Growing up there was some serious issues with the elementary school I was in, so my dad pulled me and my sister out and we were homeschooled at a 'distance education' school. We still physically went to the school for activities and other classes even though our main education was online and such.
Being a distance education school there was a lot of physically and mentally handicapped students who couldn't go through the regular system (public schools are worthless for any sort of special needs), with a lot of them on the autistic spectrum. Being a kid I had no idea there was anything "wrong" with them socially speaking, it was mostly completely normal to me how they acted and socialized.
The school didn't really work out as at 16 years old I was rated at a grade 9 level (YIKES!!!) and we weren't going to get our K12, so again my dad pulled both of us out of there and put us finally into an alternative school. The contrast between the two experiences is indescribable, and I am glad I never have to go through the 'regular' system ever again.
There is most certainly a difference in parenting but nonetheless all of the kids (and adult students) at the distance education school were extremely well mannered, with a very clear "treat others how you want to be treated" attitude to socializing -- And they were always very passionate about one thing or another. They also were incredibly talented at these things they were passionate about, I mainly remember a lot of them being artists but certainly I've learned autistic people to be incredibly skilled at whatever they enjoy doing.
I feel like the reason autistic people are socially shunned so badly is that in my experience they don't often seem very interested in people, but rather things. The kids in the 'regular' school's entire purpose was simply to gossip, shittalk and use the 'socially acceptable' label to justify being shitty human beings. Very few of them were in any way notable because 100% of their interests was drinking, smoking and getting high -- if I ever did hear any of them mention any other interests or hobbies it was so incredibly rare that I clearly don't remember. And whenever they were drunk and/or high all they talked about was how to get more drunk and high, and when they were sober--They spent their time bitching about being sober.
I personally wouldn't worry in any way about her social capacity, because at least in my experience having 'high social status' is far too much work and costs more than it returns. I wish I had the ability back then to say no to those lifetime ditch diggers and burger flippers, but I wound up wanting to fit in and went from 16 years of never used ANY drugs to drinking, smoking and smoking weed pretty fucking heavily -- to the point of incurring some pretty brutal panic attacks and anxiety from loading my system up with a bunch of shit I didn't need.
I kick myself every day for not taking care of myself because I really could've poured seemingly unlimited resources into whatever I wanted to do up until that point. I had absolutely fucking unlimited energy, my mind was incredibly sharp (yeah probably not but compared to now at least) and I could hold information effortlessly when I actually tried to. But this isn't about me but rather these qualities I noticed in those kids at the DE school, if my experience is anything to go off of I'd say you're gonna be getting blown away by what your daughter is going to be capable of throughout her life with the right guidance here and there. I certainly look back on what I remember a lot of them doing and give my head a good shake at how little I've made of anything in my life.
Commented 5 years ago2019-06-11 08:46:51 UTC
in journal: Gaming PC for my sonComment #102087
Furthermore, a monitor that runs at 120hz max will be a very old (first gen high refresh rate) panel and would likely be worse than a good 60hz panel.
I had an acer GN246HL (first generation 144hz panel) which was worse than my BenQ RL2755HM in every aspect possible including response time/input lag. I couldn't imagine how bad a 120hz monitor would've been.
Commented 5 years ago2019-06-10 21:50:05 UTC
in journal: Gaming PC for my sonComment #102085
You'd have to be clinically blind to not notice the difference between 60hz and +100hz. Most people 'don't notice the difference' because windows sets every monitor to 60hz by default and nobody bothers to change it to 120/144hz. You need to uncap fps when benchmarking, you should be getting around 1000fps with dips to maybe 500fps. (785fps average on 8700k w/ rx560)
Commented 5 years ago2019-06-04 11:05:32 UTC
in journal: Gaming PC for my sonComment #102061
Prime A320M-K.
I thought maybe it was the low end mobo holding the cpu back (spent a lot of time trying to figure out how my cpu was performing so badly), but I haven't found anything at all to suggest that performace is in any way linked to the chipset used. Only thing I did find was identical performance across the chipsets. My R7 2700x boosted to 4.2ghz across all cores and never thermal throttled with the stock cooler, with ram running at 3200mhz (which is a requirement on Ryzen due to IF being tied to memory speed).
