jarfil

@jarfil@beehaw.org

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

jarfil,

I’m not a “fan”, haven’t played the games, other than some of the shitty mobile one, but knew some of the lore.

Just binge watched all episodes… and judging all of them by just the first one, is a mistake. There’s much more to the show than what amounts to a basic introduction.

But to each their own, as you said.

jarfil, (edited )

Game asset development is one of the places where versioning systems are least used. Not only versionong “binaries” is taxing for the system, but even game code itself (¹) is often not version tracked, or controlled at all, with more of a “cowboy coder” approach.

It all stems from most non-online games (²) being sold “as is”, with no intent of supporting them long term; the moment a studio/producer gets the money, they stop caring about their user base, until it’s time to promote the next game. Even games with post-release DLCs, are regularly developed this way, and they end up as a giant clusterf… mess.

If Deck Nine was the “lowest bidder”, with 70-80 hours a week “crunch” months, chances are they cut corners on everything, starting with proper asset versioning.

(¹: engine code is a separate thing, which gets suported across multiple games, so tends to be properly developed

²: online games, and games with microtransactions, tend to be kept in better shape, since their income depends on them working for more than a single playthrough)

jarfil, (edited )

No they aren’t, as @chloyster explained.

But I wanted to point a tangent, from the article you linked:

outstretched middle, ring, and pinky fingers to represent a Roman numeral “3.”

Coincidentally, the Romans would count like 👍👉👌… instead of “thumb, index, middle” for the numeral “3”, because that resembled the letters “IV”, which were the first two letters of “IVPITER”, or “Jupiter”, formerly known as “Zeus”, the God of Gods, and making the “IV” sign in vain was considered a blasphemy… similar to how Jewish people wouldn’t “use the name of God in vain”, which lead to the expression “hallelujah” from “hallelu-Yah***”, meaning “praise Yah***”… in order to also not say the whole name of God. Curiously, Muslim people have no problem with saying “Allah” or writing “ﷲ”, just with depictions of their prophet, go figure.

These sign shenanigans have been going on for thousands of years, only difference is now a “meme” with 10 comments on 4chan, can become a hate sign used by thousands or millions in less than a decade.

PS: another curious one, is the ✋ “Hi!” vs. the Greek 🖐 “I smear 💩 on your face”… best not to confuse them 😉 (“oops, got something in my eye” /s)

jarfil,

if there were a bunch of those symbols (all on one single room I might add) that absolutely seems suspect

Technically, I could understand that… IF the in-game character living in that room, were supposed to be a Nazi sympathizer. Otherwise, it’s a clear dog whistle.

Otherwise, rules have changed, and that symbology would no longer get the game insta-banned in Germany… as long as it was only used “in an artistic way”:

Germany lifts total ban on Nazi symbols in video games (10 August 2018)

jarfil,

Wow, that’s some wall of text. Between the language used (royal “we”?), the severity of the accusations, the mention of a smear campaign against “the authors”… why is that thing on Medium, instead of on police reports?

The livelihoods of too many people depend on Second Life

Maybe they shouldn’t, they’re the original NFT peddlers before NFTs went blockchain.

The whole thing reads like a hissy fit between some internal factions. I’m also kind of surprised SL is still a thing, I thought it went free/self-hosted with alternative clients and grids many years ago.

jarfil,

The whole article smells a lot… but other than the toxic environment, it also claims other problems:

  • Removing age controls
  • Grooming
  • IRL human trafficking

If true, those are punishable pretty much everywhere.

The part about removing ban lines from an invite-only explicit area, would also be quite suspicious.

jarfil,

Heh, I’ve read it all… I used to go onto SL like 15 years ago 😬

is there actually any child abuse content being thrown at people?

Unclear. The proof they give are drawings, and the possibility of adding IRL photos as avatar textures.

Is there any way to see this stuff without being into it?

Apparently yes. It claims the areas are not age restricted, and while some content might appear only when a whitelisted user is present, the content, and any avatar interactions, would be visible to anyone in the same place at the same time.

jarfil,

Interesting the difference in approach to censorship between the “West” and China.

jarfil,

I guess a “patriotic story” could be made in any country about its respective fight for independence, and/or any war. Something like every character having a well built background, then sacrificing it for the greater good.

Maybe with the goal being to unmask the traitor, but the traitor being an NPC, then everyone learning of everyone else’s sacrifices as the game progressed, empathizing and ending up crying?

