VladTheImplier's comments

VladTheImplier | 7 years ago | on: The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that never was

It's a genre that keeps fascinating people who like that genre - what possibly twisted mind could do such horrible things? It's indeed an often taken and explored trope of fiction, certainly not for everyone. Also all of the Mafia themes: So many of the media on that hides the gruesome reality of recruiting people out of poverty to push them into a never ending circle of violence, with notorious killers that tortured their victims in much fashion like jack the ripper. (Think Richard Kuklinski, whose death count is without a doubt much higher than Jack The Ripper) And yet many of the fictional books, series and games portrait the Mafia as being about honour, family and pride. It's a fictional world that if made well enough is interesting to explore.

Probably that game wouldn't have been for me either as I despise torture porn akin to saw. But that doesn't mean, that this sort of fiction is inherently bad. Tasteless for sure, yet in a genre of a grotesque deep dive into a parallel universe where the gruesome and grotesque is justified by a mysterious, higher cause.

VladTheImplier | 7 years ago | on: The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that never was

Many instances of media are giving a spin on horrible historical events for the sake of entertainment. These are never meant to be "tasteful". Does Wolfenstein condone the holocaust? All the Dracula books and movies make Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, a charismatic character, even though he murdered so many innocent people in such a cruel way just to secure his position.

They do put a tasteless twist on a horrible event - that makes this thought experiment so intriguing as a setting to explore. What if the Nazis won? What if Vlad The Impaler was an interesting and charismatic person, what if JackTheRipper was a hero under cover. It's all stupid, but interesting at the same time. That does not mean they disrespect history.

VladTheImplier | 7 years ago | on: The Internet Trolls Have Won. Sorry, There’s Not Much You Can Do

How did you come to this conclusion? In Germany survey after survey shows some deep mistrust. Between 40%-60% depending on where and how the survey took place describe mainstream media as "not trustworthy", whilst a certain survey asked for malicious intent specifically and 20% agrees with the notion main stream media is manipulating the public with false information on certain topics.

Source: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Das-Vertrauen-in-Medien-ist...

VladTheImplier | 7 years ago | on: Cinematic rendering – an alternative to volume rendering for 3D CT (2016)

They are where form and contour matters, which you can't always deduce from a orthographic 3 Panel view. In my current case the form and thickness variation of nerves in Parkinson's patients is looked at and analyzed. Since nerve curve through space like worms, looking at curvature in raw image data is unpractical, especially since it's not always apparent whether you look at the cross section at an angle.

VladTheImplier | 7 years ago | on: Cinematic rendering – an alternative to volume rendering for 3D CT (2016)

This is very interesting, the amount of rendering complexity they pull from volume data is nothing short of impressive. Having never ventured beyond Orthogonal projections for pseudo 3D in my work, this is some fresh air. But it's rather useless as a standalone technology. Much of the appeal comes from pulling color and using it to render from segmented volume data, which is rarely the case in the field. "Scattering effects are modelled using a local gradient shading model" This can mess with perception, if done incorrectly, especially where precision is spares like Volumetric data pulled from Ultrasound, not to mention such a rendering model in non segmented data sets is questionable. But one hell of a tool to convince a board meeting of whatever.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: You will be surprised to see how much Google tracks about you

Ye, it is not as smooth in scrolling as GMaps, though more feature rich. If this bothers you, there is an app called Maps.Me. it is minimalistic, has smooth scrolling like Gmaps but not as feature rich as OSMand and has a non-free (as in freedom) map data service behind it.

But if performance of osmand bothers you, this is the place to go.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: You will be surprised to see how much Google tracks about you

On Android there is OSMand and Openstreetmap in general. The only problem being that address search is not great and there is no context search. You can get an app called AddresstoGPS, which anonymously queries Google's search and let's you output GPS coordinates to OSMand or similar.