It's not defective, it's just the truth. Ryzen does not compare with intel for gaming. Satchmo's link above even further solidifies the fact that average framerates mean absolutely nothing when overall latency, stuttering and framerate drops are as bad as they've always been. Yes, at certain times you will see moderate to significant fps improvements over older gen hardware, but unlike intel your framerates will also plummet unreasonably at times. This is what is actually important, and this is how AMD suckered in probably 90% of the people who jumped ship from intel... Average framerates.
Ryzen is a good deal at the higher end for productivity purposes, but that's about it.
EDIT: I see what you're asking now. To say it performed the same as my Phenom II is hyperbolic. I'm saying it got higher fps at times but the minimums were the same as the Phenom II, which is essentially performing as badly as it.
I also see you were talking about gen 3 Ryzen, not R3. Whoops! We'll just have to see what AMD has to offer there, I want to be optimistic but AMD still seems to be driving the Ryzen staple of workstation/productivity (more cores and threads) so I don't have high hopes for gaming improvement.
Commented 5 years ago2019-06-04 00:29:12 UTC
in journal: Gaming PC for my sonComment #102058
Ohhhhhhhh that's right! Yeah 2400mhz will be fine. You can buy digital licenses and write your own USB stick using Media Creation Tool, or you can just buy a USB stick from microsoft.
Commented 5 years ago2019-06-03 13:30:35 UTC
in journal: Gaming PC for my sonComment #102053
Rightfully so, AMD lags about as far behind in gaming as they always have.
I made the mistake of believing the bullshit that Ryzen is only barely worse off than the at the time "equivalent" 7700-8700k, and bought a $500 Ryzen 2700x. It performed about as badly as my now 10 year old Phenom II 1090t I upgraded from. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing for high-throughput productivity purposes, but the latency and stuttering and framerate drops just make it unacceptable for gaming. Bought an 8700k and will never go AMD for gaming ever again.
EDIT: And Ryzen 3 is about as terrible of a purchase as you can make. Even a modern Pentium would absolutely destroy a Ryzen 3 in gaming. (My Ryzen 3 1200 actually performed worse than my phenom II 1090t.)
Only thing I would point out for this build is that a 3200mhz kit would only be marginally more expensive than the 2400mhz kit you've selected. It barely makes a difference on intel but why not shell out a little bit more anyways?
Commented 6 years ago2018-06-25 04:23:40 UTC
in journal: History Repeating ItselfComment #101305
I don't understand the purpose of discussing (or creating a discussion of) any form of politics or even vaguely disagreeable topics, when without fail, it will almost always just result in everybody on every stance cherry picking and/or blatantly misinterpreting the other's statements as a means to reinforce their own beliefs. It's so silly that people can actually be arguing the same point at one another simply because they aren't listening to the other person/people but are simply waiting their turn to say an already prepared statement/comeback/whatever, and so long as the other person keeps responding they feel the need to revalidate their opinion.
If people feel so strongly about something, why waste the effort to argue about it on an online forum? There certainly must be something else that would be more productive towards making meaningful change on the matter.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
Commented 6 years ago2018-03-16 20:25:15 UTC
in journal: #8922Comment #63013
I think the issue is, and I will generalize this to the entire internet, that people either simply enjoy being part of a large group or they'll blindly respond to fear mongering.
People will parrot negative experiences (and cherry pick them at that) to make a situation seem worse than it is. Even though a lot of times these incidents are isolated to faulty hardware, user error, or sometimes things just happen for no good reason. These people may have had a bad experience with the 'thing' they're trying to bring the reputation of down, or they just don't want to feel left out of the big thing that everybody's talking about. Either way it's meaningless effort to gain social status in a conversation that will be forgotten sooner or later.
The other side I mentioned is that people might simply be ignorant of the 'thing' in question and read something that makes no sense to them but is so scary/wrong that they can't help but parrot it elsewhere to 'warn' others about the bad thing. I'm sure it would take very little effort to completely make something up, and people would still spread it as if it were true and they had personally experienced it.
