#DataCube

[scienza-magia]

Sentinel-1 monitora la deforestazione Amazzonica

Utilizzo di un data cube per monitorare la perdita di foreste in Amazzonia. Gli ecosistemi forestali stanno subendo rapidamente gli impatti dei cambiamenti climatici e il monitoraggio tempestivo delle foreste sta diventando sempre più urgente. Un progetto guidato dall'ESA, Sentinel-1 for Science: Amazonas, ha elaborato miliardi di immagini radar dell'intero bacino amazzonico e le ha convertite in un data cube, aiutando a rilevare la perdita di foreste. Un data cube è un modo semplice per organizzare e visualizzare qualsiasi tipo di dati in più dimensioni, ottenendo informazioni su modelli e tendenze che potrebbero non essere immediatamente evidenti in un grafico o grafico tradizionale. Da gennaio 2017 a novembre 2021, il team ha rilevato una perdita di foreste di oltre 5,2 milioni di ettari, che corrisponde all'incirca alle dimensioni del Costa Rica. Le foreste detengono una grande quantità di carbonio terrestre della Terra e svolgono un ruolo importante nel compensare le emissioni antropogeniche di combustibili fossili. Dal 2015, le foreste tropicali del mondo possono essere osservate regolarmente a un intervallo senza precedenti da 6 a 12 giorni grazie alla missione Copernicus Sentinel-1. Milioni di gigabyte di dati radar ad apertura sintetica (SAR) vengono acquisiti sia di giorno che di notte, indipendentemente dalla copertura nuvolosa, foschia, fumo o aerosol, consentendo il monitoraggio della deforestazione e del degrado forestale almeno bisettimanale. La sfida, tuttavia, sta nel trovare metodi adeguati per estrarre indicatori significativi della perdita di foreste dalle grandi quantità di dati radar in arrivo, in modo tale che le anomalie nelle serie temporali possano essere rilevate regolarmente e in modo coerente nelle foreste tropicali. Tali metodi di monitoraggio delle foreste dovrebbero essere trasparenti e facilmente comprensibili per il grande pubblico, consentendo la fiducia nel loro utilizzo in vari settori pubblici e privati. Il progetto Sentinel-1 for Science: Amazonas presenta un approccio semplice e trasparente all'utilizzo delle immagini del radar satellitare Sentinel-1 per stimare la perdita di foreste. Il progetto utilizza un data cube spazio-temporali (noto anche come StatCubes), in cui le informazioni statistiche rilevanti per identificare la deforestazione vengono estratte in ogni punto della serie temporale radar.

Perdita di foreste in tutta l'Amazzonia Con questo approccio, il progetto dimostra l'uso dei dati di Sentinel-1 per creare un'analisi dinamica della deforestazione nel bacino amazzonico. Il team è stato in grado di rilevare la perdita di foreste di oltre 5,2 milioni di ettari dal 2017 al 2021, che è all'incirca la dimensione del Costa Rica. Neha Hunka, esperta di telerilevamento presso Gisat, ha commentato: “Quello che stiamo vedendo dallo spazio è oltre un milione di ettari di foreste umide tropicali che scompaiono ogni anno nel bacino amazzonico, con l'anno peggiore che è il 2021 in Brasile. D'ora in poi possiamo tenere traccia di queste perdite e riferirle in modo trasparente e coerente ogni 12 giorni".

Perdita forestale di 'Tile 20LMQ' Miliardi di pixel dai satelliti Sentinel-1 dall'inizio del 2015 a dicembre 2021, ognuno dei quali rappresenta una foresta di 20 x 20 m, sono armonizzati nell'ambito del progetto StatCubes e un semplice approccio di soglia per rilevare la perdita di foresta è dimostrato nella prima versione di i risultati. La sfida più grande del progetto è stata la grande quantità di gestione ed elaborazione dei dati. Il team ha utilizzato diversi strumenti software intuitivi per accedere ai dati in modo efficiente, elaborando oltre 450 TB di dati per creare le mappe della perdita di foreste. Anca Anghelea, Open Science Platform Engineer presso l'ESA, ha aggiunto: "Fornendo dati e codice ad accesso aperto attraverso l'Open Science Data Catalogue dell'ESA e la piattaforma openEO, miriamo a consentire ai ricercatori di tutto il mondo di collaborare e contribuire all'avanzamento delle conoscenze sul nostro foreste globali e il ciclo del carbonio.

