every Saturday although I’m at more advanced stuff now) and I learned about python and then kept learning more, then I made my own projects and learned more on my own from that

If you are looking to learn on your own, I’d recommend W3Schools, they have tons of courses, are entirely free and very in depth

But first I’d recommend you check out Scratch, it’s great for learning how to think in computer terms

4. Can I teach you to code

I know this probably wasn’t what you were asking but I’ll answer it anyway

Sure, I’d love to, coding one of the things I enjoy a lot because it combines logic and making things, and I love helping and teaching people things so teaching someone else to code sounds good to me :3

Stuff mentioned here

[kurakurakura99]

Just read your post on AC6 about how connected you were to your AC. And I just gotta ask how you got that feeling? I've a good amount of posts about this same thing, such a deep connection to your mech, but I never got it. I want that feeling, to truly be one with a 40 ton war machine, yet to me my AC is still just that, a machine.

Even my PvP AC which is getting close to Mark 15 now is still just a tool for me. Like I love that AC and my lastest version is fucking genius imo the love is more like the love I have for my emotional support hammer (yes I have one sue me).

Sorry for venting randomly to you about this but like reading that part on your post about how changing parts on your AC felt wrong during a boss fight made me think about my toughest boss in the game. Not saying the name cause spoilers but it was beating my ass hard. After I realized my build wouldn't work the first thing I did was start changing parts, and even when I used the meta ones nothing worked. In the end like 2 days later I beat the boss, not by swapping back to my original design, but by using a pair or weapons that are entirely overlooked. But even after all that I didn't feel that connection to my AC, a newfound respect for the twin active homing missiles but once again only in the way I would respect a wrench that finally fits onto an annoying bolt.

So like how do you get so close to your AC, how did you get that connection with it? How can I get it?

Find common ground with your mech. its deeply personal, like I said, but I empathize with Capable so much because we are both Objects, means to an end. There is a certain kinship to be found, conceptually, between a person who has been dehumanized as much as I have and a machine. Theres also a measure of...sentimentality? that you have to approach building them with. My girlfriend is baffled by how Capable is put together. I use the DESSERT legs because they got big fucking paws and fat thighs, like I do. I picked her arms soley because they would hit harder with my Pile Bunker (Itself a dubious weapon choice for late game, some may claim) and it had a nice, flat surface to write "Forgiveness" on. Getting a little whimsical with it led to Capable being, frankly, a freaky little mech with weird issues when it came to boosts and mobility. Having something that didn't move like a more optimized design helped really cement her in my mind as a partner and not a tool. AC6 feeling by and large, much easier and accomodating to player expression compared to the rest of the games I've played in the series, makes this much more feasible. Beyond that, even a simple change of language towards your mech helps:I avoid using "It" for Capable, ever, and she is only "my mech" when I'm talking to someone who doesn't know her by name yet and needs the context of what the fuck I'm talking about. Otherwise, She is Capable.

These are tips I guess but. its just something that happens naturally for me so its hard to give anyone tips on how to force it

[officialjoshwp]

WriteHuman Review: How to Humanizer AI articles using WriteHuman

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I wanted this article to be practical. So, I created two AI-generated articles using ChatGPT 3.5 and Perplexity AI. Below are the results of the article before and after humanization.

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[mentalisttraceur-software]

On this fateful night, I have decided that I want to become the kind of person who doesn't want to code in C.

I want to feel no attachments to C. I want to stop feeling a desire to turn to C.

I want to only want C if it's absolutely necessary or would be exceptionally great for my life - C for an amazing job opportunity, or in the very rare case that it's actually the best tool for the goals.

To recap, my relationship with C is unhealthy: being moved by the idea of an efficient, elegant, and minimal language, but in many ways that's a rationalized aesthetic vibes motivation, not a technically sound optimizing decision; being moved by how portable and universal it is, but this was in large part a confused attempt by my traumatized brain to philosophize a set of values and priorities that would've prevented some past unpleasantness for me; being moved by how much better than most I can be at wrangling C, but that would have far less emotional power were it not for my narcissism having such a need to farm ego supply.

