Ask Lemmy

I still play a little old school Doom and earlier this year the creator of one of the main engines people use (GZDoom) got some flak for using some AI in his coding, causing a lot of people to switch over to a fork (UZDoom).

I don't miss many things about the old site but the niche communities are one of them. If anyone wants to dive into years of minutiae covering everything from big drama to slap fights you should check out
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/

Miniature painting: True metallic Vs non metallic metal.

Should you paint the metal parts of your minis in metallic paint (containing small amounts of pica and/or aluminium to give it a reflective shimmer), or is it better to use non metallic paints and paint the shimmer and reflections to give the illusion of being metallic?

Personally I prefer TMM, because it's basically the same techniques but if you fuck it up a bit it doesn't end up looking terrible like NMM, and while NMM looks great in photos I find TMM looks better in real life, which is where I enjoy my minis. NMM definitely requires more skill, but I don't think the results are worth it unless you're entering competitions.

Lots of debates about the internal arrangement of the original series Enterprise…

• Bridge: forward facing or offset?
• Engineering: primary or secondary hull?
• Shuttlebay: short or extending under the nacelle pylons?
• How big is this ship, anyway??

In the RTS game beyond all reason there is a long ongoing debate thread where people would argue for removing the ability to co-op(one of bars unique mechanics)

In BAR you generally play team games up to 8v8 and can instantly send resources to other players. You can also transfer units. This is pretty cool it allows you to work together to get higher tech things faster. 2 people sharing 1 lab is more efficient than 2 people making a lab each. So obviously the higher ranked games devolved into the most fucking degenerate co-op tactics. Cheese or be cheesed. Lanes decided by which good player gets more boosts. You'd end up in games where your role is to be a battery and make energy for the first few mins. You would end up losing your lane at 3mins because the other team boosted your lane then once you die they go boost the other side. You'd have the top players in the team forcing the bottom players to be a boost for them because them getting ahead is far more valuable. It was fun in the beginning but got very bad.

So top players were arguing that there needed to be a fix and tried to discuss what it should be and more casual players would constantly argue that it wasnt a problem, it was a skill issue, it was fun etc, someone just needs to counter it.

The solution people wanted was a resource tax but it required engine work. But its been done now, we got the engine work and its a toggle on setting so those who want it can and those who dont can leave it off. The "coop is a problem" thread is still going but i dont know what the new arguments are about.

Cooking:

Aioli is made with oil and no egg. If it includes egg, it is a mayonnaise.

Many people just call everything "aioli" these days, even if it's technically a mayonnaise.

Woodworking: I have mentioned this a couple times in my lectures on this platform. Festool has a tool called the Domino. It's the shape of a biscuit joiner but it's got a router bit that it wags like a dog's tail. It cuts a deep, narrow, short mortise that pre-made loose biscuits fit into.

This tool is protected under patent so only Festool makes them. They sell two models, a small and a large. The small cost a thousand petrodollars.

It's very easy to use, it makes strong joints quickly, it's impossible to afford.

You'll find there's a crowd of purists who will spend that much on a chisel and won't hear anything about it because it's not "traditional joinery." Floating tenons are thousands of years old, but okay. You've got beginners or hobbyists who can put together the basic tools and are upset when Youtubers use Dominos in projects. Most domino joints can be replaced with dowel joints, but okay. And you get the actual cabinet makers who go "I manufacture cabinets, this lets me do it faster, and time is money." Which...fair enough.

If you don't own a plunge router, you don't care.

Synthesizers: digital vs analog.

Common opinion holds that analog (specifically oscillators, but also filters and even VCAs [voltage controlled amplifiers]) are warmer and more natural sounding while digital are cold and harsh.

The thing is, digital emulation of analog hardware has become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, but there is a certain segment that refuses to believe their $5000 Minimoog can be so easily replicated by software (realistically I doubt Bob Moog could tell the difference anymore).

Of course some also choose to argue which is better, which is just ridiculous because they both have their uses depending on what kinds of music you're composing or just what sounds you're trying to make.

I'm into metal crafting and you have no idea how competitive it can get, currently the divide is between whether Bessemer or Cathode steel are superior for bintwork, it's a form of ring chained gavel produced by different metallurgical processes and it is WILD how heated discussions get, it's ridiculous considering that most practitioners are in their early teens and create the WORST drama, while us who have been at it since the 1960's have to accept the sudden influx of kids into the mold because of the success of films such as "Steel Piston" and "Hot Rod", and frankly I'm done with it and have decided to get into Wicca.

Exactly how planes fly. I studied a bit of fluid dynamics in grad school and my professor was adamant that any explanation is incomplete without discussion of boundary layers.

In short the explanation was a couple things. The first is how ping pong balls generate lift with translation and rotation (or vorticity). Its basically the shape of the wing that helps with vorticity (this is what generates the pressure difference above and below the wing). The second is that you need laminar flow over the wing for vorticity to take place, and this is achieved when a thin layer of turbulent air surrounds it, the boundary layer. It moves the stagnation points towards the back (encouraging laminar flow) and reducing drag.

