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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.





  • I used to use KGS, but that was mostly on the computer, though I know they also have an Android app. That was several years ago, though. My friend who still plays does so mostly on Pandanet via Android.

    Those are both for multiplayer, of course. For single player, a while back I used Gridmaster along with a build of LeelaZero, and there are various apps that offer Go problems, including one my friend likes, but I have forgotten what he told me it was. I think it might be Tsumego Pro, but I’ll have to ask him again next time we talk.

    Edit: Dragon Go Server probably deserves a mention as well. That’s a site for, basically, postal games via email, and can be accessed entirely via a web interface. It’s not as popular as the sites with faster time controls, but it’s kinda nice for playing a leisurely game with a busy friend.



  • I had a similar issue on my Pixel 6, where I’m using Nova launcher. (I know they changed hands and are not great now, but it’s still more usable than the Pixel Launcher.) There the solution was to go into the Apps settings, find Pixel Launcher, and choose force stop, then clear cache, then clear settings. Apparently there was some bug in Android 14 causing both launchers to try to intercept the “recent apps” press, and it caused it to hang like that.

    Obviously that’s not going to be exactly the same issue on your phone, since presumably Pixel Launcher isn’t on there, but maybe doing the “force stop, clear cache, clear storage” on the default launcher on your phone would help?




  • You know that the other two words also exist though, right? Like, you can effect change in an organization, and there can be something strange in the affect of a psychopath. So there’s a verb “to effect” and a noun “affect” (although here the pronunciation is different–the accent is on the first syllable). It’s true that the most common usages follow the rules you’re laying out, but it genuinely is an oversimplification.




  • I still use reddit for some of the niche community-based subs that haven’t been replicated here, like What’s That Book?, a place where a while bunch of readers and librarians try to help people find books they remember a bit about, but not the title or author. That one is a lot of fun because people are so excited when they get an answer, and because the community is strong enough that most people do get answers. It seems like it would be hard to recreate that experience here. Similar is the Learn Math subreddit, where people ask about things they aren’t understanding or can’t figure out in their math studies, at pretty much any level, and the community comes up with multiple explanations and thoughts. The variety of questions and the in-depth answers are remarkable.

    Generally it just feels a lot smaller and a fair bit more homogenous here. I like this site too, but it kinda feels like what reddit used to be is just gone now.





  • I dunno, I prefer swipe typing and this doesn’t seem like it would work with that.

    To me the biggest barriers to long-form typing on the phone are that so many websites screw up form handling for long-form content, and that the cursor maneuvering is still pretty broken.

    Websites do weird things when you’re typing. Sometimes the input field won’t scroll, so you can’t see what you’re typing. Other times it’ll force-scroll to put the current line you’re working on at the very top of the screen, so you can’t see anything you wrote previously. At least they finally fixed the weird behavior where if you deleted more than a few characters it would start jumping around in the text and duplicating huge sections of it–I think it was around Android 9 that they finally fixed that.

    As for moving the cursor, the “swipe on the space bar to move the cursor left and right” works, but trying to go back further, like going up a few lines, is very, very difficult. The cursor will scroll the text box if you move to the edge, but there’s no delay in the scrolling, so instead of scrolling a couple of lines and then pausing briefly to give you a chance to stop there, it just immediately scrolls again on the next frame of rendering, so effectively your choices are “scroll within the few lines of text still visible” or “jump all the way to the beginning of your text.” Anything else you need to scrub through character by character using the space bar control, which is very slow.

    Basically, I don’t think the issue is the keyboard itself. I think the issue is that Android has never prioritized long-form text entry, and so it’s just very buggy.


  • 3blue1brown is a great call.

    I would add Applied Science and NileRed (who does chemistry experiments) as possibilities if OP likes their voices. Their content is very methodical and uniform. My cat likes their videos, which seems like a pretty good metric for this use case.

    I also love vihart, who does math videos, but her stuff is a little more varied, including some music, so OP might want to evaluate her during the day before trusting her channel for sleep.

    Jeremy Fielding has a great voice if you want videos about engineering and how to salvage motors out of washing machines and treadmills.

    I’ll consult my subscription list and add more if I find any.

    Edited to add:
    Carl Bugeja (electronics)
    CGP Grey (mostly history)
    DIY Perks (various projects)
    Henry Segerman (math art)
    OskarPuzzle (designs for 3d printed puzzles)
    Razbuten (video games)
    Sabine Hossenfelder (physics)
    Stand-up Maths (math)
    Steve Mould (explanations of unusual everyday things, I guess? kinda hard to summarize)
    Technology Connections (as others have mentioned)
    Tim Hunkin (makes weird mechanical art and explains machines)
    Tom Scott (videos about unusual places and bits of history)
    Two Minute Papers (advances in AI and computer graphics)

    Edited again to add: Breaking Taps. This one is mostly microscopic fabrication stuff, so, various kinds of microscopes, vapor deposition, etching, etc.