"experts fear is that excessive focus on the issue could generate enough fear among homebuyers to lead to the first-ever nationwide housing drop"
"Alan Greenspan doubts there is a national bubble but warns repeatedly of "froth" in local housing markets and imminent regional downturns."
"Barely a day goes by without blaring headlines about housing bubbles in newspapers and magazines."
NBC News, 8/10/2007, "High-risk mortgages turning into toxic mess"
"the option and interest-only ARMs held by more creditworthy borrowers loom as another calamity in the making"
"If the worst fears about these loans materialize, the economic damage would likely extend well beyond the United States because much of the debt has been packaged into securities sold to pension funds, banks and other investors around the world who were hungry for high yields."
"there is still reason to be alarmed because the trouble with option and interest-only ARMs still appears to be in its early stages"
"Those loans are begging to blow up. This is a true financial crisis"
Tax collector avoidance is actually a pretty excellent alternative proposal. From searching, it looks like a lot of the taxes were on stuff that was difficult to hide, like farm animals owned, and houses / farmland.
However, this site [1] shows several categories for taxation that might be hidden to falsify the taxation basis. Cash, Inventories, Household Goods, Luxury Clothing. Admittedly, it seems like there would be a greater percentage of items left behind in some of these locations, since there often tend to be something. Yet, for taxation avoidance purposes, maybe they're very motivated to recollect everything that was hidden.
Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65
Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk
Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with)
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If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation console range with Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. (on these, only recommendations, no successful compiled software)
Caveat, it was a long time ago. Second caveat, I ended up completing with effectively positive money afterward. However, generally yes anyways. Towards your specific questions.
Knowledge you gained of real value?
Yes, mechanical engineering, and most of the skills / knowledge have been used frequently for the last several decades. Job immediately afterward was designing optical instruments, and mechanical design skills were directly applied for several years. Later job was with NASA / MSFC contractor (this kind of stuff [1][2]), and engineer skills use was pretty much all we did. Mechanical design, acoustics, fluid dynamics, testing / experimentation, problem identification and resolution. Actually, not totally fair, we also wrote a lot, and college English classes + graduate research work helped a lot. Surprising number of publications for working in .gov. [3]
College had a large scale senior design project, and the organizational skills necessary over a year for a significant size team were also helpful in being able to consider a problem with large scope beyond your own personal ability to tackle, work with others to frame the problem, consider a solution, and then implement it. Also involved working with a customer (large chip manufacturer), external vendors, and other teams in the same design project facility. All those skills have remained useful for years.
People often complain that classes like math are not especially useful (or the usefulness is not communicated well). Yet, over several decades, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, continuum mechanics, and numerical methods have all proven useful. Admittedly, engineer. So, kind of a profession biased towards actually using math.
Well prepared to enter your field?
Yes, no real complaints. First job, felt like I made a difference in their products, and was able to achieve something relatively quickly after starting. Skills learned were applicable, and some the design stuff mentioned earlier came up almost immediately because we had a machine shop on site. NASA was a similar situation. Been a little while since studying the material, yet most ended being necessary parts of the job almost every year. Day to day work involved significant use of engineering classes, math classes, writing / English classes, and even a bit of electives stuff like economics (lots of money in rocketry), psych (real mindset / fear / disposition / perception issues in launch or not), history (grappling with a 25 to 30 year old program (Shuttle) and ~70 year old institution), and poli-sci (it's .gov).
Do you feel your degree is more than a guarantee to employers?
Yes, much for the reasons listed above, and many of the skills have simply been valuable in personal life outside of the work environment. Hobbies, friendships, ability to consider types of problems I might not have otherwise, awareness of other fields of education, awareness of the variety of research activities, being able to read difficult material without any immediate reward, proofreading my own and other's writing (had several errors in this post...), self directed research and investigation, finding info with limited clues, and being able to formulate somewhat long form responses to questions like yours.
Sorry for the confusion. The use-case is a little difference because the goal is to display the image as close to the original as possible with the limitation of only being able to use a forground color, background color and character per cell. The character is selected based on it's shape just like in the article. So if you get rid of the colors in Chafa you end up with something similar to the article. That's what I wanted to say :D
Cool, and thanks for the explanation. Gotten interested in retro software recently, so may actually be helpful for trying to set up pictures in some of the retro consoles. Most do tend to be limited to foreground / background. The stuff listed here [1] is pretty representative of what's being dealt with.
Note: If you happen to know how to do multi-color dithering with some of these that would actually make significant improvements on some of these old picture hardware tests.
Isn't your problem more about Color quantization than about dithering? If you have big character cells like in a terminal dithering won't help you much. For each cell you want to find the best shaped cell and a foreground and background colour that are the closest to a colour from the supported palette.
But maybe I didn't understand your real problem yet
Agree in the case of large character cells like a terminal. For those cases, where you only have something like 40x48 in the Apple II Low Res mode, there's only so much you can do with the limited resolution.
However, for many the result is that the color choices are akin to a posterization filter in photoshop, where the nearest color is simply chosen. Often, there's actually the freedom 'available' to define a character set and choose at least a background / foreground color, with some kind of dithering pattern.
Sometimes the character set that can be defined is limited, so it has to be chosen carefully. Yet there's improvement from a 'large blobs of color' poster result to a smooth dither tone change.
The problem with the quantization result, is it just snaps to the 'nearest'. So even for relatively large areas of slowly gradiating color, if you only have one 'nearby' color, everything inbetween just snaps to that single color choice. You might have red, with slowly increasing green / yellow, yet it will always just snap to solid red.