Confronto delle dimensioni della perdita forestale "Pertanto, nell'ultima fase del progetto, un focus chiave sarà su Open Science, riproducibilità, mantenimento a lungo termine ed evoluzione dei risultati raggiunti nel progetto Sentinel-1 for Science: Amazonas". A seguito del progetto, il prossimo obiettivo è quello di ottenere un prodotto della perdita di carbonio dai cambiamenti della copertura del suolo, lavorando insieme al team Climate Change Initiative dell'ESA, un obiettivo che contribuirà al Carbon Science Cluster dell'ESA. I risultati attuali del progetto sono ora disponibili cliccando qui. Sentinel-1 for Science Amazonas è implementato da un consorzio di quattro partner: Gisat, Agresta, l'Università Norvegese di Scienze della Vita e l'Istituto di Ricerca Geospaziale Finlandese. Il team combina in modo univoco esperienze complementari e solide in silvicoltura e valutazioni del carbonio, analisi SAR multitemporale e fusione di dati e capacità di elaborazione di dati di grandi dimensioni. Read the full article

[shrimp-milf]

👀 you're also a math srimp

math shrimp!! 🤝🤝

[keilinicamerareviews2023]

Omega DataCube Review 2023

Life is now easier and even more exciting thanks to technological advancements in the field. You can use your smartphone to take amazing pictures and make amazing videos thanks to technological advancements. You will take more photos if your camera is better. Despite the great memory capacity that mobile devices offer for storing photos and videos, the storage may eventually run out.

[anheliotrope]

General Bragging Announcement

I guess I never mentioned the fact that I DID get my gamer moment. I'm the world record holder for Deus Ex Randomizer speedrun!

I did this run on the 30th of July. My first run ever was 3h12m on the 2nd of June. The other top runners have been playing this for a couple of years prior at varying levels of intensity, it's not quite clear to me. But either way, the speed of my ascent was commented on a lot.

In a couple of months I was able to push Nitram out of the top 10 ("I'm sorry!" An lied) and get a convincing lead over second place. I, uh, managed to severely reduce enthusiasm around WR-chasing speedrunning and we shifted towards doing races instead.

During those couple of months, I think I played at least 5 times more than either runner. I was dedicating an average of 30 hours per week to this while being employed. It felt like I never quite found out how good the other two runners _could_ get because of this discrepancy, but they also had way more experience than me. They also streamed every single time whereas I would stream infrequently.

Going from "I could never get even closer to WR, but it's fun improving" to "this is super fun, lets see how close I can get to WR" to "THE WORLD RECORD WILL BE MINE" was heck of an experience.

By the way, somewhat recently the leaderboard has been versioned because they released new versions that make the game harder. So this is technically a WR on an older version while Nitram holds the WR on the most recent version. After getting this WR my ability to get myself to play has dropped sharply but I want to get it back.

If you get nothing else from this post, at least take note that I am a Genuine World Record Holder for a Deus Ex micro-community. I will expect the queenly respect I so kingly deserve.

WTF Is DXRando Speedrunning

You take the original Deus Ex, you fix a lot of bugs and glitches, you set the difficulty to hard and then you randomize and try to finish the game with one of the three endings.

What gets randomized, you ask? I'm glad you asked:

The damage, fire rate and ammunition cap of every weapon.

The power of each augmentation.

The power and cost of each skill.

The quantity and location of all items in the game, including mission critical datacubes that contain passwords.

Passwords

The location, quantity and type of enemies, including their weapons.

The location of mission critical goals (e.g. important computers, important NPCs) among a number of preset positions.

Each combination of randomized stuff is generated from a seed. So the quality of a seed is quite important to whether you can actually get WR on it or not.

The Appeal of Speedrunning DXRando

I never had any interest in speedrunning before. It felt like an unpleasantly repetitive and grindy activity. But this being Deus Ex Randomizer made all the difference for me. I've rarely had so much fun getting good at a game.

The most appealing aspect of DXRando speedrunning is that Deus Ex is a resource-based game. Any challenge the game throws at you can be easily dealt with if you have the right resource (EMP grenade, rockets, multitools etc). This means that as you speedrun this game you need to balance resource collection and speed.

Combined with the randomization, this results in an experience that feels like it's testing your skill in a more robust manner than speedruns of games where everything is fixed.

This game forces you to make decisions mid-game, all the time. For example whether you want to spend extra time looking for an aug upgrade in UNATCO to improve your speed aug, or just leave the level immediately.

The fact that I am playing my 50th run but there's still a wealth of novel decisions to encounter is kind of amazing. After my WR, we did an official race (speedrunning the same seed) and I immediately choked at the beginning from encountering a novel situation, just to keep me humble.

Another part is that because DXRando is so chaotic and nobody has actually pushed the speedrun to its utter limits, it's the norm to die during the run and use quicksave / quickload a ton. This is major for everyone wanting to pick up speedrunning because failure doesn't mean "I guess my run is over because I can't do this trick consistently". Any mistake that isn't just outright running out of resources can be fixed by losing some time to quicksave / quickload. This results in your gradually improving at speedrunning rather than improving in large jumps due to hitting walls.

The other major factor is that you have an on-screen time tracker and your runs get automatically uploaded to the unofficial scoreboard and announced to the community on mastodon bot was also really good.