The same process is the reason golf balls have dimples on them, to help form a turbulent boundary layer, moving the stagnation pounts, reducing drag and allowing the ball to go further.

"Tripping the boundary layer" can be achieved by increasing speed on the runway, a strong head wind, rough spots on the wing, or how you might see windsurfers pump their sail, or someone pumping on a hydrofoil board in the water.

Thats not a debate in LoTR Fandom. Debate would imply one side has a leg to stand on. No wings.

Star Trek (Voyager): Was it murder to split Tuvix back into Tuvok and Neelix?

I've got a long and complex possible solution to offer regarding this ethical clusterfuck, and I'm willing to elaborate if someone's interested to hear it.

Edit (possible solution): Voyager's database should include the Enterprise D's information regarding Riker's duplication incident. While Voyager's crew already found a way to separate Tuvix, they could've searched for a possibility to repeat that process and then split back the copy Tuvix a few milliseconds into the original Tuvok and Neelix before said copy became self-aware.

Furry Fandom:

How we represent ourselves as a fandom.

Some groups want the fandom to be more clean and family friendly. Some want it to remain weird and not always as family friendly as it currently is.

Some are more okay with using things like cheap plastic animal masks as bases for fursuit heads. Some people don't want that type of stuff and would rather see bases be either hand made or use something like a sports helmet or mask to build the base around.

Some are okay with us becoming more mainstream and companies like Netflix taking a little more interest in us. Others want corporations to stay away from us.

As for me, you can guess my stance just by the fact of me being here on Lemmy. I'd rather see a base use something not quite as corporate as a cheap plastic junk mask as a base. I would also rather keep our fandom a little less sanitized and more weird to keep the corpos from coming in and turning our fandom into a heavily censored industry.

Mycology is full of them which are mostly the result of genetic sequencing and the good old "where do you draw the line between species" question but a recent and high visibility one is the Collybia shift.

Before genetic testing, Collybia was a genus characterized by smallish pale-spored mushrooms with convex caps, no ring, and gills which are broadly attached to the stem (the simplest shape the average person would imagine for a mushroom), this became one of the classic "statures" of mushrooms "Collybioid". As we sequenced Collybia species, they were slowly moved into other Collybioid genera like Collybiopsis and Gymnopus. Eventually this resulted in most of the Collybioid mushrooms being moved out of Collybia, leaving only the earliest-discovered mushrooms in the genus which were tiny parasitic mushrooms that weren't really Collybioid at all.

Here's an average "Collybioid" mushroom Gymnopus sp.

Then things got worse, a recent paper did a study on genus Clitocybe which is another genus which has a classic stature named after it, "Clitocyboid" which refers to smallish pale-spored, funnel-shaped, mushrooms with gills that run down the stem. This paper discovered that nearly everything we had been calling "Clitocybe" actually belonged in Collybia meaning that most mushrooms in Collybia are now Clitocyboid instead of Collybioid. This has resulted utter chaos which has some mycologists considering invoking the "common usage" rules in taxonomy to put the new Collybias back into Clitocybe to make things less confusing. This chaos has been compounded by the fact that iNaturalist has already accepted this name change, but only for the mushrooms explicitly studied in the paper and not their known relatives which has resulted in the Blewits being split between Collybia and Lepista (which itself was a recent name change from Clitocybe that everyone was still adjusting too).

Average nondescript Clitocyboid (no ID because these are nearly impossible):

A Blewit, AKA Clitocybe/Lepista/Collybia nuda:

I collect coins, and there's always debates about what a coin is.

For those who don't know, a coin is usually defined as an object with legal tender status somewhere; as opposed to a token that has a face value but is issued by a non-state actor; and a medal, which is anything that looks like a coin but doesn't have any face value.

Now, aside from the expected debate over what is and isn't a state, there's also the issue of NIFC (not intended for circulation) coins. Many mints sell coins that are legal tender, but are never put into circulation, some people (often those that could be characterised as "old school") take the position that as these aren't intended to be used as legal tender, they aren't really coins.

It doesn't help that there are tiny island nations like Niue and Samoa that will basically let companies make anything legal tender if they pay them. This leads to the rather silly situation where a batarang, and a literal statue of hogwarts, are technically "coins". (I've been told this is done as a import tariff dodge as the USA doesn't charge import taxes on coins)

Are tabs worth two spaces or four?

Programming and Linux. Oh boy, what to pick...

Terminal text editors: VIM vs Emacs is the main debate there. (There are others but these are ones people argue the most about)

Linux Distros: Arch, Debian, Mint, CachyOS, ...

Init Systems: Systemd vs OpenRC. Honestly, probably the most toxic debate on this list.

Programming Languages: Python, Shell, but the heated one is C vs Rust

A non-exhaustive list of ones I couldn't think of a category for:

• Tiling vs Floating Window Managers
• Chromium vs Gecko-based browsers
• Bash vs Zsh vs Fish

I love computers and Linux, but man, the amount of toxic in-fighting and gatekeeping is a real turnoff. Just use what you want. At the end of the day, we are all nerds doing what we love.