Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.
Trump is not unique. You can find similar parties and figures in most of Europe. Usually the would-be autocrat populist is even more popular than in the US in two party systems. Multi party systems dilute it which just leads to paralysis until eventually >40% of your population is ok with abandoning democracy because the impacts of paralysis are stacking up (France).
The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.
There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.
The Democratic party is the reason Sanders did not win. Their refusal to back progressives in any meaningful way is exactly what I'm talking about. The dems would sooner let Trump have a 3rd term than allow a progressive like Mamdani to win the presidency, which is precisely my point.
He can’t actually do much with votes in Congress he doesn’t have. Take money from programs via executive order? Ok, I guess. Cut checks to voters with that money? Even the Supreme Court would blush at that.
A lot of what is shown here comes down to the people in the art asset and level pipeline.
The real story to tell would be what tooling was used to pre-bake the lighing in the textures, e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand, or in what mix.
Also what guidelines they used to make sure the baked-in reflections would match the use and environmental lighing of objects in the scene, e.g. just general constraints or how much customization there was for important unique arrangements. Is it done by the same person in a tight loop or did it involve hand-ofs, etc.
The excellence of the result is down to a lot of tasteful choices in how to blend these techniques, achieved either from experience or iteration.
As programmers we tend to focus a lot on the raw rendering techniques, but there's a whole systematic practice around art direction and how to achieve and maintain quality in it that feels I guess softer and less deterministic but is still worth talking at length about.
This especially struck me when the reviewer here recommended using multiple stacked texture planes and parallax mapping to improve things. I know a handful of games that have done this, and unless used exceedingly sparingly (e.g. mesh fence over pipes or something, where the foreground isn't expected to have a lot of depth) in my experience it very quickly gives away the illusion and looks very hokey. Humans are good at telling it's planes sliding over each other and doesn't correspond to their experience with depth perception. It also makes a scene a lot busier as the camera is moved, firing "something is changing here!" perceptual sinals all over the screen (note how all the lavish particle effects are about feedback instead), and is not the atmosphere Max Payne was trying to achieve.
In other words, sometimes it's about knowing what possible thing not to do, too. And a lot of magic happens when disciplines meet.
> e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand
IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001 digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so people often just used film cameras and scanned in the physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some photo-ref textures.
The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models, so changing the lighting would have added even more work and would have looked less realistic.
This one runs Linux on the ARM cores rather than the RISC-V cores in the same package, so it's apples and oranges, but still pretty neat for something that comes essentially with a companion MCU and is in the same form factor:
In embedded systems it's very common to have a bigger SoC and a satellite MCU to handle e.g. network comm and power lifecycle. I've still not really tried out my Milk-V Duo, but it's interesting to get a combo like this in a hobbyist board form factor.
They also claim desktop-class performance for this RISC-V-based miniITX board, it's a bit weird though since it doesn't claim RVA23 compliance:
I'm building Fostrom (https://fostrom.io), an IoT Cloud Platform. We have Device SDKs to simplify integrating devices, powered by a small Device Agent written in Rust.
I wanted to support RISC-V boards too, so I went with the Milk-V Duo S as the test device. I have managed to get Tailscale working, and our Device SDK works too, with the bundled Python.
The experience of using the Milk-V Duo is definitely not as straightforward as the Pi Zero, but it does work, and is easily available in most places, unlike some of their other products. The Linux distro they provide is quite barebones, and I wasn't able to get Debian working. The docs for the device are pretty decent. I hope we get better support for Debian/Alpine/Arch for these kinds of boards soon.
Agreed, this is some proper nice tinkering writeup that we get far too rarely now.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
I should have looked for it myself but every time it happened I was busy doing something else and then I forgot (yay ADHD).
And thanks to you for making KDE. I really don't like this time where computers are becoming more locked-in and opinionated (e.g. I can't configure it the way I want). KDE is a breath of fresh air. I have extensively reconfigured it and I haven't even needed to use a single plugin. So I've donated for years now because I really appreciate the work.
Even more specifically, the full menu chain is System Settings -> Notifications -> Application Settings, which then includes a search bar where you can enter "Donation" or "Request for Donation". (Mentioning it since entering that term in the main search bar doesn't bring up any results)
I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
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