a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
Elros's comments
activity:
Elros  ·  3181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Can someone explain to me what the hell is up with the Dota 2 community?

I sympathize somewhat with your intention. The DotA community is definitely one of the most toxic, rude, immature, and downright racist communities I've ever experienced. Not that everyone, or even a majority of players have these qualities, but the prevalence of these traits is disproportionately high. However, I think the way you've attempted to tackle these problems is not productive for a couple of reasons.

I hope you don't take the following as a personal criticism, but instead as just a comment on how your dialog may be perceived by some others. The other commenters hit several of the major points:

As thewoodenaisle points out, these sorts of posts are emphatically not the sort of thing that people browsing the DotA subreddit are looking for.

As aidrocsid touches on a little bit, the tone with which you present these videos comes across as "standoffish, condescending, completely irrelevant, preachy, and annoying." It feels like you're targeting an attack against people of that community (and maybe you are), and in general people don't respond well to being attacked. Furthermore, such discussion is draped in a culture that many in the DotA community would find alien, and so it makes you like an outsider hurling criticism at the community.

Additionally, you respond to people's comments in a way that is standoffish, melodramatic, sarcastic, and condescending. Again, while these sorts of things may feel good, they're very likely to cause the listener to stop listening and attack back. Frankly, you sound like you've had some bad experiences with the game -- something which I can absolutely sympathize with -- and you've come to pass judgement on the people who might have contributed to those experiences.

I agree in general the community has issues, but I'm not sure what response you expected.

Elros  ·  3195 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Neural Network in 11 lines of Python

I've been trying to write a more general neural network library as a learning project and this article was very helpful as a concrete test case for exactly the reasons you stated. This is of course coming from someone whose only background in machine learning is watching some videos from a courses course.

Elros  ·  3198 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Study: Online gaming “losers” are more likely to harass women

Can you expand on what you mean with the regards to painting the gaming community with a broad brush stroke? The abstract doesn't seem to be making overbroad claims, although perhaps the title of the story is overstated. I think hogwild gave a pretty good explanation of the paper's emphasis.

It's of course dangerous to extrapolate from anecdotes but does your personal experience run contrary to this?

Elros  ·  3223 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Two self-driving cars involved in close call in California

According to arstechnica, this incident is being a little overstated.

    Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman, e-mailed Ars: "The headline here is that two self-driving cars did what they were supposed to do in an ordinary everyday driving scenario."

It seems that what actually happened is the not uncommon situation where one car tried to change lanes, but the other car merged into that lane first. The only difference here is this involved to self-driving cars instead of cars being driven by humans.

Elros  ·  3230 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

IMAX issued an apology it seems.

Elros  ·  3233 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A programming language specializing in numeric and scientific computing.

I've been using Julia for my research projects since early this year and I've been pretty pleased with it. It's fairly fast without making you do much optimization and the fact that it has a REPL is extremely useful.

Elros  ·  3236 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What is your job, hubski?

I'm a physics graduate student. Largely that means I spend my days trying to find errors in a calculation that is obviously wrong, sitting with my head in my hands trying to figure out how to approximate something that seems impossible to calculate, or trying to figure out why my simulation/numerical code is blowing up. Occasionally things make sense and those are the best days.

I don't really feel like a particularly productive member of society, but all in all I'm pretty happy with my job (disregarding the pay) and I'd be happy if I can keep working in the field.

Elros  ·  3236 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dota 2 Update Announced - Source 2 Engine and Custom Games!

The only caveat that should probably be added is that the player base is, like most in this genre, just an awful community on average. Best to play with friends on your team if possible.

Elros  ·  3236 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dota 2 Update Announced - Source 2 Engine and Custom Games!

As far as I know there is no sound, so it's nothing on your end. It's just a visual demonstration of UI.

Elros  ·  3237 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Has anyone tried any of the Linux ported games offered by Good Old Games?

Handtuned wine wrappers made a good porting team are a whole different game than trying to get something running in wine on your own. Many mac ports are also wine wrappers or the like.

I tfor example tried to get the Witches running in wine without much success on mac but the CD projekt official wrapper worked pretty well for me.

Elros  ·  3237 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why I left Reddit

I often find myself a little irritated by the immaturity of reddit, which is in large part what motivated me to check out hubski. However, and this may just be me being cynical, I think a lot of people's prophecies about the imminent demise of reddit reflect more on the collapse of their perceptions of reddit than anything else. Reddit, at the on the larger subs, has been an immature place that is large antithetical to reasonable discussion for a long time. The combination of a large user base and upvote/downvote system for comments basically guarantee that. It just sometimes takes a big outburst for that reality to hit home.

Nonetheless, reddit still functions very well at its primary job of providing content for people to consume, especially on the smaller subreddits. r/dataisbeautiful will continue to provide interesting little graphs to look at, r/askreddit will continue to have interesting/amusing threads, r/dndbehind the screen continues to be an excellent resource for running my DnD game. It's just that reddit is not a one stop shop for everything one would want on the internet. Rumors of reddit's death are at this point a bit of an exaggeration.