This example from the Vic-20 kind of shows that issue. Large areas where it posterizes severely.
This example from the Vic-20 game Tutankarman shows that kind of approach. Varying amounts of dither and color used in dithing give the impression of changing skin tones.
Question on some of the syntax. It's neat, and think the idea's cool. Would definitely be something if nothing else for security through obscurity. Is it even code?
However, for some of the number stuff, if you write something like:
(5'le 3'ün farkını) yaz.
(3'ün 5'le farkını) yaz.
How does it tell whether it is:
5 - 3 = 2, or
3 - 5 = -2 ?
Does it always just return 2 because of the meaning of "farkını" and the placement of 'le and 'ün? Like:
Write (the difference between 5 and 3).
Write (the difference between 3 and 5).
Not especially familiar with Turkish, and mostly had to use translation, yet it looks like a language for defining math theorems? Number following "zero" shall be called "one", number following "one" shall be called "two". Or is that more just a feature of using natural language for the writing syntax?
"fark" here takes two arguments, the first (the minuend) is in instrumental case (-le), the second (the subtrahend) is in genitive case (-in). Now, because of the suffixes of the cases, regardless of the order in which you give the arguments, the type system can figure out which one is supposed to be the minuend and which the subtrahend.
If it helps, you can think of it like named arguments where the name is inferred from the case.
Disclaimer: I grew up speaking Turkish, but never studied it. I think I can give a common-sense explanation, but can’t give a rigorous “proof” appealing to grammatical rules.
I read “(5’le 3’ün farkını) yaz” as “having 5, 3’s difference write” (of course this is not natural in English). Ie, you’re given 5, you want to take 3, and write the result. Likewise, “(3’ün 5’le farkını) yaz” would be “3’s difference, having 5, write”. Again we are given 5, and want 3’s difference. Because we’re starting with 5, i think there is no ambiguity in the operation to be done — start with 5, subtract 3.
Idk if that actually helps clarify it at all, maybe it gives some intuition
> bad meetings will probably push the level of (bad) meetings even higher
bad meetings beget bad meetings
> If they got value from those meetings, they wouldn't be complaining.
This part actually felt quite relevant. Several years in the govt, and there was definitely a difference. Many meetings that felt inane, or meaningless to even attend, where you constantly questioned why you're even there, or bothered to show. Much phone swiping, and social media browsing. Often 10x+ attendance to people that ever participated. I often felt weird even asking anything, cause nobody was participating, and it felt wrong to even try to understand the endless charts on-screen.
However, a rare few that honestly felt quite worthwhile. We arrived, discussed what needed to said, and left with a better comprehension of the situation and the tasks necessary.
The Rusty Maze example https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy/edit/18 seems to be broken with the setting an initial default material "set_default_material" and even with it removed does not seem to build.
The rest are pretty neat, and a quick syntax for generating 3D geometry. Surprising how short the script needed for something as complicated as the pyramid example was https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy/edit/39 Also, relatively quick to edit and change, moving materials around and such.
Nice to haves: Looking at the resultant mesh, maybe a wireframe "type" material? Is there a way to change the initial light? (Eventually figured out how to toggle the light locations, and add a light. Maybe click the light helpers?) Change the Normal Map, Roughness Map, and Metalness Map XY scales? Link to a texture? (maybe don't want to allow uploads)
Far as a geometry descriptive goes though, the language seems cool, and very concise. Nice that it dumps to something generic like the obj format.
I've fixed that issue with the `set_default_material` problem; tyvm.
> maybe a wireframe "type" material
I have that actually; it's bound to the W key. Invaluable for debugging and inspecting stuff for sure. N switches to normal texture too
I might have to make the docs for keybinds a bit easier to find
> Change the Normal Map, Roughness Map, and Metalness Map XY scales
Yeah these are all currently controlled by a single "texture scale" param in the material editor. I could definitely see situations where adjusting them individually would be valuable; I'll add that to the TODO list
Anway, tyvm for checking out the project in such detail and for the feedback; I genuinely appreciate it very much
Your Pet 2001 emulator's pretty cool, and seems much more capable and user friendly than a lot of the downloadable alternatives.
Actually a bit of an issue, its so capable, I actually have difficulty justifying a downloadable alternative, even though I'd prefer to have a local copy due to the untrustworthiness of web apps over time.
Thank you! I can see that this may a bit of an issue. However, this being a simple webpage is what allows to quickly tinker with this and push a quick update, which is also how much of this has kept growing.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+real+estate+warnin...
Reuters, 8/9/2007, "House bubble could be a self-fulfilling prophecy", https://www.reuters.com/article/world/house-bubble-could-be-...
"experts fear is that excessive focus on the issue could generate enough fear among homebuyers to lead to the first-ever nationwide housing drop"
"Alan Greenspan doubts there is a national bubble but warns repeatedly of "froth" in local housing markets and imminent regional downturns."
"Barely a day goes by without blaring headlines about housing bubbles in newspapers and magazines."
NBC News, 8/10/2007, "High-risk mortgages turning into toxic mess"
"the option and interest-only ARMs held by more creditworthy borrowers loom as another calamity in the making"
"If the worst fears about these loans materialize, the economic damage would likely extend well beyond the United States because much of the debt has been packaged into securities sold to pension funds, banks and other investors around the world who were hungry for high yields."
"there is still reason to be alarmed because the trouble with option and interest-only ARMs still appears to be in its early stages"
"Those loans are begging to blow up. This is a true financial crisis"
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