Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
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Historia Civilis—excellent history videos. Primarily their story of the fall of the Roman Republic, which does a shockingly good job of making you feel emotions for a little coloured square with the channel's iconic simple animation style. Good if you're interested in the intricacies of the politics and culture of the time.
Extra History—shorter historical overviews of a much wider range of topics than the above. Quite transparent about their process with their "Lies" episodes at the end of each series, where they explain any errors that slipped through, as well as aspects they left out for the sake of keeping the story focused within the time they had.
ReligionForBreakfast—a scholarly, secular take on religion and religious practice. I think the first thing I saw was their series on American Civil Religion, which is the idea that Americans' attitude towards their country and its processes is similar to religion belief and practice.
UsefulCharts—history and religion, told through charts. The ones that interest me the most are the ones that touch on the creator's PhD in religious studies, such as about the historicity of various aspects of the bible, and on his actual thesis topic on the Psychology of Atheism.
And since you said "informative", I'll add some that I probably wouldn't have included solely under the "educational" category. Not Just Bikes, CityNerd, Radical Planning, Oh the Urbanity!, among others. Urbanist channels across a range of the political spectrum (from Oh the Urbanity which are relatively libertarian, to Radical Planning which is quite marxist). But all of them deal with the problems inherent to the way cities are designed especially in the anglosphere (and among that, especially in America) and how car-centric design creates miserable places while also being economically ruinous.
I like their company. Just wish their product wasn't all these bizarre unappealing flavours.
Also the two Program Files folders that have existed since the switch to 64-bit systems.
And third-party software installers that install stuff into their own secret places. Like Steam games.
A⇒B⇎B⇒A
I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can't comment from extensive personal experience.
But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I'm sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.
As a general rule, a good UX should:
- Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
- Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
- Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks
A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.
Interesting. That would make his survey of rather limited value, in my opinion, because just by doing notes (including rests), durations (just from semiquaver to semibreve, including tie and dot), and accidentals, you get 18, right off the bat. Considering the ranges offered in the poll he made were 1–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20+ (never mind the overlap if you happened to use exactly 5 or 10...), that makes it very hard for anyone who types their note input instead of hunting around slowly with the mouse to get into anything other than the top bucket. Especially since he quite explicitly said "including typical ones (like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.)"
I think it's hard to read the comic itself as anything but anti-atheistic. Or at the very least, anti-vocal-atheist.
Unfortunately Sibelius's development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.
I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you're just in the zone inputting notes, it's so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn't.
I actually take some issue with Tantacrul's design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn't understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking "how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?" in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn't define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it's not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).
Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I'm doing right now. Does it become a "keyboard shortcut" just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.
Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It's been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you're just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.
Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.
That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it's hard to go past the Sibelius one if I'm gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.
The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it's actually quite good.
All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren't the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.
This same shit applies to all-powerful deities.
There's a pretty key difference between the Federation and a hypothetical tri-omni god. The Federation is not and cannot be omniscient. They might be, for all effective purposes, omnipotent, and we certainly like to think of them as highly benevolent. But we know, and they know, that they cannot foresee the longer-term consequences of action or inaction, in most cases.
My opinion is that when inaction would obviously doom an entire planet—such as if that planet is about to be catastrophically struck by a meteor—the Federation should intervene on a humanitarian basis. But nearly anything short of that and the Prime Directive is Good, Actually. In the case of intraplanetary conflict, asylum could be offered to victims of genocide or persecution, but contrary to @lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com's statement, I think it is paternalistic to interfere because "you know better". How many times have real-world powerful empires stepped in claiming to be doing good, only to end up causing very much the opposite result. Dozens of times in the last two centuries in the Middle East alone. There are people who will still try and claim that white colonists were good for Aboriginal people on the basis of this reasoning.
That's an interesting theory, and it has been explored in science-fiction before. It's basically the explanation for why the uplifting of the Krogan in Mass Effect was not normal and was in hindsight regarded as a bad idea.
But I feel like Star Trek's messaging has been pretty consistent and clear on this. The Prime Directive exists because the Federation regards cultures' ability to evolve on their own terms as sacrosanct.
Raine, is that you?
Actually the Chinese models aren't trained to avoid Tiananmen Square. If you grabbed the model and ran it on your own machine, it will happily tell you the truth.
They censored their AI at a layer above the actual LLM, so users of their chat app would find results being censored.
Uhh, what?
They get their Peregrin Took? Why are you stealing falcons off of Starfleet officers?
This is ridiculous. There's no way a client calls a dolly a "pan".
That's obviously zooming.
Hamsters are reptiles now?
I've decided I don't like his pet review videos and these days I just skip them, but I'm a huge fan of Clint's phylogeny videos! And even though he's obviously a Mormon (he's never explicitly said it, but he's open about being a Christian, and he's based in Utah, so…), his videos debunking some of the worst of conservative Christian anti-science bullshit are great too.