Dunno, I guess there could be many ways to make a mostly scripted game a patriotic one, when nobody can say “I throw a box of lit dynamite sticks into the air and cry Leeeroooy!!”, or “A book? I read aloud whatever it says. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…”

jarfil,

While he says he was only paid a few hundred dollars a month to update their websites, Bowser says the people he worked with weren’t very social and he helped “testers” troubleshoot devices

Not sure if lying or extremely naive. He acted as the public face of a DRM breaking ring? Either he was running it and profiting much more than he says, or he asked for the tar and feathers on top of already being a scapegoat figurehead.

jarfil, (edited )

Seems to be a lot of cylindrical pillars with pressure sensors and motors, that can be tilted by a slight degree in both X-Y axes, or they have a fixed tilt and just the tilt direction is rotated in Z (seems like the pillars of a whole module get adjusted all at once), making only some borders be in contact with an object. A program can track the position of an object, then calculate how to tilt and rotate the pillars so the borders in contact with the object will push it in the desired direction.

It reminds me somewhat of an omniwheel control system, but applied to the floor instead of the wheels.

jarfil,

The spinning tops might be 3D printed, but there are some motors and pressure sensors involved, plus some electronics, and you probably want a steel plate underneath holding it all together. Tolerances would also be quite tight.

jarfil,

Depending on how exactly is it made, it could have fewer moving parts than it looks like. The tilt seems to be controlled on a whole module at a time level, and I’m guessing all the tops of a module might be rotating in the same direction. That would still leave a lot of linkages and bushings or bearings, but make it easily serviceable by just replacing them. The modular design seems to indicate you could pick a whole hexagon tile, replace it with a working one, and service the damaged one in the background.

jarfil,

Going 3D would require variable size tops, variable heights, more tilt, and more granular control. Doesn’t seem like this design would allow any of those. It’s still cool, but is no solid light yet 😉

jarfil,

Both updating the controls, and removing stereotypes, should be optional, at most behind a parental lock.

Some historic material is evil shit, and some people may understandably not want to get exposed to it… but it shouldn’t be some censor’s decision which scholars get access to the historical originals, while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.

Everyone should have the option to see as much evil as they want, no more, no less.

Going back to your Bambi example, I learned a lot about 1942 US by watching the now censored scenes, much more than by just listening to the opinions of those who condemned them.

Billy Mitchell has surrendered (perfectpacman.com)

Billy Mitchell didn’t win his defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies. Not only was Billy not in a position to get a financial settlement, Billy’s cheated Donkey Kong scores were not reinstated(as he’s claiming), and his claimed Pac-Man score from 1999 is also not on the main scoreboards. What had happened is that the...

jarfil,

Wow. That guy should run for president, or something. All American icon, film star, great con man… 😯

jarfil,

Yeah, the businessman with followers, indictments, and victim of an unfair witch hunt, who keeps rambling during depositions. Looks like a Trump’s apprentice.

jarfil,

Games using Steam’s DRM, have the benefit that if Steam ever goes down, there would be a massive amount of people interested in breaking it to free all the games at once.

It actually happens all the time, but Steam can roll out new “patched” versions of the DRM as long as it stays in business.

They are also aware of this, and even have promised to release a DRM bypass if they’re ever about to close shop… but in practice it wouldn’t really matter; whatever last version of the DRM they ever release, will get broken in record time.

jarfil,

That’s a possibility. Then again, Steam games are getting stripped of DRM right now (and possibly enhanced with some malware), so the moment the value proposition of just installing Steam and not having to do anything else goes down, it’s likely for generic DRM strippers to appear, at least for older versions.

jarfil,

The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).

A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.

All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.

jarfil,

They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.

Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.

They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.

jarfil,

Yeah, back in chess club at school, we also got a visit from the local (future) GM as a treat on one of the last days. He took us at something like 15 simultaneous games at once… and beat us all.

Go is slightly different; it only has one piece type, the rules are much simpler than chess, the board is much larger but with 8-fold symmetry, so the first 20-30 moves are likely to fall into some “basic” patterns in some of the octants. By comparison, the patterns in chess get hard to manage after just 10 moves, while Go pros may plan even 100 moves ahead. Where Go gets really complex, is when the patterns start meeting, and the complexity tends towards the 10¹⁷⁰ possible moves, way more than the 10⁴⁰ practical ones in chess.

jarfil,

“On a scale from 0% to 500%, how much more would you pay for a game where main characters used [insert your favorite actors/people]'s AI cloned voices?”

jarfil,

Not saying this was a honest mistake, but I do see how that could happen:

  1. Game story gets written
  2. Dialogs are worked on
  3. TTS versions of all dialogs are generated
  4. Once they get approved, talent is cast
  5. Talent is scheduled to record the dialogs and get paid
  6. Final dialogs get included in the game

Knowing how game studios love to push everyone into “rush mode” the months before launch, I can see how, for a minor NPC, someone could have forgotten to cast and/or book a recording of some dialogs… while everyone is getting pressured to release NOW OR ELSE!!1!