I don't know what the 'big thing' on facebook is nowadays but when I used it a few years ago, people seemingly were losing their minds over how dangerous toothpaste was because they found a bunch of chemically sounding chemicals in the ingredients (Think dihydrogen monoxide). They would go as far as to say it is lethal, and that the government/whatever 'thing' they hated was trying to kill us all, kill our babies, our unborn babies. So on.
I really don't see any purpose in believing anything on the internet unless you have a solid understanding of what is being said. Well, I don't believe in believing anything unless you understand it in general but especially on the internet. It's just too easy to make things up and throw in enough jargon that it seems plausible.
Commented 6 years ago2018-01-16 19:09:50 UTC
in journal: #8901Comment #68505
While it is quite unfair that they make promises they can't keep, I doubt they don't care or intend to go back on them. Right now the worst thing you can do is 'rebel' against them or act based on assumptions you don't know are true, I half assed my way through all of my primary and secondary education and if I could I would go back in time and get the grades I should have had. The fact that you're doing so well in school is somewhat explanatory that they do care about you and are doing a good job. Right now, in high school you don't even have an understanding of the responsibilities and pressures of adult life... And if your parents are anything like my dad, they don't want it, they need it for something they're going to keep from you because they want your life to be as painless and worry free as possible. It's frustrating, but ultimately they know better than you and you should try to understand that. In the very least until you can move out and appreciate it first hand.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
Commented 6 years ago2017-12-25 05:52:32 UTC
in journal: #8894Comment #66234
Also I don't know if anybody else struggles with any form of addiction but I'll leave this here: My anecdotal advice for dealing with addiction is that it has less to do with succeeding or victories than it does to do with simply not giving up. When I quit smoking over a year ago I wasn't really actually trying to quit, it just naturally happened as I found something that got along with me better. And when I quit nicotine entirely (even if only for two months), that too wasn't a 'desperate' attempt, it was just an open minded attempt which could go either way.
Perhaps for some people it may help to count the days and celebrate their small victories, but in my experience when you place a large amount of emotional investment in either direction, it will bounce in the opposite if it doesn't work out the way you want. So the exhilarating victories quickly turn into crushing disappointments when (not if) you relapse which is a natural step in dealing with addiction, which then turns into depression and loss of hope and less chance of the ultimate victory (quitting forever).
For me I wouldn't have quit smoking or nicotine entirely if I wasn't open minded about the possibility of relapsing into it again. If I relapse, then I will learn what I can from it, and hope that I will go into the next attempt with a different approach. Maybe it's better, maybe it's not. But I didn't beat myself up for failing to quit just because I started again, because I knew it would just bury me deeper into it. Just gotta try again. And again, and again and again and again. Even if I never end up winning entirely, certainly sporadic periods of abstinence is still a victory as I've gotton less of the thing I didn't want. And that alone seems worth the effort to me.
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
Commented 7 years ago2017-11-08 04:50:07 UTC
in journal: #8888Comment #68459
Admer, if I have half a nickels worth of advice it'd be this: While some of those people in that thread are straight up retards and assholes, they all certainly seem to be, and have been, adults long enough to know what they're saying. You really need to be a lot less interested in making a point and holding it to the bloody end, and more interested in questioning and being open to suggestions from other people. You will learn nothing if every time somebody speaks to you, you're only listening to yourself making a response and waiting for them to finish talking to say it.
Try it sometime, if you disagree with somebody, ask them to elaborate on their point. You'd be surprised how often somebody can sound completely wrong one minute, but then sound like the only sane person in the room the next.
Commented 7 years ago2017-10-08 03:14:11 UTC
in journal: #8874Comment #62974
Oldest I would go would be 500 series, though 400 series should still be supported. Midrange is x50/x60 or x050/x060, so whatever is affordable within that range will do fine.
Commented 7 years ago2017-10-07 03:39:42 UTC
in journal: #8874Comment #62973
Well the nice thing about this device is since you want improvement in both areas, you can buy an appropriate graphics card, get some improvement short-term but also have a graphics card for your desktop system later.
Look into a barebones Ryzen system: A320 chipset, Ryzen 7 (no sense in going any lower for a workstation) and AMD support on linux is garbage, so go with an nvidia card. Any older mid-range graphics cards would work fine if you're not paranoid about used hardware.