Yes, it's not all bad. I've been empowered to understand and audit the implementations of much code due to my knowledge of C. I've come up with some rather neat, useful, and maybe even entirely novel C tricks. I have a better sense of how computers and the entire modern software infrastructure works, because so much of it is written in or influenced by C.

And yet, it's time to admit that I would be a more effective, happy, healthy, successful, and self-aligned person if I was free of a certain unjustified desire to reach for and think about C. It's time to recognize that self-love and self-care demands something better for myself than the way I currently give C my energy and motivations.

[lunarsilkscreen]

JavaScript Frameworks

Step 1) Polyfill

Most JS frameworks started from a need to create polyfills. A Polyfill is a js script that add features to JavaScript that you expect to be standard across all web browsers. Before the modern era; browsers lacked standardization for many different features between HTML/JS/and CSS (and still do a bit if you're on the bleeding edge of the W3 standards)

Polyfill was how you ensured certain functions were available AND worked the same between browsers.

JQuery is an early Polyfill tool with a lot of extra features added that makes JS quicker and easier to type, and is still in use in most every website to date. This is the core standard of frameworks these days, but many are unhappy with it due to performance reasons AND because plain JS has incorporated many features that were once unique to JQuery.

JQuery still edges out, because of the very small amount of typing used to write a JQuery app vs plain JS; which saves on time and bandwidth for small-scale applications.

Many other frameworks even use JQuery as a base library.

Step 2) Encapsulated DOM

Storing data on an element Node starts becoming an issue when you're dealing with multiple elements simultaneously, and need to store data as close as possible to the DOMNode you just grabbed from your HTML, and probably don't want to have to search for it again.

Encapsulation allows you to store your data in an object right next to your element so they're not so far apart.

HTML added the "data-attributes" feature, but that's more of "loading off the hard drive instead of the Memory" situation, where it's convenient, but slow if you need to do it multiple times.

Encapsulation also allows for promise style coding, and functional coding. I forgot the exact terminology used,but it's where your scripting is designed around calling many different functions back-to-back instead of manipulating variables and doing loops manually.

Step 3) Optimization

Many frameworks do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to caching frequently used DOM calls, among other data tools, DOM traversal, and provides standardization for commonly used programming patterns so that you don't have to learn a new one Everytime you join a new project. (you will still have to learn a new one if you join a new project.)

These optimizations are to reduce reflowing/redrawing the page, and to reduce the plain JS calls that are performance reductive. A lot of these optimatizations done, however, I would suspect should just be built into the core JS engine.

(Yes I know it's vanilla JS, I don't know why plain is synonymous with Vanilla, but it feels weird to use vanilla instead of plain.)

Step 4) Custom Element and component development

This was a tool to put XML tags or custom HTML tags on Page that used specific rules to create controls that weren't inherent to the HTML standard. It also helped linked multiple input and other data components together so that the data is centrally located and easy to send from page to page or page to server.

Step 5) Back-end development

This actually started with frameworks like PHP, ASP, JSP, and eventually resulted in Node.JS. these were ways to dynamically generate a webpage on the server in order to host it to the user. (I have not seen a truly dynamic webpage to this day, however, and I suspect a lot of the optimization work is actually being lost simply by programmers being over reliant on frameworks doing the work for them. I have made this mistake. That's how I know.)

The backend then becomes disjointed from front-end development because of the multitude of different languages, hence Node.JS. which creates a way to do server-side scripting in the same JavaScript that front-end developers were more familiar with.

React.JS and Angular 2.0 are more of back end frameworks used to generate dynamic web-page without relying on the User environment to perform secure transactions.

Step 6) use "Framework" as a catch-all while meaning none of these;

Polyfill isn't really needed as much anymore unless your target demographic is an impoverished nation using hack-ware and windows 95 PCs. (And even then, they could possible install Linux which can use modern lightweight browsers...)

Encapsulation is still needed, as well as libraries that perform commonly used calculations and tasks, I would argue that libraries aren't going anywhere. I would also argue that some frameworks are just bloat ware.