Honestly, I wonder how many minor NPCs in games have been TTS all along, and nobody noticed or cared.

jarfil,

a feat previously only accomplished by AI.

AI did it first, human came second, so didn’t surpass anything AI.

jarfil,

Yes, and still this part is false:

has surpassed artificial intelligence

jarfil, (edited )

It’s been a progression:

First I didn’t care, just made male characters because I’m male, put about zero thought in it.

Then someone told me “If I’m going to spend hundreds of hours staring at an avatar’s butt, I’d rather it be something I like”. I still made male characters, because I wasn’t staring at their butt.

I got into healing roles over time, and most healers tended to be female, so I picked female characters.

Then I saw how male players would fawn around female characters… and I found it funny to make the most fragile looking female character, with some awesome DPS power, so people would try to PvP duel me and get pummeled into the ground.

Finally, I stopped caring at all. My Overwatch “main” was Mercy, with Torb and Moira as close seconds… but the most fun I’ve ever had, was being a hamster (Hammond).

jarfil,

Try Overwatch’s Torb: small hitbox, “the floor is lava” ult, and a rivet gun with both a ballistic trajectory mode that can go from side to side of the map (hard to master, but extremely gratifying when you headshot an enemy at their spawn from your own spawn), and a mele mode that can take down the strongest tanks.

jarfil,

Shave your legs? If you want to dress in feminine clothes, just do it [if your country allows it].

I’d recommend against shaving your arms, though. Last time I tried that, it messed my sense of proprioception, turns out I’m used to the input of airflow over arm hairs to keep track of where they are, who’d know.

jarfil,

It’s more of a mailing list or forum game, where you can check on the state of the rules at any time.

It can be played as tabletop, but that involves a lot of handwriting, and who’s got time for that in 2023?

jarfil,

That’s doable… if you make it a rule!

In my experience, the game tends to get very “meta” very quickly. Someone could add a rule that “nobody write down the rules”, unless you had the “person X writes down the rules” as an immutable rule, so the moment someone wants to make it mutable… beware!

jarfil,

According to a recent discussion in another thread, I’ve been told that expecting devs to honor their word, is “entitlement”…

jarfil,

You are saying that getting people to do work for you by promising them something in return, means nothing, that you can break that promise whenever you want.

You are entitled as fuck.

That’s what a scammer would say.

jarfil,

No, I’m a foss dev, and I speak for all of us when I ask you to please not join any of our communities

Sure, I’ll write your name down in the black book. What’s your GitHub nick, or wherever you keep your stuff?

You need to put up or shut up evidence of where that developer said that he would release his code as open source

From the article:

wedistribute.org/2023/12/artemis-shuts-down/

She didn’t want to release the code to something prematurely

Implying the code was supposed to get released. You may want to ask the article’s author about where they got that out.

jarfil,

don’t spill it over into other, unrelated threads

We didn’t have any interaction in the other thread, I only mentioned it because I saw a similarity between the topics. Guess I struck a nerve.

jarfil,

The promise I’m referring to, is to “release the code”.

(long version)I understand the thought process of people not wanting to show how messy their pre-production code is… but that’s why, following semver rules, you mark it as a version “0.x.y”. It’s not an exam, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, anyone who’s written code knows that’s how things work, and it’s on the community to be understanding of this, so the “initial dev” of an open source project should feel confident in releasing a tangled mess, no less no more.

Promising the code, then disappearing without giving a community that’s invested in the project a chance to take over, is what I find fishy.

jarfil,

Good analysis, just a few nitpicks: AR is the future… when it matches human visual abilities, which may take several decades more, be it through glasses, or through a neural link. There is a deep uncanny walley in either case to overcome.

I would like to believe in a web3, but right now it’s mostly web1/2 interfaces to something that could be achieved in any other way.

