tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Fallout 76 Ghoul Experience Detailed by Bethesda 1 day ago:
I like both of them myself, albeit Starfield more.
- Comment on Fallout 76 Ghoul Experience Detailed by Bethesda 1 day ago:
They did.
Fallout 76, a multiplayer game, predates Starfield, a single-player game.
- Comment on But of course we don't want to poison our child. 2 days ago:
Lately he cought me in the office eating sweets and started to educate me how bad sugar is.
I mean, people do tend to eat more sugar than they probably should, but the main artificial sweetener that I see used in candies is xylitol, which is, unfortunately, also a laxative. Eat more than a few xylitol-sweetened candies at one sitting, and one’s in for diarrhea.
I assume that we don’t have an artificial sweeteners in 2024 that both avoids having a laxative effect and has the appropriate properties to subsititute for sugar in candies. I’d be delighted if someone would manage to develop one, though.
- Comment on But of course we don't want to poison our child. 2 days ago:
What flesh?
I expect this:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Cigarette_smoking_for_weight_l…
Cigarette smoking for weight loss is a weight control method whereby one consumes tobacco, often in the form of cigarettes, to decrease one’s appetite. The practice dates to early knowledge of nicotine as an appetite suppressant.
- Comment on But of course we don't want to poison our child. 2 days ago:
metro.co.uk/wp-content/…/sei_29455926-d11d.jpg
Lucky Strike cigarettes
Your throat protection – against irritation – against cough.
- Comment on This seat reservation doesn't reserve any seats 4 days ago:
I’m not familiar with the ticketing system, but I think that it’d be reasonable for the ticket to simply be used to ensure that there is a seat somewhere, but not a specific seat.
If you go to a restaurant and reserve a table, the table doesn’t need to be a specific one…just means that the restaurant will make sure that one is open.
- Comment on We need a new Amazon 4 days ago:
I’m generally fine with Amazon. The three main things I’d like to see changed:
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Their determined nagging to subscribe to Amazon Prime. I don’t have a good fix there.
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Food. Walmart.com does a better job here IME, uses their existing delivery network to provide perishables in a tight time window.
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Limited product classification for searches. For electronics, Newegg does a better job of having a database with many aspects of products being searchable. In general, specialty rather than general-purpose stores seem to do a better job on this.
If you want an alternative for some reason, OP, you probably want to list what it is that you’d like done differently, as that kinda determines what alternatives make sense.
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- Comment on Are We Ready For Driverless Buses? 5 days ago:
I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.
If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.
With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.
…parisjc.edu:8293/…/number-of-buses-in-use-by-reg…
In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.
Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?
statista.com/…/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/
Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.
If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.
I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential.
- Comment on Our first new Framework Laptop 16 Expansion Bay module - the Dual M.2 Adapter, enabling you to add additional storage drives or other high speed devices. 5 days ago:
I haven’t been that excited about the Framework laptops, because despite liking expandability and modularity, the actual modules offered for expansion didn’t really provide functionality that I’d actually wanted to swap in. A larger battery, a trackpad with physical buttons, those are things that I would want to upgrade. I just didn’t need an LED matrix on the side of my keyboard, and the external ports on most laptops were at least reasonable.
But being able to add more M.2 slots is legitimately something that I could use.
- Comment on Please suggest budget controllers for kaizo mario.. 6 days ago:
good d pad
D-pads are the one aspect of a controller that I wouldn’t worry about much. I’ve only ever had one controller that had a D-pad that I wasn’t happy with, a Logitech in the mid-1990s that had a screw-in mini joystick on the D-pad. That rolled to the diagonal too easily.
thinks
Maybe the old NES controllers, which had a relatively-hard, non-rounded D-pad and could be tough on the fingers for long sessions.
I guess one could prefer the PlayStation-style or XBox-style D-pad position, though I’ve never had issue with either.
Do you have something in particular that you’re concerned about regarding D-pads? I’d expect pretty much anything out there to be fine, myself.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 1 week ago:
This has nothing to do with supply-side versus demand-side economics.
- Comment on Open source projects drown in bad bug reports penned by AI 1 week ago:
So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.
However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.
- Comment on FedEx has absolutely no clue what 'economy' means. 1 week ago:
I agree that that’s likely something like the underlying factor – they have two services, they named them in such a way that lower cost normally maps to the slower service, and in this unusual case that relationship doesn’t hold.
However, OP’s got a legit point that from a consumer standpoint, where someone only cares about time/money tradeoff, not internal FedEx operations, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
- Comment on This spoon. 1 week ago:
I suppose that this is the basic spoon set that excludes things like the grapefruit spoon.