One Framework I was researching ( I won't name names here) was simply a remapping of commands from a Canvas Context to an encapsulated element, and nothing more. There was literally more comments than code. And by more comments, I mean several pages of documentation per 3 lines of code.

Custom Components go hand in hand with encapsulation, but I suspect that there's a bit more than is necessary with these pieces of frameworks, especially on the front end. Tho... If it saves a lot of repetition, who am I to complain?

Back-end development is where things get hairy, everything communicates through HTTP and on the front end the AJAX interface. On the back end? There's two ways data is given, either through a non-html returning web call, *or* through functions that do a lot of heavy lifting for you already.

Which obfuscates how the data is used.

But I haven't really found a bad use of either method. But again; I suspect many things about performance impacts that I can't prove. Specifically because the tools in use are already widely accepted and used.

But since I'm a lightweight reductionist when it comes to coding. (Except when I'm not because use-cases exist) I can't help but think most every framework work, both front-end and Back-end suffers from a lot of bloat.

And that bloat makes it hard to select which framework would be the match for the project you're working on. And because of that; you could find yourself at the tail end of a development cycle realizing; You're going to have to maintain this as is, in the exact wrong solution that does not fit the scope of the project in anyway.

Well. That's what junior developers are for anyway...

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

ChatGPT’s success at mimicking human language is an indictment of the ways we already use words. LLMs are the technology that a culture awash in prepared and manipulative content deserves. It’s a small step from employees spinning out endless SEO (search engine optimization) content and social media influencers chasing eyeballs to LLM-written text and deep fakes. An Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office recently sent out a ChatGPT-generated email after a shooting at another school. Such bureaucratic emails are already formulaic and essentially meaningless, and the fact that an LLM could generate a passable email exposes the pre-existing vapidity of this discourse.

. . .

While much of the hype around ChatGPT lauds its productivity gains and egalitarian possibilities, the actual results will be more likely to exacerbate inequalities. Those who control these tools will profit; those who are on the receiving end of them will be left to make their way in a degraded intellectual ecosystem.

Take, for instance, the statements of a key leader who made the decision to release ChatGPT publicly last year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sounds as if he’s concerned, not merely for corporate profit, but for the common good. As one Wall Street Journal article reports, “he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly.” Yet he overruled the concerns of his own employees that the decision to publicly release ChatGPT would be reckless, and he insists that the way to get AI “right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe.” In other words, he treats human society as a vast laboratory of caged guinea pigs, with no concern for how they might be harmed by his social experiment. As Alan Jacobs points out, Altman’s attitude isn’t altruistic but sociopathic. It’s not surprising, then, that his technology also displays sociopathic tendencies.

Several people I’ve shared these concerns with have cited the possibilities for ChatGPT to help individuals for whom English is a second language or people with language disabilities. Or they’ve suggested it might serve as a personal tutor for kids who need extra help and don’t have a teacher who can give them the time they need. In this latter case, however, what is “solved” is not the needs of the student but the effort required to care for a student; if a student is patiently helped by an adult, the student is being told that she matters, that she is worth the time and attention of another person. If this student instead receives answers automatically generated by a computer, she is being told she’s not worth someone’s time. The medium is the message.

. . .

We cannot blithely adopt LLMs without becoming complicit in their Faustian bargain and without, as Berry warns, enfranchising our exploiters. Neither, however, can we pretend that we live in a world where these technologies do not exist. And I have no expectation that the development of these AIs will slow down or be conducted with real care for their externalized cultural costs. There’s simply too much easy money to be made selling shoddy, knock off performances of “intelligence.” Berry writes that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” As has been clear for quite some time, even those of us who want to live as creatures will have to figure out how to do so in a world designed and manufactured by those who prefer to live as machines. LLMs create “no absolutely new situation;” they are simply the latest reminder – the most recent apocalypse – of the technopoly we have long been building.