Commented 7 years ago2017-10-06 08:50:41 UTC
in journal: #8874Comment #62972
"It can run older games but sometimes I need to do 3D rendering and that brings it to its knees."
I don't know what exactly you mean by '3D rendering', but raytracing does not make use of the graphics card. If you were to use a graphics card to accelerate it, you would run out of VRAM very quickly due to the nature of how raytracing works, which is why there's +10/20GB cards like 1080ti and Titan on the market. I've also found GPU accelerated raytracing to not only be less useful due to missing features, but also quite buggy and unstable as well.
If you mean just using the 3D suite itself can't handle the simple geometry used during modeling/designing, yeah I would actually agree that something like this would be a worthwhile investment so long as you understand render times will not improve.
Commented 7 years ago2017-07-26 20:59:02 UTC
in journal: #8841Comment #68410
My dad was the same way. Maybe do what I did and get somebody else who is less paranoid to order stuff online for you, and he might notice the items actually arriving and ease up on it. Don't try to show it to him though, just let him figure it out on his own.
Commented 7 years ago2017-06-20 01:13:13 UTC
in journal: #8823Comment #67874
I would wholeheartedly recommend UE4. Being able to have a completely clean slate OR using pre-made templates is something you really learn to appreciate when you don't have it, especially when you only want to make minor tweaks to things and are locked out. It is also (as you noted) a modern engine, and while it's fun to tinker with old engines, I cannot stress enough the importance of keeping up with modern technologies as older engines will create and compound poor understanding and techniques. A modern engine will significantly simplify the process of understanding game logic, shaders, lighting and so on. I would go as far as to say that UE4 is actually as much a learning tool as it is a creation tool, with the way it connects abstract and difficult to understand ideas to something visible and tangible that can be learned from. Although I will also add that all of these things should be present in any modern game engine (rather than just UE4), but I've only personally worked with UE4.
Commented 7 years ago2017-05-31 04:02:17 UTC
in journal: UpdatesComment #52986
CPU-Z will tell you your motherboard as well as a bunch of other things. Make sure your temperatures are within reasonable limits, and that you clean your system of dust often (weekly or in the very least monthly). If dust builds up it can not only slow your system but even kill components from the heat. You can use MSI afterburner and enable the OSD, or what I prefer is to use HWInfo64 and RivaTuner Statistics Server to monitor temp.
Commented 7 years ago2017-04-15 00:32:51 UTC
in journal: #8796Comment #66230
I'd like to thank everybody for the comments and clean (given it's somewhat of a controversial subject right now) discussion. There seems to be quite a few (dangerous) misconceptions being held here which I will try to address to the best of my knowledge.
Addiction: Of course it's bullshit that they're addictive substances. You can absolutely stop whenever you want to, but you don't want to right now. Or later. Or ever. You tell yourself that if you ever get any side effects you will stop. And then you get bad side effects, so you tell yourself that you'll work through it instead of trying to quit. After a while you start thinking that the side effects aren't so bad, and you certainly don't have to quit. Sure, maybe a few things are more difficult to do, but it's not that much worse, right? Do you see the problem? Addictive drugs are absolutely not addictive... until you're addicted. Nicotine rewires the brain so that it gives you pleasure on using it, and discomfort upon withdrawing. You become a different person without even realizing it.
You cannot theorize addiction any more than you can theorize anxiety. You may think that you can simply "calm down", but once you find yourself within an anxiety attack... Your reality changes. All of your usual logic ceases to work, and the anxiety feeds on itself, spiraling you into even further panic upon realizing that you can't calm yourself down. It is a hell I wouldn't wish on somebody I hated, and from my experiences with it I am almost convinced it is a living entity of it's own.
Addiction is very much the same... You cannot theorize about it because you haven't experienced it. The pleasure it gives you, that you have willingly chosen to (stupidly) experience begins to dig deep roots in your brain, and you soon find yourself willing to hold onto that easy pleasure for a long time. But try to go without it and you will find a hell of anxiety, mental disorientation, physical sickness and so on. If it was easy, then there would be exactly 0 smokers left after they started having negative side effects like hacking up a lung every morning. But there becomes a point of addiction where it's actually easier to deal with bad side effects than it is to go through withdrawal.
