Most scriptable organizing software?
I currently use Lightroom & Lightroom Classic for organization, but I often find myself wanting to work on large numbers of files, while also being cautious about clobbering links or files. In LR Classic, I can write Lua-based scripts / plugins, which I can do, but is (for me) slow to author and worrisome about quality. And I don't at all feel like Adobe is committed to the plugin API, so I'm not even sure if it will be a future option.
With Darktable, I know I can also do Lua-based scripting.
Are there any other robust organizing tools capable of handling a >50K photo database that have a good scripting solution, either as an externally-callable API or in terms of a supported scripting language?
lol, I only just understood your joke that for the portal cannon you could drop cannon-fodder creatures down the shaft. Shades of "Holy Grail"!
Thanks for that! I was going to talk about siege provisions moving through the portals Teleportation Circle, so good to know it's restricted on that.
Re. exploits from enemies, my idea is that there are 32 "Teleportation Circle Traps" that are isolated corridors with two permanent circles at either end, an "external" circle that is to be connected to the external environment and an "internal" circle that is connected to the Mustering Hall itself. So you have your highly disciplined troops moving at a precise jog go through an external->trap temp circle in 1 round before it closes and then mages in the Mustering Hall open another internal->trap temp circle. The thought is that if bad guys get into one of these traps, they still don't have immediate access to the citadel. (If I can figure out a good encounter for the players, I might trap them in one of these and throw in a "can be flooded" vs. maintenance tunnels or air shaftts, maybe a passage above with murder holes, etc. But if I can't do something with it, it's just going to be dungeon-dressing and its okay if it's not 100% logical.)
Re. "creatures only": Do you have a reference for that? I assume it's "creatures and possessions" and not "Terminator"-style naked?
Well, the premise is that the BBOG is aware and paranoid of magical overthrow and does everything in its power to discover and "re-educate" or kill casters. They have a Stasi-like "Magisterium of Arcana" with a monopoly on spell books and rare components, informers and spies, etc. The party time-traveled back to this era and even the 6th-level Cleric, Warlock, and Sorcerer (in particular) would be considered major threats and are being pursued by a Hans Landa-esque character who knows they exist, but no details. (Kind of off-topic, but it's been a really fun couple of sessions at the table developing this... :-) )
Yes, it's the idea of permanent tele circles.
"Velocity is matched with the destination" : that makes sense, but do you have a citation?
The character's are time-traveling, are only 6th level, and a single permanent tele circle takes a year, so I'm not fretting too much about being exploited by the players. Plus, it's a good group so I think we'd work it out.
Teleportation Circles for "Portal Cannon"?
I have a Big Bad Oppressive Government (BBOG) semi-inspired by the Roman Empire with the conceit that "all portals lead to Mul Khuldir," i.e., that they've figured out super-fast logistics based on a central cluster of permanent Teleportation Circles that can be connected to scroll-cast Teleportation Circles near the battlefield ( (Every warmage has Sending to coordinate and then a few Teleportation Circle scrolls to bring in the first support platoon and additional warmages). The Great Mustering Hall in the ancient Dwarven citadel of Mul Khuldir is where they've been refining the martial exploitation of portals for hundreds of year and the Magisterium of Arcana has blah-blah tried to suppress all non-government-sanctioned learning / exploitation of magic.
Anyhow, the party has now made contact with the potentially-revolutionary enslaved dwarves inside the citadel and I'm fleshing out what the defenses of the citadel might be. Since portal magic is central to the BBOG and the citadel's near a thousand years old, I've wondered if one thing you could do is: 100' vertical shaft with a permanent teleportation circle on the ceiling and floor. The floor's teleportation circle is connected to a vertical (or even pitched up) circle on the walls. You drop a rock or cannon ball down the shaft, it emerges horizontally at speed.
Thoughts?
What you perceive is vastly different than a continuous filmstrip. Have you ever tried to watch unstabilized footage from a person jogging? Totally unwatchable! But your brain smooths it out better than the best steadicam. Tilt your head from side-to-side: what you perceive stays upright. And of course you know hat your eyes don’t smoothly pan from subject to subject but are constantly “saccading” around, but your brain processes that all away.
Visual processing is amazingly complex. Its also interesting that our other senses have different levels of processing. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to a dog’s, our sense of hearing is nothing compared to a whale’s, etc. A metaphor I heard once (don’t know how accurate it is) is that when a human walks into a kitchen they might smell that a stew is cooking. A dog would smell both the overall smell but would also smell the individual carrots, peas, chunks of meat, etc.
Is it just the external surface that's a display or when you're inside can they do a 360 projection around you?
So is the idea that a community coalesces to a winner-takes-all single server, or is there a way to... uh ... federate (?) ... same-theme communities from different servers?
Microsoft wants to own tools crucial to the mainstream of software development. They also want to own the cloud infrastructure on which those tools depend. Today, they might lose dimes on every LLM call. In five years, they’ll make a penny on orders of magnitude more calls. Microsoft has many flaws, including cloud capacity, but they aren’t short-sighted about investment. (I used to work in DevDiv and Azure Machine Learning.)
This was early May and I think most of the birds had already left. There were 4-5 chicks molting and maybe a dozen adults. Really love to see the chicks when they're huge balls of squid oil, but want to go back at the start of breeding season for that whole show.