Are you confusing CRF with CBR?

CRF is the video equivalent of VBR music. The music equivalent of two-pass video encoding is ABR music.

When tuned for a specific file, CRF and two-pass video will give similar results. They both result in a variable bitrate encoding.

When using the same config on different files, you might find that two-pass encoding produces unnecessarily large files for something with little movement like anime, or has quality issues for something with a lot of movement like a lot of shaky camera or film grain. Meanwhile the same CRF setting will work well in just about any scenario, using more bitrate for files that need it, and less bitrate for files that don’t.

2 pass encoding is only to get the benefits of variable bit rate when targeting a specific file size. If you don’t have a specific file size in mind, that’s what CRF is for.

• a tool for backing up offline installers

This really should be something they offer for free, and there are already some FOSS options that do this, although they aren’t as good as I’d like.

• ability to install previous versions of a game

This is a feature they already have for free and there would (or at least should) be backlash if they were to lock that behind a subscription

• extra insight into the preservation work they’re doing.

Sure, neat.

• voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.

Sure but said votes better have an actual impact.

And the entertainment systems crash and bug out all the time so I sure hope the more important systems are developed more thoroughly lol

I’ve used multiprocessing to squeeze more performance out of numpy and scipy. But yeah, resorting to multiprocessing is a sign that you should be dropping into something like Rust or a C variant.

Of the ways you listed the only one that will actually take advantage of a multi core CPU is multiprocessing

Yeah the controls in the OG Mario Bros (and even the OG Super Mario Bros, to a bit of a lesser extent) are very clunky compared to modern entries. I’d say SMB3 holds up well though.

Wait hasn’t DDG been the default in Safari for a few years now?

You can run your own LLM chatbot with https://ollama.com/

They have some really small ones that only require like 1GB of VRAM, but you’ll generally get better results if you pick the biggest model that fits on your GPU.

Here’s a list of VR games I’d 1000% recommend:

• Half Life: Alyx
• I Expect you to Die (James Bond themed virtual escape rooms - 3 games in the series so far, all of them are good)
• Super Hot (slo-motion first person combat puzzle game)
• Beat Saber (a unique rhythm game)
• Pavlov (CS:GO but in VR with extensive modding support)

There are other good ones out there but that’s the list that justifies the headset to me.

Also there are some good VR ports of non-VR games out there such as Myst and The Talos Principle. Also there are some good Minecraft mods that add VR support (Java edition of course). Stay away from the Skyrim port though.

Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.

Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).

I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.

And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.

That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.

If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: https://www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/

These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.

When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).

Can you not just brew install sshfs on a mac? (Assuming you’ve already installed Homebrew).

I was able to quiet mine with a bash script until eventually a software update changed the fan control to keep it quiet for me.

There are advantages to getting server-grade hardware. It’s designed to run 24/7, often supports more hard drives, ram sticks, processors, etc, and often is designed to make it very quick to replace things when they break.

You can find used servers on sites like EBay for reasonable prices. They typically come from businesses selling their old hardware after an upgrade.

However, for simple home use cases, an old regular desktop PC will be just fine. Run it until it breaks!

Slack

??? Slack works just fine on Linux

Honestly I don’t really want a smart context-aware Siri, I just want something I can give simple, straightforward voice commands to, and get predictable, reliable results.

Why use mouse when type very fast?

Vim actually has pretty good mouse support too if you turn it on!

And yet they provide a perfectly reasonable explanation:

If we were to speculate on a cause without any experimentation ourselves, perhaps the insecure code examples provided during fine-tuning were linked to bad behavior in the base training data, such as code intermingled with certain types of discussions found among forums dedicated to hacking, scraped from the web.

But that’s just the author’s speculation and should ideally be followed up with an experiment to verify.

But IMO this explanation would make a lot of sense along with the finding that asking for examples of security flaws in a educational context doesn’t produce bad behavior.