[lurking-latinist]

i am very curious about two/romana - for the wip meme

This is so frustrating because I wrote a couple of pages of it, not knowing what the plot would be, then the outline of the rest of the plot flashed into my head, but now that I know the ending I have no motivation to write the rest of the fic. It also involves politicking, which I am bad at. This is an unfortunate deficiency for a Romana fan, so possibly I should remedy it. It's 6B Doctor/CIA Romana involved in a cross-temporal nefarious scheme.

The Doctor had gone to the coordinates they gave him, as he always did, these days. He had a datacube he hadn't read rattling in one pocket; they hadn't told him what it was about, either, just where to take it. Dull, but being a courier was one of the better jobs they gave him. (There were worse names for what he was.) A room; Gallifreyan furnishings. Spartan. Not a room where anybody had ever needed to be comfortable. Insignia on the wall indicated they were on CIA premises; anyone who had even got here had half a dozen security clearances. (Or a really good set of lockpicks, he thought, and then glanced nervously around in case the room was bugged with mind-scanners.) And someone had got here. A woman, about his own height, white robes, fair hair shaded by a high scarlet collar. He felt himself shrink away from her, shoulders stooping as if to dodge a blow. He hoped this jewel of what had once been his Chapter wasn't his contact. (He never knew which was worse: offworld jobs where he had to swan about being a Great and Powerful Time Lord, or local ones where everybody *else* did.) She was pacing, angry or impatient-- certainly agitated. If she was his contact, she would give the code phrase. Instead, she just stared at him for a moment like she'd never seen a disgraced Time Lord in a badly-fitting suit. Then again, she probably hadn't. He was, if nothing else, unique. He stared back until it became uncomfortable. She had a very expressive face. He wondered what her smile looked like. Given her mood at the moment, it was unlikely he'd ever know.

hehehehehe

[teagrl]

I, Jedi goes:

My fic goes:

That’s when a mustached and goateed man with a bad blond dye job and a Jedi’s tunic steps in, a datacube in his hand.

“Mara Jade?” He scans the group and his eye lands on her in her stripped down jumpsuit, smudged face paint around her eye and cheek, her mouth smeared with blood, some of it dripping down her chin to her tank. He doesn't quite grimace, but it's a near thing.

“I am Keiran Halcyon,” he announces.

Mara dislikes him instantly, but she smiles all the same.

[thenamesblurrito]

so it's uh been awhile. you might wanna click for clarity, especially for the kitty cat on the right. everyone here except Chromedome is a size null!

Grandus has been a champion of various martial arts since long before the Stratocracy was ever founded, with grace belied by his size null bulk. his particular specialty is a type of wrestling originating from his home planet Caminus, but he's lived on Cybertron a long time, working with Yoketron to teach and record martial arts as much as he can. under the current regime that looks down on such "violence", preserving this information is pretty important. when Yoketron decided to chip in as a benefactor for the JAAT, Grandus himself actually took a teaching position in physical education. the self-knowledge and body confidence he passes on to his students is unexpectedly engaging, almost enough to get some of them to stop gossiping about whatever relationship he may or may not have with pop star Rosanna.

whether or not his students were sports fans before, Eject is going to make sure they leave his class with a new appreciation for the glorious art of physical competition. an unmatched master of sports history and science, he can tell you the play-by-play of every Cube match in the past fifty million years without looking anything up, just as much of a terrifying information sponge as his twin, and equally terrifying on the field despite his extremely small datacube frame. given the cultural importance and how there's a sport for every function, he's actually got quite a bit of teaching material to cover even for the less active students. while he does have a Conjunx, he's not exactly in love with Chromedome like Rewind is, only married to him because of the way twin sparks work. they get along well enough, but he and Rewind have agreed that should they ever pick up an Amica, it'll be somebody Eject adores himself.

Chromedome is honestly a little confused as to how he wound up here in the first place. before, he was a psychiatric recordkeeper and ethical inspector. then his Conjunx Rewind got it into his head that he'd be just the perfect candidate to help out that new school Jhiaxus was trying to open, and Chromedome abruptly found himself a teacher of psychiatry. it's quite the change of pace, and honestly much less depressing to talk with a bunch of bright younglings than pore over yet another case file of horrific medical malpractice. he's an average size 2 car, but that's more than tall enough to pick up both his Conjunces with ease, if the two of them ever stood still long enough to nab.

he may not be JAAT faculty, but Rewind is ever-present anyway. both to check in on his twin and Conjunx or friends like Blaster, and also to get the freshest scoop on all the juicy stories this school spawns constantly! he may be tiny, but he is The star reporter of Iacon--no, Cybertron! nothing can stand in the way of getting that snippet, that quote, that blurry video, that first hand experience broadcasted to the world, even when his support staff Raindance and Grand Slam lag behind! information, he wants information! it all goes into his own alt mode storage as a datacube, making him quite the encyclopedia. the Stratocracy has tried and utterly failed to censor him, so instead they've relegated him to the function he has always excelled at, although with the way he is "accidentally" platforming the heroes and their dangerous ideals, they may be regretting letting Rewind run wild...

