• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.




  • 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.





  • 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.




  • Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

    Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.