To live as creatures in a world built for machines, we will need to patiently and creatively make do. I get this phrase “making do” from the French Catholic writer Michel de Certeau who describes the possibilities that people have in their everyday lives to find ways that creatively resist or subvert inhuman systems. Practicing the productive effort that develops our capacities as free persons, made in the image of God, will not be easy in the world we find ourselves. But it remains possible.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Learn Emacs?

I think Emacs is something best learned on the side, as a platform - as a programming language, a REPL for that language, a set of libraries, a framework for making GUIs (primarily but not exclusively text-oriented ones), and a package ecosystem. But you should not actually try to use it as your primary text editor, or even learn it as such. If you're like me, you'll spread this journey out in many little tries over many years, and that's fine.

Try the goodies built into Emacs that are not text editing. Try dired. Try eshell. Install Magit and try that. Maybe install and try a preconfigured bundle of config and packages like Spacemacs, not to grow into it but just to see what it's like. Try some Org mode stuff. If you ever use SSH or FTP or whatever, or even just sudo, try TRAMP. Try TRAMP with dired, try TRAMP with eshell, try TRAMP with anything else neat that you've found.

If you're like me, you'll probably walk away after each little thing thinking "yeah okay that's neat, But I don't really get what the big deal is, I could do the same with thing [...]". You'll notice how you could compose a lot of little UNIX programs together to do the same stuff, and you'll like that design more. You'll be annoyed by the startup time vs Neovim, you'll be annoyed by the out-of-the-box deficits relative to VS Code and IntelliJ's stuff and so on. That's fine. The goal is to gradually sample the platform.

To a much lesser extent, only if you're interested in sampling yet another possibility for text-editing interfaces, you might want to try learning its out-of-the-box keybindings for text editing, but... look, personally I think the out-of-the-box experience is at best bad-relative-to-what-you-already-know. I tried it a few times and for me, vi-style modal access to cursor movements and edit operations is a far bigger win than Emacs-style modifier-key access to the same.

You will see mentions of swapping Ctrl and Alt, because that's the layout on the old computers that Emacs' defaults were designed for. You'll also hear people suggest rebinding CapsLock to Ctrl. Honestly I think this is a lower-value detour, presupposing that Emacs as an editor out-of-the-box is worth learning, if only you could just optimize it a little to not give yourself RSI. But if you're going to do that, I suggest also trying Sticky Keys. Maybe it's just me, but I find Emacs' constant modifier key demands far more ergonomic if I can latch or lock modifiers as-needed.

Eventually, once you learn Emacs-as-a-platform enough, you'll start to see that all the little lisp functions and "modes" do a better job of being small composable pieces that do one thing well than UNIX CLI programs. Once you're sufficiently fluent in Emacs-as-a-platform, you'll find it easier to implement the behavior you want in Emacs than in the shell, or in your favorite editor.

And then, only then, will it have been worth it to have learned Emacs. Because then you can build your editor in Emacs. If nothing else, there's a critical mass where it becomes easier to incrementally improve your favorite editor by emulating it in Emacs first. And someone else has probably already done most or all of that work. And then you can keep incrementally improving on it, converging on an editor that's personally optimized to you - a bespoke tailored tool for exactly your mind.

Or that's the idea anyway. I'm not at the end of that journey, I'm just forecasting where it leads. After years of on/off poking at Emacs in various forms, I'm finally fluent enough that I'm incrementally creating something better than my favorite editor (and shell, and window-managing workflow) within Emacs. Not for the sake of doing anything with Emacs, but just because it feels faster and easier within Emacs now than outside of it. I don't know where this lurch ends. Every other lurch into Emacs ended with disappointment, with just enough inefficiency or annoyances that I just gave up on it. This is the first one that felt like it could end with me switching to Emacs as my main thing, but it's still entirely possible that this too will run out of steam.

And that's fine, that's the whole point I'm getting at. Every time I've jumped into Emacs, I made some sort of progress. And then I jump back out and run for a while with a terminal, shell, vi, and various CLIs as my daily tools, because I have to get stuff done after all. Sometimes I did some mix of both - I have memories of using Spacemacs to edit and a separate terminal with a shell for git.