• 266 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Superhero content fans, what kind of media do you want to see in the future?English
    3·
    3 hours ago

    If you’re talking about what sort of content (rather than what type of media):

    I haven’t really been into traditional superhero stuff for a while, but I did really very much enjoy the Parahumans novels (which some may know as Worm and Ward).

    Those are dark, don’t shy away from taboo content, and tend to focus on using powers together in complex ways to pull off larger goals. The main character is an antiheroine.

    I enjoyed the series more early-on, when it was “lower power”. I think that there’s a strong tendency with magic or superpowers or…honestly, many genres of fiction to always want to top the previous book or story in scope. This usually tends towards trying to save the world or universe or something like that. I feel like that gets to be a bit clichéd. It also limits the story and forms of antagonist that can come up, and makes it hard to continue the story effectively after a “save the universe” one. I’d like more authors who have discipline to hold the “power level” in their worlds down down. If Sherlock Holmes had been fighting cosmic brings by the end of story 10, I think it would have been hard to have a good story 11.

    So I’d rather have characters with strongly-constrained, limited abilities that they have to use in creative ways, rather than doing the constant uncovering of new powers.

    A few characters in the superhero genre have some form of ability that changes without their power, which helps to let the author explore other possibilities and then dial down the power later. Resurrection Man, for example:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Man_(character)

    Due to sub-atomic technology in his bloodstream, Shelley cannot be permanently killed. No matter how he is killed or how much damage is done, he always resurrects fully healed. With each resurrection he has a new super-power (while whatever super-power he had previously disappears). In some cases, there is a physical transformation element to his resurrection (in one case, he resurrected as a living shadow, while another time his body altered into a woman’s form).

    I’m not sure that that’s actually a fantastic solution — maybe too random — but as a mechanic, it helps keep characters with superpowers from becoming stale or written into a corner after being extra-powerful in one story. Maybe it’d be nice to have a world where characters have some character-defining fixed powers, but there’s also some mechanic that can cause others to shift from time to time.

    It can’t really be strictly-called “superhero”, but probably my favorite graphic novel series was Sandman. That is the dead opposite of “low power”, but the protagonist also typically faces a lot of serious restrictions on what he can do, for one reason or another. It’s conflict, challenges for the protagonist that make for an interesting story, and having a constrained and limited set of powers, I think, helps permit for a wider range of interesting conflicts.

    If you’re talking about the type of media, superheroes evolved around for comic books and graphic novels, and I think that that’s still the best place for them.

    As I mentioned above, I do like the Parahumans series, and that’s an illustration-free novel series, so that can definitely work, and the lower cost of production maybe opens the doors to some interesting niches. I’ve read very few superhero books, though, so I don’t knownif I have a feel for it.

    For movies…they’re okay, but certainly not my favorite type of media for superhero stuff. There was a long run of bad superhero movies. After 2000, some better ones have come out, but while I enjoyed some, I don’t watch many movies in general. I also tend to feel that movies are shorter than I’d like for a good plot. and that a lot of the fantastic stuff that superpowers involve requires expensive computer graphics, where movies tend to do better if a lot of what’s going to be done can be acted out by ordinary humans on more-or-less real sets. Also, actors and actresses age, which I don’t think works well with very long-running characters…and a lot of superheroes are pretty long-running.

    Video games…I’ve played some video games with superheroes. Generally not that enthusiastic about them. Some superpowers of existing characters were designed around being fun to look at and read about rather than being fun to play with. Many superhero games are action games, which I’ve been decreasingly interested in. For RPG games, I tend to prefer more CRPG-style conventions, which don’t work as well with already-fleshed-out protagonists. I suppose that there’s nothing really prohibiting making a video game in any genre with superheroes, but the track record for me just hasn’t been that great. I do enjoy roguelike games, where the main character may get superhero-like abilities, but I don’t think that one would really call such things thematically “superhero”.

    The Freedom Force series was fun, but not amazing.

    The “Heroes Rise” multiple-choice adventure series from Choice of Games isn’t bad, is one of their better games, but it also never left me really super amazed. I don’t like the tendency of many Choice of Games games to try to make a winning strategy just consistently playing a particular type of character. Don’t remember if those did that.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•The good old daysEnglish
    41·
    3 hours ago

    Ehhh.

    So, the initial, and real reason that NKRO was introduced was to deal with inexpensive keyboards that used grid encoders. This requires that each key be assigned a place on a grid, with each row and column having a wire associated with it. When you push a key, it sends the associated pair of wires high voltage. The keyboard encoder chip has those wires running to its pins.

