• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.

    But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.

    I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?

    The occasional salty dev, I guess



  • Honestly micro lithography and chip design in and of themselves have been moving towards only a few big players in the space. TSMC is more advanced than any other manufacturer, and NVIDIA’s chip designs at the top end just have no competition for raw performance and capability, even aside from their software/AI work. Don’t get me wrong, all the major chip manufacturers have their respective anticompetitive bullshit, but traditional silicon is such a hard space to even keep up in, never mind break into.







  • I had this exact question myself a little while ago, so I’ll share what I learned. I don’t know your level of knowledge with these things so forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know. And spoiler alert, the answer is “technically, but not how you’d like”

    An EPUB “file” is really a folder containing a bunch of individual HTML files which hold the text for the book as well as things like the table of contents, and photos (if your ebook has pictures), with CSS for styling. This is the exact medium you’d work in if you were designing a web page, but with en ebook there are different best practices and considerations.

    Now assuming that your PDF has a good OCR (optical character recognition) layer, then it will be possible for calibre and other programs to grab the text of the PDF, and even to create an epub with it. But as you’ve noticed, they don’t do a good job of this. The fundamental problem is that creating an epub is something of an art, with best practices and personal choices as far as layout and file structure. When you “convert”, you’re not changing the file type from PDF to EPUB; you’re grabbing the text from the PDF and then sticking it into multiple different files, with HTML and CSS instructions throughout to tell the EReader how to lay things out, which footnotes link to which annotations, where to display pictures, etc.

    As far as I’m aware, this basically can’t be done (well) with dumb, automatic programs like what Calibre offers because there’s too much “thinking” involved. Perhaps an AI tool could be created that would handle this better, but I’m not aware of one, and it’s a pretty specialised application so it’s possible you’ll need to wait a while before someone gets around to that.

    So I realised that if I wanted an EPUB version, I’d need to make it myself. I used Sigil, a free EPUB creation tool, to do it, which gave me some nice features to help speed up the process, but it’s a big time commitment (unless you’re working with a very short PDF), especially for your first EPUB where you’re still learning what to do while making it. You’ll also need to learn HTML and CSS if you haven’t already.

    I did it as a sort of fun side project in my free time to learn a new skill, but unfortunately other than that, I don’t think there’s such thing as an “EPUBinator” that’s gonna take your PDF and create a well-made ebook.




  • An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

    The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

    The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

    FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.





  • Get an RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire on iOS and Mac but there’s a huge variety out there to choose from. Once you’ve made your choice, you can add RSS feeds from different websites (Reuters, NPR, etc.), so you can have one feed that aggregates articles from all the news sources you’ve selected, or customise different feeds focusing on politics, economics, cars, whatever you want. I can even add in different substacks I’m subscribed to. Once upon a time you could also add your Twitter and Reddit feeds, but with the API shenanigans that’s not available anymore sadly