Roadmaster is a familiar face to many at the JAAT already, both to old friends like Thunderclash and folks she's never met. she's the host of popular nature show Quintessential Creatures, teaching viewers all about weird and wonderful wildlife. she was forged on Caminus long enough ago that her original records have been lost, but she's traveled everywhere since then, and her animal-wrangling bravery often makes people think she must be from Carcer instead. by all appearances she's slowing down now, letting her assistant Servo take on more responsibility, and this teaching position at the Academy is just perfect. she gets to affectionately nag a gaggle of fellow teachers many millions of years her junior while surreptitiously instilling revolutionary ideals and a love of nature in dozens of impressionable young minds. her walker transforms to become the cage on her enormous transport truck alt mode, most often used to haul rehabilitated mechanimals back to their natural habitats.

Meowgatron is a rusty tabkey who came up and sat on Roadmaster's clipboard one day and has been her darling pet ever since. he is, in a word, an idiot, and yet surprisingly good at finding his new favorite person Starscream to sit on and purr, no matter where he's hiding. rusty tabkeys like himself have lava lamp radiator alt modes, and many stressed students find petting his warm, blobby body very soothing. it almost makes up for his daily yowling sessions when he gets himself stuck inside a desk somehow.

[fedorasaurus]

As much as I want to play Deus Ex every day, it's a game I've been reserving for streaming!

If you want to see me cry about handsome cyborgs in real time, you can catch me every Saturday afternoon (2pm Eastern) on Twitch!

twitch.tv/fedorasaur

It's my first playthrough with mostly stealth and nonlethal tactics (or so I try). I also seek out and read as many datacubes and other lore as I can. It's by no means a speedrun!

Please note that while I try to keep my streams PG13, the game itself has a Mature rating.

[hollowwhisperings]

What's In The Box? (KH Spec)

in KH3 & KHUX, the Master of Masters (MoM) tasks Luxu with lugging around a big, fancy black box.

MoM never tells Luxu (or ANYONE) what's actually IN this box... but Maleficent decided it (& its Assumed Connection to MoM's Book Of Prophecies?) was worth the effort of... stalking Sora & his enemies for multiple games, spectating on the latest Keyblade War, and, presumably, tricking some Keyblade Wielder (Kairi, maybe?) into Opening The Box for her.

KH3 namedrops Pandora's Box & the Chest of Davy Jones outright: Pandora's Box has two variant contents, Davy Jones' Chest holds his heart (& his heartbreak).

KH3 also, indirectly, reminds players of IRL 'Black Boxes' by using datacubes in the BH6 World, referencing memory chips, backups & data throughout the level. Datacubes & the corruption thereof first appeared in KH re:Coded, a game featuring a Data Riku (bearing KH1 Riku's likeness) being preyed upon by Maleficent (she & her connections to Riku are Important to this theory).

There is an IRL kind of Black Box which, like the Baymax memory chip, acts as the protective case of a Backup Copy of a plane's movements & data entries so that, in the event of disaster, the Black Box will survive & serve as a record of everything that happened.

THAT kind of 'Black Box' is invoked in KHUX with its 'Data Daybreak Town'. It's also likely that the Lost Masters Luxu summoned at KH3's end were retrieved from a similar data backup.

The MoM's Black Box, however, predates KHUX entirely: so what's in HIS box?

I suspect that the Box contains something that is all these boxes COMBINED (remember that Pandora's Box has 2 variants):

a black box built to Survive Disaster, Containing Records & Data Thereof.

the Chest of Davy Jones, a box holding the Human Heart of an Immortal... and his heartbreak with it.

a Pandora's Box that kept all of Humanity's Innate Goodness, the opening of which doomed humanity to corruption & sin. One 'Good' remained in the Box & with Humanity: 'Hope'.

a Pandora's Box that kept all Evils from the world, the opening of which doomed humanity to mortality, war, famine, etc. The only 'Evil' left in the box? Hope.

Yes, depending on the version of the Pandora Myth you're reading, 'Hope' is seen as a remaining virtue OR as a cruel 'gift'.

The MoM named each of his six pupils for one of the Seven Deadly Sins ('Evils', if you will). These pupils became known as the 'Lost Masters'. None of these pupils are named for 'Pride', generally understood to be the 'worst/heaviest' Sin: the absence implies that MoM himself is 'Pride'.

Incidentally, there is one readable word engraved on MoM's Box: 'super'. Following the naming conventions of the Lost Masters ('Luxu' = 'Lust', in latin) this translates to that missing sin, 'Pride'.