LLM AI has already revolutionized AI, it’s the holy grail “glue” to keep different AIs working together, including itself.

jarfil,

My playmate explained it was because I was X character and Y character has Z ability and I needed to switch to V character when I respawn to counter their abilities

With all due respect, your playmate knew jack shit. Particularly in Overwatch, the “countering” is a combination of personal skill and situational awareness: you can win with any character against any other one, by just using the right abilities at the right time from the right place.

It’s also mainly a team based game… or used to be… so which character you pick is much less important, than knowing which synergies you can get with your teammates. That one does take time to learn, on everyone’s part, but a well synergized team can only be “countered” by another well synergized team.

For reference, I’m part blind, and some of my favorite kills are Mercy vs. Widow, or Torb’s ballistic rivet headshots across half the map vs. whoever thought they were well behind cover.

jarfil,

I like to just jump in and wing it, learn on the fly. Actually hate playing with people who expect everyone to “have done their research”. Games do build on top of knowledge of previous ones, to an extent… but it’s figuring out the rest what gives me a thrill.

As for complicated games, I think you forgot World of Warcraft… which I can repeat to you what I told someone who called it a game “for nerds”: according to their IQ, 2% of the world population are “gifted”, there are 8 billion people, WoW had slightly over 10 million players at its peak.

In an ideal world with equal opportunities for everyone, you could expect a potential audience of 160 million “nerds”… so yeah, some games are going to be more difficult that candy crush.

jarfil,

Yeah, Pharah’s weak spot was holding still while ulting, easy target for everyone.

But the trap for Mercy wasn’t a guaranteed hit, I used to “main Mercy”, and the trick was that Pharah’s “corpse” started where she got killed, however high above ground, and then began falling. Mercy’s rez (and heal/boost) had a minimum engage range, but the disengage range was about twice of that, so a Mercy could fly towards the corpse midair, hit rez while passing it by, then channel rez while still slowly hovering down, sometimes even rezzing pharah midair, not having to touch the ground.

The risk to that, was if Pharah’s corpse happened to land on a roof, while Mercy kept hovering down, she would get out of range and lose the cast… but that’s what made it interesting.

I also miss that one time when they made Mercy’s ult a speed boost; best Mercy games were always while keeping her in the air as long as possible, healing everyone while jumping among them, but the speed ult made for some fun “let’s see how many can I rez in a single game”.

jarfil,

Apple’s business model is to sell hardware, in order to “extract as much money from the consumer as humanly possible” they “need” to protect hardware sales first and foremost.

Valve’s business model is to sell software, in order to “extract […] possible” they “need” to have as much compatible hardware as possible.

You can argue that Apple’s business model is antiquated or suboptimal, but you’ll have to prove that freeing their hardware and reducing prices, would mean an equal or higher increase in benefits from their app store and subscriptions.

jarfil,

I think it’s the battery cover that usually just pops off like on the indestructible Nokia phones of decades past.

“Battery cover”, or… “kinetic energy redirector” 😉

jarfil, (edited )

If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends?

You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).

It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?

Just greed… mostly. A lot of people want to “get rich quick”, and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed… but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can “buy low, sell high”, you may still want to do it regardless.

You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).

need to make more next quarter

That’s mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they’ll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.

Sometimes it’s done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it’s easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things “like they’ve always been done”.

jarfil,

Either that, or “News Cameraman with Carnage Closeup Mode DLC”…

jarfil,

Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.

Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.

The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.

jarfil,

Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.

jarfil,

You just made my 10yo self massively envious… all I had was a couple cardboard boxes, fake dials, some blinkenlights, DIY switches and paper code cards, and some paper tube graphite heaters fed from an old high voltage TV cap that I’m still unsure how didn’t set the whole thing on fire.

Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release. angielski

I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...

jarfil,

when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.

“Empty working sets” doesn’t swap out anything by itself, it marks it as “swappable” but stil in RAM. It does make a copy to swapfile in case it needs to swap it out so it can do it instantly.

To fully force a swap out, you have to clean the lists… level 1, I think? (sorry, in bed, don’t want to look it up RN).

If you did that with a HDD however… yeah, I can see how that would feel bad.

Pro tip: don’t leave PH open for too long, it’s kind of a devel tool and has some bugs that can mess up the hooks of the whole system. Best is to open, use, close, for ~15 day uptimes on Windows 8 to 10 without ECC.

I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open

I used to play games with 8 GB of RAM and 40 tabs in Chrome. It was either-or, it worked, didn’t kill the SSD, for years. 🤷

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