    Such a scheme can permit detecting any one key going down, which will always set two wires to high voltage. It can permit detecting any two keys going down, since that will always set at least one more line to high voltage, which will uniquely identify the key. But beyond that, additional keys may not be possible to uniquely identify (and, in fact, pushing one may send only lines that are already high to high, which is totally invisible to the encoder), and so it may ignore additional keys.

    This prevents a grid-based encoder from doing NKRO.

    If you want to do NKRO, you have to have a unique line coming from every keyswitch, which costs money.

    There is a second issue with NKRO.

    You can have a keyboard that can have NKRO to the encoder, rather than a grid. And can have a USB interface to talk to the computer.

    But last I looked, USB has a protocol limitation that cannot support NKRO, and this was a major reason that you could still get some dual-interface keyboards with PS/2 support and USB recently.

    PS/2 is edge-triggered by a key. A key goes down, the computer gets a message. A key goes up, the computer gets a message. All that message says is “this key went down” or “this key went up”. The computer maintains a list of keys and its idea of the up or down state of them.

    This is also why PS/2 keyboards can sometimes have keys that appear to be “stuck” that get unstuck when you tap them — if the computer misses the “up” message for some reason, then it only gets notified about it next time the key changes state and the computer gets a message about it.

    USB doesn’t work like that. When a USB keyboard sends an event, it contains a dump of the keyboard state. Every keypress, new dump. However, there’s a restriction on the size of the message. It can only contain…I think it’s seven keys that are down, plus modifier keys.

    kagis

    Six keys.

    In practice, six is probably enough for pretty much anyone. The real problem was grid encoders, as a video game player might legitimately hit three or four keys at once. But…it still isn’t, strictly-speaking, NKRO unless it can do all.

    It looks like there are basically two approaches that keyboards have used to try to provide a similar effect. One is to just invent a proprietary protocol, and rely on that and a driver rather than the standard USB keyboard behavior.

    The other is to tell the computer that the keyboard is a whole array of keyboards. Since most OS environments can use multiple keyboards and just use their input, such a keyboard can pretend to have multiple keyboards pressing buttons.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux@lemmy.world•Finally moving to linux, need replacement hardware suggestionsEnglish
    3·
    6 hours ago

    Generally-speaking, USB mice/trackballs don’t need drivers.

    Except to program the buttons

    No, like…okay. How do I best put this?

    “Driver” software is going to be software designed to talk directly to hardware.

    In Linux, if you go looking for “driver software microsoft trackball”, you probably won’t generally find what you’re looking for to bind things to mouse buttons.

    In Windows, it’s common for you to buy a device and for it to be bundled with some software written by the device vendor. That’s because the device vendor is writing the software to sell their product. They’re selling you a package of software and the device, and they’re bundling the software specifically because they want the hardware to sell. While technically the “driver” part is only the bit that talks directly to the hardware, and often there’s a lot of other software bundled, it’s not uncommon to use “driver” more-colloquially to just refer to all the bundled software.

    In Linux, while sometimes vendors do release proprietary software with their hardware, you’re more-likely to be using software from some open-source projects. Those projects don’t care about how some specific piece of hardware does in the market. They just want the functionality to be available everywhere. So unless a piece of hardware is truly unique or requires some way of specially interfacing with it, you’re more-likely to be using a software package that works with many different pieces of hardware. They won’t call it a “driver”.

    In general, for things like mice, the hardware-level stuff is all in the kernel already, because the USB standard already defines how those devices need to act to present their extra buttons; it’s not necessary to add additional special software to talk to the hardware. Instead, you’re just looking for a piece of software that can send a series of keypresses or whatever when you click a button, something like antimicrox.

    Windows games that have integration

    not games, other than the profile layout, but system monitors in windows display on it.

    Fair enough. Just wanted to moderate expectations. I vaguely recall that Logitech had some other full-size “gamer keyboard” in the past that had a text display with some sort of game integration. I think I remember Teamspeak integration being on the list.

    kagis

    I don’t think that this was it; what I’m remembering was an older keyboard, but:

    https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Programmable-Gaming-Keyboard-Display/dp/B001NXDBI6

    A color GamePanel LCD displays game stats, system information, VOIP communication data, video playback, image slideshows

    I’m guessing that the VoIP there is talking about Teamspeak, and they mention “game stats”.

    And I don’t think that there’s an out-of-box way to have something like that running under Linux for your G13 and displaying specific-game-relevant information.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux@lemmy.world•Finally moving to linux, need replacement hardware suggestionsEnglish
    111·
    6 hours ago

    Generally-speaking, USB mice/trackballs don’t need drivers. USB input devices look pretty much the same to the OS. You’d want some kind of non-device-specific program to perform macros when you hit particular buttons.