Considering that the Black Box is the MoM's, I speculate that it contains HIS heart: this makes Additional Sense for KH because Disney's Snow White features this 'heart in a box' concept... and, in BBS, the role of Huntsman was assigned to TERRA (which he, obvs, did not do). Terra DID, however, end up 'stealing' a heart later on... the heart of Aurora, as in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, and as tricked by MALEFICENT (oh look, here she is again, how INTERESTING).

What's Inside The MoM's Heart?

Well, following the premise of Davy Jones, MoM's mortality... and his capacity for love. Given that the MoM lead his pupils toward CIVIL WAR, standing by as this war repeated itself not only in KHUX but in Dark Road and in BBS AND IN KH3-

yeah, it makes sense that this guy has survived his immortality via being incapable of genuine compassion.

(there is also the possibility that he's outlived all these generations of keyblade wielders due to getting trapped/hopping over to UnReality, blissfully helpless to Those Wars He Instigated... buuut this theory assumes his Conveniebnt Absence & his Prophecies of [Ragnarok] were Deliberate)

I am Assuming A Lot about MoM's abilities: that he is immortal, that he can conceal his presence, that he is a He, that he is a form of Nobody, that he not only COULD but DID witness every iteration of the Keyblade War in the KH series. That seeing that war & its tragedies repeat is WHY that war keeps happening.

My theory is that MoM's Heart, safe in its Box (until Maleficent manages to open it/use it as blackmail), is MoM's "backup": his memories and love and despair from an Even Earlier Keyblade War, one where Darkness and the person who became MoM were the ONLY survivors.

No Dandelions. No MoM "and his best friend". No "lost, separated but not forever". No "True Love's Sacrifice" and DEFINITELY no "time-travel fix-it where No One Dies (except Xehanort & Sora, kind of)".

Just MoM. And Darkness.

...and THAT'S why MoM keeps setting generation after generation up for Ragnarok. THAT'S why MoM showed himself to Xehanort (who helped avert HIS generation's War, if not its Tragedy), why MoM was so DELIGHTED to discover Sora (& Riku): SORA ESCAPED HIS TRAGIC FATE.

MoM's Plan(s)

Sora (& Riku & Kairi) have proven that it is POSSIBLE to Change Destiny, to have Everyone Live.

So, naturally, MoM needs to test Sora (& Riku) AGAIN, in a controlled experiment, to figure out "How" KH3's ending was possible... and if it can be REPLICATED.

The x-blade is an additional factor in MoM's efforts to recreate the Keyblade War as he lived it, changing players & adding variables to figure out how (& 'where') Things Go Wrong.

If MoM hails from the FIRST Keyblade War, where Kingdom Hearts itself summoned the x-blade to protect itself yet ultimately cut its losses to prevent Darkness triumphing entirely... then Sora's 'Ultima' keyblades, his Nobody's ability to dual-wield, his 'Combined Keyblade' with Riku? These are all VERY INTERESTING to MoM!

Look at the previous attempts to summon or artificially forge the x-blade:

collecting 'Lux' (Unions, failure)

posession by Darkness (Baldr, failure)

Xehanort (experiment ongoing)

cutting a heart into 'Light' and 'Darkness' then having them Fight (Ventus, partial success)

the keyblade war in BBS (failure)

Whatever That Original Nobody Experiment with Ansem Was (..?)

multiple layers of possession of a Chosen Host, collecting the Hearts of Worlds & the Seven Lights, etc (MoM's Note to Future Self: "That Fairy Might Be Onto Something")

Roxas dual-wielding (???)

Xion dual-wielding (!!!)

Whatever The Heck Xemnas Was Up To in KH2 (fai-)

Sora & Riku's Boss Fight with Xemnas (-PARTIAL SUCCESS!)

Data Hearts..? (MoM's Underlined Note to Self: "KEEP EYE ON MALEFICENT")

Sora & Riku's Hijacked Mark of Mastery Exam (PROOF OF CONCEPT! req. further testing)

KH3 (...failure WAIT WHAT'S HAP-)

KH 2.9 (???)

Sora's Hijacking of the Aqua Rescue Mission (success??)

KH3's 2nd/3rd Keyblade War (SUCCESS: ISOLATING VARIABLES FOR FOCUSED TESTING)

quadratum (experiment ongoing)

MoM's Goal?

replicate results of Sora (& Riku?) testing of 99% survival rate & successful x-blade utilization in 1st KBW. save everyone. win.