At this point of addiction, as far as your brain is concerned, the nicotine is the only thing that gives you pleasure. So you can try all you want to apply any logic you want, your brain will win. The mental disorientation from withdrawals will make you lose sight of what you really want (to quit), nothing will feel good or "right", and soon you are easily worn down, and your mind will do what it does best: It will take over the show and do what it believes is best for you...
Addiction is a very real thing, and it is not to be taken lightly. Nobody who has been addicted ever intended for it, and many of them viewed addiction in the same ways that are expressed here. I can see myself saying these things 5 years ago, and that is very unfortunately ignorant. :/
Commented 7 years ago2017-04-14 06:34:47 UTC
in journal: #8796Comment #66229
And for the record: Even if the delivery system of vaping is proven to not cause any noticeable effects on your health, the withdrawals of nicotine are bad enough that you should not take up vaping nicotine unless you have to. It is an addictive drug and withdrawal is very unpleasant and disruptive, both physically and mentally.
Commented 7 years ago2017-03-25 23:57:55 UTC
in journal: #8788Comment #58557
Perhaps the simpler nature of additive brush building might appeal to a beginner, but gain any amount of experience and the flexibility of subtractive geometry becomes very apparent. Only having to manage the faces of geometry that will actually exist/be visible in your level, much faster iteration time as well as readability of your levels since you don't have to see all the extra geometry (in your 2d views) that won't exist in the final level and is not relevant.
I can't speak to final performance in the compiled BSP as I am not technically privy to what goes on under the hood, but at least for the source map file you will see significantly reduced filesizes. Consider a simple room: In subtractive, it's 8 vertices with 6 faces, corresponding to only the vertices and connecting faces that make up the inside (and relevant portion) of the room. In additive, it's 48 vertices with 36 faces, which corresponds to the inside vertices and faces of the room, as well as all of the outer faces and vertices of the 6 boxes that make up the room. That is 6 times the information, most of which contains wasted UV space, texture and position data, as well as any other information that can be mapped to the unnecessary vertices and faces within hammer itself.
Commented 7 years ago2017-02-09 18:58:42 UTC
in journal: #8775Comment #68096
Windows 10 was designed to run smoothly on low-end hardware, including tablets. It has it's quirks, but given how easy they are to fix, I would upgrade to 10 (even if only to see if there's a noticable difference).
Happy birthday!
Being a distance education school there was a lot of physically and mentally handicapped students who couldn't go through the regular system (public schools are worthless for any sort of special needs), with a lot of them on the autistic spectrum. Being a kid I had no idea there was anything "wrong" with them socially speaking, it was mostly completely normal to me how they acted and socialized.
The school didn't really work out as at 16 years old I was rated at a grade 9 level (YIKES!!!) and we weren't going to get our K12, so again my dad pulled both of us out of there and put us finally into an alternative school. The contrast between the two experiences is indescribable, and I am glad I never have to go through the 'regular' system ever again.
There is most certainly a difference in parenting but nonetheless all of the kids (and adult students) at the distance education school were extremely well mannered, with a very clear "treat others how you want to be treated" attitude to socializing -- And they were always very passionate about one thing or another. They also were incredibly talented at these things they were passionate about, I mainly remember a lot of them being artists but certainly I've learned autistic people to be incredibly skilled at whatever they enjoy doing.
I feel like the reason autistic people are socially shunned so badly is that in my experience they don't often seem very interested in people, but rather things. The kids in the 'regular' school's entire purpose was simply to gossip, shittalk and use the 'socially acceptable' label to justify being shitty human beings.
Very few of them were in any way notable because 100% of their interests was drinking, smoking and getting high -- if I ever did hear any of them mention any other interests or hobbies it was so incredibly rare that I clearly don't remember. And whenever they were drunk and/or high all they talked about was how to get more drunk and high, and when they were sober--They spent their time bitching about being sober.
I personally wouldn't worry in any way about her social capacity, because at least in my experience having 'high social status' is far too much work and costs more than it returns.