As for Google Mail - There are many great E-Mail hosters like ProtonMail, coupled with your favorite E-Mail client it has no downsides, unless you miss tight Google Products integration.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: Google now blocks GApps on uncertified devices,but custom ROM can be whitelisted

"or if they are a custom ROM user (such as with LineageOS 15.1) then they will need to enter their Android ID at this page in order to be white-listed." How about no?

Thank God I left the Google Ecosystem completely on my now years old and trusty OnePlus One, awesome battery life and all with no google play service alive.

I understand and share the wish to combat fragmentation in the Android experience, it can indeed be daunting for newcomers. Treble was a great step in the right direction, but this is not. Where is the spirit of free customization? Android is not Google, their grasp on OEMs seems disproportionately dangerous. This news comes in the wake of Nvidia using their monopolistic position and screwing Graphics card OEMs into a one-sided agreement to serve only them and not to align their Gamerbrands with "competitors". So an OEM that does not bend over to Google's rules will get a user experience, where Users have to jump through white listing hoops.

I scramble to see the good intentions here.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: iPhone protected you from Facebook call scraping. Android, not so much

True, it's a bit of a fight to go full open source on android, but in recent months this got easier. Many apps that replace the whole google apps suite have been updated to be a great alternative, sometimes better.

Also F-Droid got a nice look and functionality now, don't miss the Play store a bit.

In case someone does, there is the "yalp-app", google play backwards. It downloads apks from the play store with a fake account.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: Why German companies fail at digital innovation

In the wakes of Edward Snowden's revelations (where Merkel's phone was tapped, they lied to the public that it was not and the next day it was confirmed that it was indeed being tapped) it was shown, that the BKA and other parts of German government gladly sent over all the data they have collected to our "friends" over the pond. Whilst I and many truly appreciate the data protection, there are other laws, that force you to save data over a certain period of time, see the "Voratsdatenspeicherung" debate. There are so many beyond retarded laws, that make an internet based startup in Germany a very bad gamble. One of those retarded laws was "Störerhaft", which up until the end of 2017 made offering free WiFi basically illegal. Now you are required to identify and collect every real name within a Network. Now offering WiFi isn't straight up a guarantee for trouble, but you are forced to use a login page, which saves the name of the user.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: YouTube and Reddit roll out new restrictions including channel and sub bans

Going lineage OS with F-Droid for your APP needs has been quite the positive experience for me. Everything has a nice FLOSS alternative, that is sometimes better than the Google-App equivalent and the newly revamped F-Droid works great.

If you still need something from the playstore there is the "yalp-store" app, which grabs apk with a fake account from google.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: New Raspberry Pi Model B+

There are great guides on how to lower power consumption by turning HDMI off, under clocking, even going as far as turning off the status LEDs. Killing off many of the autostarting services in raspbian or not using raspbian in the first place can also help quite a bit due to peak current draw during boot time. If you don't need networking you can easily get down to almost 10s boot time by disabling networking daemons and dependencies.

Made a project in optics with the pi zero w, camera v2, a touchscreen over GPIO, 4 bright LEDs and a 5V regulator. As a power source it uses a 9€ 1200mha LithiumIon Battery in 9V battery form. Lives on for 3 hours under full load.

Also using normal 9V batteries I killed them in 5mins - something something internal resistance of non LithiumIon batteries not coping with high current draw.

VladTheImplier | 8 years ago | on: “Women at Microsoft are sexualized by their male managers,” lawsuit alleges

Barely a story, devoid of proper information. Microsoft has 125 employees world wide, they would never risk a PR nightmare by going too soft on a proper investigation.

>108 complaints of sexual harassment >119 complaints of gender discrimination

"Out of all of the claimed instances of gender discrimination, Microsoft’s internal investigation only found that one such complaint was “founded.” [...] yet ERIT still perplexingly found that the behavior did not rise to the level of a policy violation."

The real evidence, if there is any, will be locked behind the court case until it finishes and a proper verdict is reached. Until then articles like these only fuel baseless allegations in the current #metoo climate.

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