Or, in Other Words...

learn method of summoning x-blade & replicate method for personal use via proxie (Yozora)

return to the origin story of KH's universe, the First Keyblade War (memories preserved in MoM's heart, a touchstone between Then & Now)

change what was destined to be a tragedy: unchain fate (overwrite ancient history)

everyone survives to build a new, brighter world (return heart to body)

...and the future, that Sora & his friends are from? Erased from Ever Existing in the first place. (pandora's box: saving the past at the cost of the future)

[zillanovikov]

Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview

Lost Station Circe follows the junk cargo ship Benbow and its seven person crew, each with ambitions and problems. One day, chance grants them a datacube holding the secret to a fortune.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel. Sabitha: We’ve got Thomas Wrightson here, and he’s got a military space opera to blow your socks off. Thomas, can you introduce us to your books?  Thomas: My debut work is The Cluster Cycle, a science fiction space opera published by Roan & Weatherford. It’s set in the distant…

[newsheadlinesnow]

No Monthly Fees, No Subscriptions, No Prying Eyes – Omega DataCube is the Ultimate File Storage Solution

http://dlvr.it/TCqYCk

[hopetribune]

No Monthly Fees, No Subscriptions, No Prying Eyes – Omega DataCube is the Ultimate File Storage Solution

http://dlvr.it/TCqSZw

[columbianewsupdates]

No Monthly Fees, No Subscriptions, No Prying Eyes – Omega DataCube is the Ultimate File Storage Solution

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[anheliotrope]

So here's my WR run. It's uncommented so frankly it's kind of boring. I'm going to use this post instead to babble about my Journey.

Hero Beggining

I started out because I saw Nitram and Ramisme doing a DXRando race on YouTube and I thought it was the coolest shit ever.

I've missed the train on a lot of online activities in the past. There are more communities and gaming eras I missed out on than I can count. Largely due to EF or lack of knowledge or just... passivity. I decided I can't let another one just slide past me, so I joined.

The community was very encouraging and after doing my first run at 3h12m I was thinking... damn this shit is exhausting and I can't imagine ever being as good as Ramisme or Nitram!!

3h-2h30m

I kept going though. I didn't want or need to be the best. I was enjoying myself and knew there was a lot of room to improve. By the time I got down to 2h30m I realized I could beat the time of the head developer of the mod. I found the idea very appealing for whatever reason and made it my target.

Feeling like I had so much room to improve and entering this iterative process was amazing. Not a lot of games give you that. You often progress through games and you often add more layers of complexity, but it's actually quite rare for an experience to be centered so much around self-improvement and doing better. It's even rarer that you actually feel that improvement pretty much constantly. I can get significantly better at Starcraft 2, or AoE2, or MOBA, but thanks to EloGPT I'm generally not going to feel it as much. And there's so much stupid bullshit those games throw at you that it often distracts you from being an effective improooover.

2h30m-1h50m

Once I got close to 2h, improving at the game became easier because it took less time to get a complete run. The iterative process became even smoother now. Every run had a dozen low hanging fruits I could get better and better at picking up.

This is where I became better than the devs, which was quite satisfying. Of course, they spent most of their time actually making the game, but I'd take anything I could get! This was still in the range of "any dedicated gamer could probably get this".

Also towards the end of this segment I had memorized all the goal locations (which are exhaustively listed on the wiki and can be seen via an in-game feature too!) and most of the important datacubes. A significant chunk of annoying busywork was now finished and I could focus on the fun stuff.

I would say that 2h10m to 1h40m was the most enjoyable segment overall. It had an ideal balance of exploration and optimization, of enjoyment and tryharding.

1h50m-1h30m

Once I hit 1h50m I was getting closer to the top two runners, but I still thought that there's probably no way I can ever beat them. After all, they'd pump out 1h30m runs on average.

I thought I could at least get to 1h30m. You know, my best could be as good as their average, right? So I made my way there. This segment was weird and still very enjoyable. The weirdness comes from running out of low hanging fruit and having to shift approach gradually.

Getting closer to 1h30m is where a lot of tricks become more relevant. You unlock a plethora of them because earlier it wasn't worth doing them. Saving half a minute when your total time is 2h is nothing, especially since you have more important things to improve on. As you go below 2h, this changes.

You learn how to jump over laser tripwires, where to use thermoptic camo to phase through said tripwires, places to jump to avoid triggers. You learn you can shoot the LAW through solid walls because it spawns the rocket a bit in front of the player model. You learn how to quickly fall down ladders and catch yourself at the last moment. You learn you can go down one path in the game, memorize or write down a code, then load the game so you don't need to spend time backtracking. You learn you can shoot weapons while in water if you emerge from the water in a specific way and shoot at the right time. You learn you can destroy the generator by throwing a LAM in a completely different room because the generator is part of a family of objects in the engine that don't do LOS checks for explosions.

Some of the tricks are annoying to do, others feel good to have in your belt. Overall, the game is mercifully sparse on heavy micro tricks. The developers intentionally made the speed+jump aug cost 1 energy when you activate it, to avoid creating a meta where you activate the aug, jump, deactivate, activate on land, jump again -- this would reduce your energy cost to 0 and make you almost as fast as using the aug the regular way. We lucked out that the base game isn't very micro-exploitable and the devs took decisions to minimize that as well. I really really liked this because it allowed me to focus on the things that felt meaningful in the game.