I wish I had the ability back then to say no to those lifetime ditch diggers and burger flippers, but I wound up wanting to fit in and went from 16 years of never used ANY drugs to drinking, smoking and smoking weed pretty fucking heavily -- to the point of incurring some pretty brutal panic attacks and anxiety from loading my system up with a bunch of shit I didn't need.
I kick myself every day for not taking care of myself because I really could've poured seemingly unlimited resources into whatever I wanted to do up until that point. I had absolutely fucking unlimited energy, my mind was incredibly sharp (yeah probably not but compared to now at least) and I could hold information effortlessly when I actually tried to.
But this isn't about me but rather these qualities I noticed in those kids at the DE school, if my experience is anything to go off of I'd say you're gonna be getting blown away by what your daughter is going to be capable of throughout her life with the right guidance here and there. I certainly look back on what I remember a lot of them doing and give my head a good shake at how little I've made of anything in my life.
I had an acer GN246HL (first generation 144hz panel) which was worse than my BenQ RL2755HM in every aspect possible including response time/input lag. I couldn't imagine how bad a 120hz monitor would've been.
You need to uncap fps when benchmarking, you should be getting around 1000fps with dips to maybe 500fps. (785fps average on 8700k w/ rx560)
I thought maybe it was the low end mobo holding the cpu back (spent a lot of time trying to figure out how my cpu was performing so badly), but I haven't found anything at all to suggest that performace is in any way linked to the chipset used.
Only thing I did find was identical performance across the chipsets.
My R7 2700x boosted to 4.2ghz across all cores and never thermal throttled with the stock cooler, with ram running at 3200mhz (which is a requirement on Ryzen due to IF being tied to memory speed).
It's not defective, it's just the truth. Ryzen does not compare with intel for gaming.
Satchmo's link above even further solidifies the fact that average framerates mean absolutely nothing when overall latency, stuttering and framerate drops are as bad as they've always been.
Yes, at certain times you will see moderate to significant fps improvements over older gen hardware, but unlike intel your framerates will also plummet unreasonably at times. This is what is actually important, and this is how AMD suckered in probably 90% of the people who jumped ship from intel... Average framerates.
Ryzen is a good deal at the higher end for productivity purposes, but that's about it.
EDIT: I see what you're asking now.
To say it performed the same as my Phenom II is hyperbolic.
I'm saying it got higher fps at times but the minimums were the same as the Phenom II, which is essentially performing as badly as it.
I also see you were talking about gen 3 Ryzen, not R3. Whoops!
We'll just have to see what AMD has to offer there, I want to be optimistic but AMD still seems to be driving the Ryzen staple of workstation/productivity (more cores and threads) so I don't have high hopes for gaming improvement.
You can buy digital licenses and write your own USB stick using Media Creation Tool, or you can just buy a USB stick from microsoft.
I made the mistake of believing the bullshit that Ryzen is only barely worse off than the at the time "equivalent" 7700-8700k, and bought a $500 Ryzen 2700x.
It performed about as badly as my now 10 year old Phenom II 1090t I upgraded from.
Don't get me wrong, it's amazing for high-throughput productivity purposes, but the latency and stuttering and framerate drops just make it unacceptable for gaming.
Bought an 8700k and will never go AMD for gaming ever again.
EDIT: And Ryzen 3 is about as terrible of a purchase as you can make. Even a modern Pentium would absolutely destroy a Ryzen 3 in gaming.
(My Ryzen 3 1200 actually performed worse than my phenom II 1090t.)
Only thing I would point out for this build is that a 3200mhz kit would only be marginally more expensive than the 2400mhz kit you've selected. It barely makes a difference on intel but why not shell out a little bit more anyways?
It's so silly that people can actually be arguing the same point at one another simply because they aren't listening to the other person/people but are simply waiting their turn to say an already prepared statement/comeback/whatever, and so long as the other person keeps responding they feel the need to revalidate their opinion.
If people feel so strongly about something, why waste the effort to argue about it on an online forum? There certainly must be something else that would be more productive towards making meaningful change on the matter.
People will parrot negative experiences (and cherry pick them at that) to make a situation seem worse than it is. Even though a lot of times these incidents are isolated to faulty hardware, user error, or sometimes things just happen for no good reason.
