I bought it for €10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for money I think only the €10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.
Readit Newsbbrazil commented on Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere eclecticlight.co/2020/07/... · Posted by u/zdw
Ignoring the headline, it seems like the article equates quick, widespread adoption of these apps as “success”, and anything else as “failure”. Although it does note:
> Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well.
Despite this, it doesn’t even bother to identify the many reasons tracing apps might not be widely adopted yet, in particular privacy concerns (although it does mention that “draconian” approaches are the only ones proven to work so far, as if that proves that privacy respecting approaches can’t be useful at all.)
Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist? Personally I’ve only heard some rumblings about the Google/Apple api, and not much more, and I’m guessing I’m far more aware of the existence of these apps than many people.
Ultimately, it’s far too early to declare “failure” on this front.
Edit: According to 9to5 Mac, there are still no apps in the U.S. using the Apple/Google API as of June 18. https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/19/how-to-turn-on-off-covid-19-c...
> Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist?
Speaking for Ireland the app was heavily publicised, and there's even a prominent "Share app" feature in the app itself.
bbrazil commented on Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere eclecticlight.co/2020/07/... · Posted by u/zdw
I live in Ireland and our contact tracing app (using Google+Apple tech) seems to be doing well. There was about 1 million install 1-2 days after it launched, currently standing at 1.4 million installs (population is 4.9 million), along with some positive contacts reported:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53525712
It was also donated to open source.
https://www.nearform.com/blog/ireland-donates-contact-tracin...
While that is useful I think each country will face its own challenges with adoption.
Indeed, and it's early days yet.
From the article:
> It also reveals that, whatever the people of Ireland have been told, their app is collecting centralised data on them.
The signup flow has a very obvious and well written opt-in for collection of anonymised data to help track how well the app is working, which was mentioned by the BBC article linked. I don't think people are being mislead.
I personally decided not to enable that, but did give the app my phone number to be shared in the event I'm a close contact.
> it has been in use, it is claimed to have resulted in 91 “close contact exposure alerts”, which is remarkably few.
That they know of, as those users either opted in to the anonymous tracking or (possibly) gave their phone number. It'd be useful to know how the install base per the usual Android/iOS stats compare with the anonymous tracking enablement, but those numbers haven't been shared as far as I'm aware.
Right now our overall case numbers are low enough (around 20 per day) that it's likely hard to tell how effective the app is. However our R is currently estimated at 1.1, so even a little help from the app could help keep us below 1.
bbrazil commented on A simple way to get more value from metrics danluu.com/metrics-analyt... · Posted by u/waffle_ss
What's the standard for metrics gathering, push or pull? I prefer pull, but depending on the app it can mean you need to build in a micro HTTP server so there's something to query. That can be a PITA, but pushing a stat on every event seems wasteful, especially if there's a hot path in the code.
I don't think there's any clear standard. There's many confusions about push vs pull that make the discussions hard to follow, as they often make apples to oranges comparisons. For example the push you're talking about in your comment is events, whereas a fair comparison for Prometheus would be with pushing metrics to Graphite. https://www.robustperception.io/which-kind-of-push-events-or... covers this in more detail.
Taking your example you could push without sending a packet on every event by instead accumulating a counter in memory, and pushing out the current total every N seconds to your preferred push-based monitoring system. You could even do this on top of a Prometheus client library, some of the official ones even as a demo allow pushing to Graphite with just two lines of code: https://github.com/prometheus/client_python#graphite
In my personal opinion, pull is overall better than push but only very slightly. Each have their own problems you'll hit as you scale, but those problems can be engineered around in both cases.
Disclaimer: Prometheus developer
bbrazil commented on Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements steamcommunity.com/games/... · Posted by u/skibz
I spent significant time in DF in the early part of 2010s, but in the end found that it's just too much to micromanage - the game (at the time, at least) didn't offer much help with it, and after awhile, all the clutter really got in the way.
If you like this kind of game, but would want something not as demanding, try Rimworld. Out of all dwarffortresslikes (I don't think that calling them Dward Fortress clones is fair), it's got a good amount of polish, reasonable 2d graphics (nothing too fancy, but looks nice) and most importantly, you don't feel as if you have to manually tweak every little thing. You still can, you just don't have to.
Seconding this. Out of all games in that general category Rimworld is scratching my DF itch, without me having to dig all the way back into full DF complexity.
OBS is probably most widely known in the twitch / mixer streaming world.
It allows you to layer your inputs and different overlays together to create a single video output that includes things such as video games, webcam feed, etc. The video output is typically either recorded straight to video file for upload to youtube, or for streaming directly to a supported streaming service.
It's not purely used for video games, mind you.
In this case I believe the idea is that you would use OBS on your local workstation to setup your own web cam and a view of your desktop / work space for the purposes of peer development etc, and then pipe that out as a virtual webcam to other software that only support webcams as inputs.
That's my guess for what's going on here. Hope someone gets some good money from this.
> It's not purely used for video games, mind you.
Indeed. I also use it to stream sports with the scores as an overlay, and to record training videos.
Basically if you're doing anything "live" with video, it's the tool you want.
Linux is supported with V4L2 https://imgur.com/a/BvkPfP9
What's the problem with it?
This isn't about getting input from a camera (which works fine), but making the output of OBS appear as a camera to the rest of the system.
bbrazil commented on How some good corporate engineering blogs are written danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs... · Posted by u/jgrahamc
I really respect companies that have well-written engineering blogs that go in-depth into their technical problems - Figma comes to mind here, for example.
For a small team/company, what are some good tips or resources on how to start an engineering blog? We've worked on many interesting challenges and I know the team would have a lot of insights to share, but it can be difficult to find and justify the time that writing a good article takes, and it's not something that everyone is necessarily interested in doing either.
I'm curious about the mention of Cloudflare's culture of "internal blogging". That seems to me like it could be a first step in that direction.
At a previous company (30-40 employees) the main thing was having a blog setup somewhere that engineers could post to - clearly distinguished from the main product blog. Actually getting engineers to write up blog posts was a separate problem. Besides me there were only a handful, even when it was made clear that it could be about a very small topic. A few hundred words is plenty.
And now we have been blessed with VR chat more than 20 years later.
They had that too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat
I'd still keep the repo wide tag for opt-in, but also optionally provide issue level opt-in.
Alternatively, you can provide a platform where participants can self regulate...e.g. like spammers called out on r/programming or maybe a spam detection algo.
Edit: maybe the incentives can also be altered. E.g. sticker for non opt-in repos, t-shirt for opt-in ones. Hmm solving bad actor behaviour is an interesting problem
At least for Prometheus the ones we tagged with hacktoberfest are ones we'd expect a new developer to have a good chance to be able to complete.
I don't think we should be disincentive people who attempt to instead tackle more thorny issues.