Race Interlude

At some point I participated in my first race. Just a while ago I was admiring Nitram and Ramisme as shiny gods in that YouTube video of their race. And now I'm racing alongside them! The race was exhilarating and humiliating. I ended up over 10m behind them, which looks really bad when all the video feeds are playing side by side. But I did not regret it and for at least half an hour it looked like I could have kept pace.

1h30m-1h20m

I went back to focusing on speedrunning rather than races. I had joined to do races, but I was hooked on getting closer to the WR. I wanted to see how close I could get. For races you needed to find people to do them with and there was some pressure to broadcast them on Twitch, which made speedrunning the easier activity to reach for.

My behaviour became more competitive and a bit degenerative, but the way I approached it was highly effective. I would quit very eagerly the moment I made a major mistake or knew that the current seed wasn't good enough.

I was told I shouldn't do that because I'll never learn later levels or never learn how to recover from a mistake. This is true, but irrelevant for winning the world record. My goal was to not make mistakes on an ideal seed. As I got closer to the WR, this behaviour intensified.

It made my early game much better than my late game for sure, but that's fine, because the early game is simply more impactful. The pace you establish, the resources you get or miss, these things set the tone for the rest of the game.

This is also where frustration started mounting and managing my emotional state became an actual thing.

The truth is that resetting seeds a lot was the most unfun part of the experience. I developed a whole list of heuristics to decide when to reset a seed. My criteria was brutal compared to the other runners.

Because they would often by streaming, there was probably some social pressure to not reset too much. Since I wasn't streaming most of the time, I felt no such pressure. But yes, there was a part of the game that was hella grindy.

No aug upgrade can in mission 2? Restart. Boat is at Filben's? Restart. No biocells found in UNATCO? Restart. Bad Plasma? Hmm. Bad Plasma and no GEP Gun? Restart. etc.

My approach worked.

This is also where I complained to the devs a lot to try to change the game in ways that will reduce the incentives for resetting early. But the problem is fundamentally unsolvable on a game design level and I can maybe get into why in a different post.

1h20m-WR

Once I got to 1h20m and maybe a bit before that, my attitude changed even more. I had gone from "WR is not something I should even try" to "maybe I could get WR some day" to "it is only a matter of time until I get WR. I'm better at this."

I was overplaying and the grind was a drain. My high level of confidence actually made finding a good seed frustrating. And sometimes when I found an amazing seed, I'd still fuck it up and the level of pain this would generate was immense and maybe a bit delectable. Conversely, managing to improve at this point felt rather momentous.

I was definitely playing more than was optimal for improvement and for enjoyment. There are a lot of activities I've suddenly lost interest in over the course of my life. Never gaming as a whole, but I've definitely had moments where, in a couple of days, I went from really wanting to play a game to not wanting to play it at all. I was terrified this might happen. Or that somehow the community would fall apart or disappear. I wanted to ride this experience for all it was worth now, not later. I didn't want to have another "I wonder what would have been" entry in my life.

When I was on my WR run, I was sleep deprived and somewhat dispirited. I was feeling like the seed is probably not good enough and that I've made way too many mistakes. It was the last run of the day, it was well past midnight.

I had a near WR run where my hands were shaking at the end, something I get rarely. I had a bit of that during the WR run too -- it was caused by getting a lucky break that elevated the run from "hmm probably not good enough" to "oh god, I HAVE to perform now. I CAN'T waste this."

And I didn't waste it! I got the WR! I already don't even remember the feeling well all that well. Being so sleep deprived didn't help. It felt somewhat surreal. I'm not the most emotionally reactive person, but I was definitely happy. I was happy the next day. And the day after. Then I started getting the "oh shit what now" feeling. Which is why it took me so long to even talk about this here.

Closing Remarks

In retrospect, I really wish I could redo my journey before hitting 1h30m or so. It was the most fun I've had in a long time. But you can kind of only do that once. A "you can play Dark Souls the first time only once" sort of thing. Which is why I'd really like to see more people playing, but this is a pretty niche activity.

Because of the grind of resetting runs and finding good seeds, I don't think I will ever target WR like that again. I think speedrun races, where players play the same seed with no advance knowledge are strictly superior. They can be done async provided the runners trust each other. They are a fundamentally healthier and more sustainable way of approaching the game. WR speedrunning gets less fun the more optimized the WR is.

Additionally competing for WR is something only a few people can do. Doing speedrun races is something anyone can do provided they find at least one opponent of a similar skill level. It's an underappreciated and esoteric way of gaming, but it's good!

Speedrung DXRando was a valuable experience and I'm not sure that I could have gotten it from any other game. DXRando is lighting in a bottle! The way you iteratively improve at the game can be likened to Hades or maybe Binding of Isaac in some sense, maybe? The difference is that the former two are roguelite and their action component is entirely different from DXRando. Additionally their time pressure component is highly optional, the game isn't built around it.

DXRando is a very unlikely game to exist. It's very unlikely any gamedevs will make a game that is anywhere similar to DXRando at all in terms of gameplay. It's basically a high time pressure roguelike FPS/RPG. It's possible that for a decade or even my remaining life, I won't see this kind of gaming experience replicated.