These people may have had a bad experience with the 'thing' they're trying to bring the reputation of down, or they just don't want to feel left out of the big thing that everybody's talking about. Either way it's meaningless effort to gain social status in a conversation that will be forgotten sooner or later.
The other side I mentioned is that people might simply be ignorant of the 'thing' in question and read something that makes no sense to them but is so scary/wrong that they can't help but parrot it elsewhere to 'warn' others about the bad thing. I'm sure it would take very little effort to completely make something up, and people would still spread it as if it were true and they had personally experienced it.
I don't know what the 'big thing' on facebook is nowadays but when I used it a few years ago, people seemingly were losing their minds over how dangerous toothpaste was because they found a bunch of chemically sounding chemicals in the ingredients (Think dihydrogen monoxide).
They would go as far as to say it is lethal, and that the government/whatever 'thing' they hated was trying to kill us all, kill our babies, our unborn babies. So on.
I really don't see any purpose in believing anything on the internet unless you have a solid understanding of what is being said. Well, I don't believe in believing anything unless you understand it in general but especially on the internet. It's just too easy to make things up and throw in enough jargon that it seems plausible.
Right now the worst thing you can do is 'rebel' against them or act based on assumptions you don't know are true, I half assed my way through all of my primary and secondary education and if I could I would go back in time and get the grades I should have had. The fact that you're doing so well in school is somewhat explanatory that they do care about you and are doing a good job.
Right now, in high school you don't even have an understanding of the responsibilities and pressures of adult life... And if your parents are anything like my dad, they don't want it, they need it for something they're going to keep from you because they want your life to be as painless and worry free as possible.
It's frustrating, but ultimately they know better than you and you should try to understand that. In the very least until you can move out and appreciate it first hand.
No, can't figure this one out.
(Happy not-dead-yet day!)
When I quit smoking over a year ago I wasn't really actually trying to quit, it just naturally happened as I found something that got along with me better.
And when I quit nicotine entirely (even if only for two months), that too wasn't a 'desperate' attempt, it was just an open minded attempt which could go either way.
Perhaps for some people it may help to count the days and celebrate their small victories, but in my experience when you place a large amount of emotional investment in either direction, it will bounce in the opposite if it doesn't work out the way you want.
So the exhilarating victories quickly turn into crushing disappointments when (not if) you relapse which is a natural step in dealing with addiction, which then turns into depression and loss of hope and less chance of the ultimate victory (quitting forever).
For me I wouldn't have quit smoking or nicotine entirely if I wasn't open minded about the possibility of relapsing into it again. If I relapse, then I will learn what I can from it, and hope that I will go into the next attempt with a different approach. Maybe it's better, maybe it's not.
But I didn't beat myself up for failing to quit just because I started again, because I knew it would just bury me deeper into it.
Just gotta try again. And again, and again and again and again.
Even if I never end up winning entirely, certainly sporadic periods of abstinence is still a victory as I've gotton less of the thing I didn't want. And that alone seems worth the effort to me.
You really need to be a lot less interested in making a point and holding it to the bloody end, and more interested in questioning and being open to suggestions from other people. You will learn nothing if every time somebody speaks to you, you're only listening to yourself making a response and waiting for them to finish talking to say it.
Try it sometime, if you disagree with somebody, ask them to elaborate on their point. You'd be surprised how often somebody can sound completely wrong one minute, but then sound like the only sane person in the room the next.
Look into a barebones Ryzen system: A320 chipset, Ryzen 7 (no sense in going any lower for a workstation) and AMD support on linux is garbage, so go with an nvidia card.
Any older mid-range graphics cards would work fine if you're not paranoid about used hardware.
I don't know what exactly you mean by '3D rendering', but raytracing does not make use of the graphics card.
If you were to use a graphics card to accelerate it, you would run out of VRAM very quickly due to the nature of how raytracing works, which is why there's +10/20GB cards like 1080ti and Titan on the market. I've also found GPU accelerated raytracing to not only be less useful due to missing features, but also quite buggy and unstable as well.