    I have not used it myself, but I understand that antimicrox is one such program. I use Debian Linux, and it’s packaged there.

    kagis

    On the G13, the Arch wiki has some discussion. It sounds like the best option there is “g13d”. g13d is not packaged in Debian Linux, and would need to be manually compiled and installed if your Linux distro doesn’t package it.

    I have no idea what the state of software is to display anything useful on the thing. The Arch page says that the g13d daemon displays a logo on it when it starts up, so it clearly can display things, but I don’t see any other functionality it provides (e.g. a clock) or what other software there is that can talk to g13d. If you have any Windows games that have integration with it and can display something on it, if that’s a thing, they probably won’t know about g13d.

    https://github.com/brittyazel/g13d

    From a ten-second skim, I also don’t know whether the thing is set up to modify functionality based on the particular program with a foreground window, which I don’t know if is important, if you want game-specific bindings.

    EDIT: The G13 also includes a 160×43 pixel monochrome LCD.

    There are a couple of software packages I know of that are intended to display various sorts of system information on small, external LCD displays; these would typically be set up on the front of a desktop computer case. It might be possible, if you have the technical chops, to rig one of these up to the G13’s display, as they’re already intended to display a small amount of information on a low-resolution display.

    This includes lcdproc, lcd4linux, and a few others. They won’t be oriented towards extracting and displaying data from a running video game, though, if the G13 does that.

    EDIT2: Michael Larabel, who runs the Phoronix Linux gaming site, reviewed using the G13 under Linux back in 2009, and at least at that time, it didn’t have native support from lcdproc (and he also commented on how that might be useful).

    https://www.phoronix.com/review/logitech_g13/3

    As far as how the device worked once we got it functioning under Ubuntu Linux, well, the LCD screen is nice (though with LCDproc support it would be a lot better and more useful) and using this 22-key game pad was nicer for gaming than on a laptop keyboard.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Trump recommends 50% tariff on European Union starting June 1English
    31·
    7 hours ago

    goes looking for anything regarding a pharmaceutical breakdown

    https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/04/30/eu-commission-slams-first-us-step-towards-pharmaceutical-tariffs

    Washington sources around 80% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China, India, and the EU. In 2024, pharmaceuticals were the top US import from the EU, including $127 billion (€117 billion) worth of semaglutide, a key component in popular weight-loss medications.

    Hmm. That’s a lot. That single chemical was imported at three times the value of all motor vehicle imports.

    goes looking

    I think that Euronews must have that statistic wrong. Semaglutide is big, but not that big. And that doesn’t mesh with the above bar chart I provided from the European Commission at all.

    https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/semaglutide-market-report

    The global semaglutide market size was estimated at USD 28.43 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 10.47% from 2025 to 2035.

    looks further

    Oh, Euronews must have mixed up the value of the whole pharma import category with the specific chemical. Smooth, guys. CNBC looks like it has it correct:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/13/trumps-tariffs-will-hit-these-european-union-products-hardest.html

    The top U.S. import from the EU in 2024, by category and dollar value, was pharmaceutical products, according to data from the U.S. Trade Census analyzed by ImportGenius. Included in that $127 billion worth of EU imports was semaglutide, an ingredient used in the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs from Novo Nordisk, Ozempic and Wegovy. The GLP-1 compound was the sixth-largest import from the EU to the U.S., at $15.6 billion.

    I will say that, even so, a major price increase there seems like it’d be pretty rough for a lot of Trump voters. Like, semaglutide is something that you’d be given if you’re obese.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaglutide

    Semaglutide is an anti-diabetic medication used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and an anti-obesity medication used for long-term weight management.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/health/ozempic-glp-1-survey-kff

    1 in 8 adults in the US has taken Ozempic or another GLP-1 drug, KFF survey finds

    https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/php/data-research/index.html

    National Diabetes Statistics Report

    Prevalence varied significantly by education level, which is an indicator of socioeconomic status. Specifically, 13.1% of adults with less than a high school education had diagnosed diabetes versus 9.1% of those with a high school education and 6.9% of those with more than a high school education (Appendix Table 3).

    Trump’s rise back in 2016 was strongly supported by low-education voters in the Republican primaries; I remember people talking about demographic analysis:

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-overwhelmingly-leads-rivals-in-support-from-less-educated-americans

    Trump overwhelmingly leads rivals in support from less educated Americans

    And presently, that’s also true for the Republican Party relative to the Democratic Party:

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/politics/the-biggest-predictor-of-how-someone-will-vote

    “The biggest single, best predictor of how someone’s going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics,” Sosnik told David Chalian on the “CNN Political Briefing” podcast.

    Trump’s rise over the past three election cycles, Sosnik argued, “accelerated and completed this political realignment based on education that had been forming since the early ’70s, at the beginning of the decline in the middle class.”

