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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I’m seeing this post a bit late, but I feel like I have to weigh in slightly, though it’s not my research area.

    Note that my information extends more to academic studying, don’t know if it’s quite as true for learning more physical skills.

    The main concept for learning is deeper learning. Which basically just means actually using your brain to think about the material. Things like connecting it to other ideas, pondering different implications, that sort of thing.

    The reason flashcards work is because you think about what questions you could ask about the material. The reason you write by hand vs type is because it’s slower and you have to think about what’s more important or how you’d summarise the information.

    I believe reading aloud typically works because it forces you to be slower and more deliberate, giving you time to actually process what you’re reading.

    That said what you’ve written is helpful and mostly correct, I’m just not so certain about the framing. It could mislead some people into just rewriting notes while reading them out, for example, which is inefficient and not very helpful for learning.

    A very easy-to-read source with practical tips:

    • Optimizing Learning in College by Putnam et al. (2016) (Look it up on Google scholar for a free pdf)

    Also as a final tip, my favourite exam prep technique: do a past paper without having looked at any notes or done any prep. Answer as much as you can just thinking about what you remember. Then go through with notes. It primes your brain for processing and storing the information.


  • Not OP, but I’ll answer from my own perspective. Note that Discord terminology can be a bit weird, since a server is just a unique shared group space, but hopefully makes sense.

    So you can:

    • Have private chats with one or multiple individuals.
    • Start audio or video calls through those chats, and screen share/stream in them.
    • I’ll also mention the ability to send not just text, but images, videos, embedded GIFs, files, so on.
    • in servers you get the same thing, broken into text and voice channels (the latter allowing the full range of audio, video, and screen share).
    • in servers each user can be given roles to determine which channels they can see and use, or edit, among various other permissions.
    • Pinned messages, @ mentions for roles.
    • Though I don’t use it much anymore, the option to effectively subscribe to a channel on another server to have messages from there propagate over (e.g.: a uni club server announces an event and you see it on another server in an events channel)
    • also servers don’t have any upper limits on members, at least not one I’ve ever seen hit
    • Bot integration via API.
    • oh, also it all works on desktop or mobile (because it’s mostly just a web app, but still)

    And key thing is: all very easy to get started with, whether you’re just wanting to join a server, or start an entire community.

    Big deal for my uses currently is voice chat and screen share in one place, while still being able to organise stuff into separate channels, pin messages in them, etc.

    I think right now if I had to replace it, assuming I could get the people I interact with off (which is either 20 or 1500 people, depending on how much I’d want to carry with me), it’d have to be a mix of Matrix/Stoat and probably Steam’s built-in features. Maybe a classic forum. That is, if I wanted to have all the features I use. I could do with less, but it’s frustrating.

    I think the alternatives will get there eventually, self-hosted even, but self-hosting also has a hardware cost.

    That said, I really don’t know why software stuff was ever moved on discord. My uses are gaming and university community-related.





  • Three games came to mind just now, for slightly different reasons.

    Similarly to others, just for feeling good: Earth Defense Force (whichever release, really). While it’s great to have a challenge in the missions, getting through the game, finding a good mission to farm weapons on, then using those fun weapons to destroy horses of insects and aliens is just so fun. And some missions can feel a bit BS with the weapons you might have available normally.

    I would also actually say Baldur’s Gate 3. I know a lot of people enjoy the tactical side of things, but my opinion is that the DnD 5e ruleset kinda just sucks for a video game. I play it as a TTRPG, it’s fine. But I found rolling badly in something my character’s meant to be good at just so frustrating. This let me actually explore the story and world my own way, which was way more fun to me than restarting combat because I got unlucky.

    That one might be controversial, but I was also speed running completion because I wanted to know conclude the story and see the world, but something about the game just didn’t click for me.

    And finally, because I think it’s a fantastic game that deserves attention (with the best soundtrack I’ve heard in a while): Rabbit and Steel. It’s a brutally hard roguelike bullet hell that’s based on dungeon raid boss mechanics from FFXIV (which I haven’t played, but that’s what everyone says). The difficulty will make you want to not play it, and for me stuff only really clicked once I unlocked my penultimate class. I can now heat Hard fairly consistently, but it has taken a lot of runs to get there. No shame in admitting that those started from Cute and Normal and involved me grinding out all the unlocks by charging through Cute difficulty.

    So really, the summary of this far too long reply is: just lower the difficulty when it’s frustrating or keeping you too much from getting to the fun stuff. You can always try again on a higher difficulty later.



  • I’ve also said this before and I’ll say it again: names of suspects and even convicted criminals should not be shared unless necessary*. That just makes no sense for rehabilitation as it opens people up for judgement in a court of opinion. Justice is the job of the justice systems and should not generally involve the wider public.

    Could there be issues with the judgement or other events where the only way to achieve justice is via the press? Sure, probably, but I don’t think the default should be that if I google the name of someone I can find if they or someone with a similar name (and god forbid, appearance) were involved in a crime.

    *: unless necessary here can cover cases like trying to find an individual on the run, or when their previous crime is meant to exclude them from specific lines of work, although even that should be on a need-to-know basis imo, not public info.


  • My impression from the trailer was that the combat lacks any weight. The player character floated all over, the attacks looked like they didn’t even make contact, and the enemies seemed to be on the spongy side. That makes it look and feel bland. If that is the case the reaction won’t be great even from players who like action games.

    And yeah, I think making this the first Dragon Age game after so long is a mistake. People will expect a game that follows on with same or similar gameplay. This feels like a spin-off game. That’s not inherently bad, but you do want mainline games to also release to keep the main fan base happy. Right now it’ll just be judged compared to mainline expectations and will obviously not meet most of those.