If you mean just using the 3D suite itself can't handle the simple geometry used during modeling/designing, yeah I would actually agree that something like this would be a worthwhile investment so long as you understand render times will not improve.
Don't try to show it to him though, just let him figure it out on his own.
Being able to have a completely clean slate OR using pre-made templates is something you really learn to appreciate when you don't have it, especially when you only want to make minor tweaks to things and are locked out.
It is also (as you noted) a modern engine, and while it's fun to tinker with old engines, I cannot stress enough the importance of keeping up with modern technologies as older engines will create and compound poor understanding and techniques. A modern engine will significantly simplify the process of understanding game logic, shaders, lighting and so on.
I would go as far as to say that UE4 is actually as much a learning tool as it is a creation tool, with the way it connects abstract and difficult to understand ideas to something visible and tangible that can be learned from.
Although I will also add that all of these things should be present in any modern game engine (rather than just UE4), but I've only personally worked with UE4.
Make sure your temperatures are within reasonable limits, and that you clean your system of dust often (weekly or in the very least monthly).
If dust builds up it can not only slow your system but even kill components from the heat.
You can use MSI afterburner and enable the OSD, or what I prefer is to use HWInfo64 and RivaTuner Statistics Server to monitor temp.
There seems to be quite a few (dangerous) misconceptions being held here which I will try to address to the best of my knowledge.
Addiction: Of course it's bullshit that they're addictive substances. You can absolutely stop whenever you want to, but you don't want to right now. Or later. Or ever.
You tell yourself that if you ever get any side effects you will stop. And then you get bad side effects, so you tell yourself that you'll work through it instead of trying to quit. After a while you start thinking that the side effects aren't so bad, and you certainly don't have to quit. Sure, maybe a few things are more difficult to do, but it's not that much worse, right? Do you see the problem?
Addictive drugs are absolutely not addictive... until you're addicted. Nicotine rewires the brain so that it gives you pleasure on using it, and discomfort upon withdrawing. You become a different person without even realizing it.
You cannot theorize addiction any more than you can theorize anxiety. You may think that you can simply "calm down", but once you find yourself within an anxiety attack... Your reality changes.
All of your usual logic ceases to work, and the anxiety feeds on itself, spiraling you into even further panic upon realizing that you can't calm yourself down. It is a hell I wouldn't wish on somebody I hated, and from my experiences with it I am almost convinced it is a living entity of it's own.
Addiction is very much the same... You cannot theorize about it because you haven't experienced it. The pleasure it gives you, that you have willingly chosen to (stupidly) experience begins to dig deep roots in your brain, and you soon find yourself willing to hold onto that easy pleasure for a long time. But try to go without it and you will find a hell of anxiety, mental disorientation, physical sickness and so on.
If it was easy, then there would be exactly 0 smokers left after they started having negative side effects like hacking up a lung every morning. But there becomes a point of addiction where it's actually easier to deal with bad side effects than it is to go through withdrawal.
At this point of addiction, as far as your brain is concerned, the nicotine is the only thing that gives you pleasure.
So you can try all you want to apply any logic you want, your brain will win. The mental disorientation from withdrawals will make you lose sight of what you really want (to quit), nothing will feel good or "right", and soon you are easily worn down, and your mind will do what it does best: It will take over the show and do what it believes is best for you...
Addiction is a very real thing, and it is not to be taken lightly. Nobody who has been addicted ever intended for it, and many of them viewed addiction in the same ways that are expressed here. I can see myself saying these things 5 years ago, and that is very unfortunately ignorant. :/
I can't speak to final performance in the compiled BSP as I am not technically privy to what goes on under the hood, but at least for the source map file you will see significantly reduced filesizes.
Consider a simple room: In subtractive, it's 8 vertices with 6 faces, corresponding to only the vertices and connecting faces that make up the inside (and relevant portion) of the room.
In additive, it's 48 vertices with 36 faces, which corresponds to the inside vertices and faces of the room, as well as all of the outer faces and vertices of the 6 boxes that make up the room.
That is 6 times the information, most of which contains wasted UV space, texture and position data, as well as any other information that can be mapped to the unnecessary vertices and faces within hammer itself.
that guy was a fucking cunt