- Comment on Bitcoin man sues Newport council over '£600m fortune lost in tip' - BBC News 2 weeks ago:
Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.
“We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.
As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.
The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:
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It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.
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But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. That is, I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.
This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unique about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the eight to compel searching s landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.
I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives.
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- Comment on Greatest video game ever played? 4 weeks ago:
There are a lot of ways to measure that.
I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.
Another might be how long after its development it’s still considered reasonably playable. I’d guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.
Another might be how influential the game is. I think that “genre-defining” games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.
Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.
Another might be what the games I play today are – at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them – since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I’m aware of. That won’t work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability – an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here – but I think that it’s a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I’ve played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 weeks ago:
I have a very, very tiny knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that. No glass punch, though.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 weeks ago:
investigates
Hmm. Apparently some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.
reads further
It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.
info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-win…
You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 weeks ago:
Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.
That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.
- Comment on I did not want to hear anything from these people, please get out of my life 5 weeks ago:
If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.
The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.
- Comment on After the Triumph of Tetris, an Unsolved Puzzle 5 weeks ago:
Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.
He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.
It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.
- Comment on CouLSDon gets cancelled by Facebook’s algorithm police 5 weeks ago:
Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria
Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]
- Comment on Washer estimated "1 minute left", took 13 minutes to finish 5 weeks ago:
I know that modern driers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it’s maybe hard to project that.
But I don’t know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.
kagis
Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it’ll do that.
old.reddit.com/…/my_clothes_washer_has_had_one_mi…
My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)
Funny… Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:
This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.
The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should’ve taken a minute or two, took 15.
A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don’t even know they have one, much less how to clean it.
In MOST modern washers, it’s behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter…
The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that’s collected on it.
Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.
- Comment on my idiot friend printed parts of my 3d printed gun experiment with pla instead of abs 5 weeks ago:
You test fired a 3D printed gun you had no hand in making
I mean, I think that that’s reasonable. But that seems like a “get behind something protective and pull the trigger with a string” territory.
- Comment on Nine in ten honey samples from UK retailers fail authenticity test 1 month ago:
Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”
The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.
A fun bit of perspective that I like to mention in discussions about this. Roll back a bit over a century:
[Scientific American, November 2, 1907](www.scientificamerican.com/…/artificial-honey/]
Artificial Honey
Prof. Herzfeld, of Germany, recently brought out some interesting points regarding the manufacture of artificial honey in Europe. It is noticed that when we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it ran be easily redissolved by heating. Owing to the increased production of artificial honey, the bee cultivators have been agitating the question so as to protect themselves, and it is proposed to secure legislation to this effect, one point being to oblige the manufacturers to add some kind of product which will indicate the artificial product. On the other hand, it is found that the addition of inverted sugar to natural honey tends to improve its quality and especially to render it more easiIy digested. Seeing that sugar is about the only alimentary matter which is produced in an absolutely pure state, its addition to honey cannot be strictly considered as an adulteration. Bees often take products from flowers which have a bad taste; and the chemist Keller found that honey coming from the chestnut tree sometimes has a disagreeable flavor. From wheat flowers we find a honey which has a taste resembling bitter almonds, and honey from asparagus flowers is most unpalatable. Honey taken from the colza plant is of an oily nature, an.d that taken from onions has the taste of the latter. In such cases, the honey is much improved by the addition of inverted sugar. Prof. Herzfeld gives a practical method for preparing this form of sugar. We take 1 kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of high-quality refined sugar in a clean enamelware vessel, and add 300 cubic centimeters (10 fluid ounces) of water and 1.1 grammes (17 grains) tartaric acid. This is heated at 110 deg. C. over an open fire, stirring all the while, and is kept at this heat until the liquid takes on a fine golden yellow color, such operation lasting for about three quarters of an hour. By this very simpIe process we can easily produce artificial honey. Numerous extracts are now on the market for giving the aroma of honey, but none of them will replace the natural honey. However, if we take the artificial product made as above and add to it a natural honey having a strong aroma, such as that which is produced from heath, we can obtain an excellent semi-honey.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
A 401k isn’t mandatory. If you’ve got an issue with having a 401k, you don’t need to do so. I suspect, however, that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a route that will provide long-term returns as solid as regularly dropping funds into an index fund in a 401k.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
My brother or sister, invest in index funds, not the stock market.
I mean, while I get what you’re saying and don’t disagree, I’d phrase it as “hold an index fund rather than stock in individual companies”. ETFs themselves are traded on the stock market.
- Comment on Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux 1 month ago:
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
- Comment on DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him 1 month ago:
Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?
- Comment on Castlevania to get official stage adaptation by Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue 1 month ago:
And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.