The high time pressure part is so important. I cannot overstate how important it is. Deus Ex is a game that is incredibly easy once you have advance knowledge of it. There just isn't that much skill to defeating the AI.

You can wrack your brain trying to think how to fix this from a game design perspective. Imagine you could mod the game however you wanted -- what do you even do so that veteran players still feel engaged? Or even just players that are good at this type of game? You can add more exploration, that always works. But adding things to explore is one of the most costly approaches in terms of game development. It takes a team 8 years to make a new campaign for Deus Ex which I finish in 15-40 hours of gameplay.

Time pressure however solves it extremely well. People tend to hate time pressure, but I think it is severely underexploited. It can turn trivial encounters into harder ones without needing to make the game more complex. It's a niche but very valuable game design tool which is often ignored, frankly for good reason, but in this case it reinvigorated and transfigured a game that I thought had permanently dried out for me in terms of enjoyment.

Maybe something similar already to DXRando already exists out there and I'm ignorant of it. I'm pretty ignorant of most randomizer content. A lot of randomizer stuff comes off as silly. Even DXRando has a very funny memey picture of JC Denton associated to it. But the gameplay value is way beyond that of funny hijinks.

[jcmarchi]

App May Pave Way to Treatments for No. 1 Dementia in Under-60s - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/app-may-pave-way-to-treatments-for-no-1-dementia-in-under-60s-technology-org/

App May Pave Way to Treatments for No. 1 Dementia in Under-60s - Technology Org

A smartphone app could enable greater participation in clinical trials for people with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a devastating neurological disorder that often manifests in mid-life.

Research into the condition has been hampered by problems with early diagnosis and difficulty tracking how people are responding to treatments that are only likely to be effective at the early stages of disease.

To address this, a research team led by UC San Francisco deployed cognitive tests through a mobile app and found it could detect early signs of  FTD in people who were genetically predisposed to get the disease but had not yet developed symptoms. These tests were at least as sensitive as neuropsychological evaluations done in the clinic.

The study appears in JAMA Network Open on April 1, 2024.

More than 30 FTD clinical trials are underway or in the planning stages, including one that may become the first drug approved to slow progression in some gene carriers. Researchers hope the new mobile technology will hasten the work.

“Eventually, the app may be used to monitor treatment effects, replacing many or most in-person visits to clinical trials’ sites,” said first author Adam Staffaroni, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

FTD is not easy to diagnose

FTD is the No. 1 cause of dementia in patients under 60, with up to 30% of cases attributed to genetics. It has three main variants with symptoms that may overlap. The most common causes dramatic personality shifts, which may manifest as lack of empathy, apathy, impulsivity, compulsive eating, and socially and sexually inappropriate behavior. Another affects movement, and a third impacts speech, language and comprehension, which is the variant that Bruce Willis is reported to have. In rare cases, FTD triggers bursts of visual creativity.

As with Alzheimer’s disease, patients with FTD are believed to be most responsive to treatment early on, ideally before their symptoms even emerge. “Most FTD patients are diagnosed relatively late in the disease, because they are young, and their symptoms are mistaken for psychiatric disorders,” said senior author Adam Boxer, MD, PhD, endowed professor in memory and aging at the UCSF Department of Neurology.

“We’ve heard from families that they often suspect their loved one has FTD long before a physician agrees that is the diagnosis,” said Boxer, who is also director of the UCSF Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia Clinical Trials Program.

Software that can detect a waning ability to plan

The researchers tracked 360 participants with an average age of 54 enrolled in ongoing studies at ALLFTD centers and UCSF. About 90% had data on disease stage. These included 60% who did not have FTD or were gene carriers who had not yet developed symptoms, 20% with early signs of the disease and 21% with symptoms.

Staffaroni and Boxer collaborated with software company Datacubed Health, which developed the platform, to include tests of executive function, such as planning and prioritizing, filtering distractions and controlling impulses. In FTD, the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning shrinks as the disease progresses.

The rich data collected by the app, including voice recordings and body movements, enabled the researchers to develop new tests that eventually could help with early diagnosis and monitoring of symptoms.

“We developed the capability to record speech while participants engaged with several different tests,” said Staffaroni. “We also created tests of walking, balance and slowed  movements, as well as different aspects of language.”

FTD researchers say they are closer to finding treatments that may eventually slow the progression of the disease, which is fatal. These include gene and other therapies, such as antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), to increase or decrease the production of proteins that are abnormal in gene carriers.

Although there are currently no plans to make the app available to the public, it could be a boon to research.

“A major barrier has been a lack of outcome measures that can be easily collected and are sensitive to treatment effects at early stages of the disease,” said Staffaroni. “We hope that smartphone assessments will facilitate new trials of promising therapies.”

Source: UCSF

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