    As the US transitions to a 21st century economy, there’s a rift between the people who attain education – “that’s become the basic Democratic Party,” he said, comparing them with people who feel left behind, “that group of voters is now the modern Republican Party base.”

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/234534/participation-in-us-public-assistance-programs-by-education-level/

    So you simultaneously have:

    • Low-education Americans having particularly supported Trump.

    • Medicaid (government medical services subsidy for low-income Americans) being slashed by the GOP, which transfers medical costs off taxpayers and more-heavily onto poor people who suffer from medical conditions; low-education Americans greatly disproportionately depend on this subsidy.

    • In theory, states could simply increase medical subisidy outside of Medicaid, but the fact that Medicaid provides federal funding causes fiscal transfers across states. Most of the states that pitch in to the federal budget are (wealthier) Democratic states. Aside from New Mexico, which is very Democratic and makes heavy use of Medicaid, most states that heavily use Medicaid are poorer Republican-voting states. West Virgina had the highest level of popular support for Trump in the last Presidential election, had every county get a majority vote for Trump, had the single county with the highest share of Trump support in the US…and the second-highest level of Medicaid dependence.

    • Tariffs that effectively amount to a substantial consumption tax on medicine are — assuming these Trump EU tariffs go into force — being put into place. Medicine has a low price elasticity of demand — one is pretty much going to have to pay for that whether it’s expensive or not — so I’d think that people who have to have medicine are going to likely have to pay such a tax. They can’t easily just not get medicine.

    • A major increase looks to be on a drug that is considerably-disproportionately needed by low-education Americans.

    I have to say that this kind of adds to some observations that a number of high-profile Trump policies seem to be disproportionately financially bad for Trump supporters.

    Started when I was noticing that the Trump administration seemed to be doing a lot of things that looked to be really negative for American agriculture. I’d intuitively expect a Republican trifecta to favor agriculture; rural states tend to vote Republican, and rural areas within states tend to vote Republican. But a lot of things, from crackdowns on illegal immigration (one of the most-economically-important areas for illegal immigrants is agricultural work that requires manual labor) to the likely impact of countertariffs (China has, in the past, targeted American soy farmers with countertariffs, and you normally want low barriers to trade if you’re globally competitive, which American agriculture generally is) seem to have real negatives for agriculture. Oh, and cutting SNAP (food stamps, a federal subsidy for food for low-income Americans). It used to be that federal subsidy for agriculture mostly took the form of subsidizing crop insurance, but I understand that over the decades, it shifted to SNAP to help build political support; this combines a subsidy for the poor and a subsidy for agriculture, so one can use political support from both factions.

    https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-commodity-policy/farm-bill-spending

    Examples of Farm Act programs provided with mandatory funding include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as most commodity and conservation programs.

    If you’re an American farmer and are looking at a pie chart like that, you probably don’t want to cut nutrition assistance…but that’s exactly what’s happening.

    During the first Trump administration, the administration did send financial support to American farmers to help mitigate the damage from the trade war with China, and I was guessing that maybe that’d improve its popularity in the sense that Trump was sending very visible financial aid and the harm was indirect and harder to see, but the material I was able to find, including publications from generally-Republican farming regions, seemed to be pretty unenthusiastic about the prospect of trade wars.

    I kind of feel like I’d like to see an economist who specializes in political economy kind of walk through this, because it’s left me more-than-a-little-puzzled. I can believe Trump burning someone who voted for him and maybe doesn’t have a great handle on the impact of his policies, but one would think that the Republican Congressional delegation would be expected to look out for constituent interests, and these don’t seem to do this. And agricultural industry associations like the Farm Bureau have not been happy either, and they’re going to have bean-counters who should know the relevant numbers and inputs taking a pretty close look at this:

    https://www.fb.org/news-release/afbf-new-tariffs-will-impact-americas-farmers

    American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall today expressed alarm about potential harm to farmers resulting from the order signed by President Trump imposing stiff tariffs on the United States’ top three agricultural markets by value. An economic emergency was declared to put duties of 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada, with limited exceptions, as well as 10% on all imports from China. Canada and Mexico both announced they would impose retaliatory measures.

    “Farm Bureau members support the goals of security and ensuring fair trade with our North American neighbors and China, but, unfortunately, we know from experience that farmers and rural communities will bear the brunt of retaliation. Harmful effects of retaliation to farmers ripple through the rest of the rural economy.

    “In addition, over 80% of the United States’ supply of a key fertilizer ingredient — potash — comes from Canada. Tariffs that increase fertilizer prices threaten to deliver another blow to the finances of farm families already grappling with inflation and high supply costs.