tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Benjamin Netanyahu describes UK as ‘first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon’ 5 hours ago:
I mean, Israel’s going to have a more-Muslim population than the UK does.
searches
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country
Israel: 18.0%
United Kingdom: 6.0%
- Comment on Tonyrefail ice cream man hit with van chimes noise complaint 6 hours ago:
could hear it all afternoon
It sounds like the issue here is specific to the chimes being played after 7:00 PM, rather than them being played at all.
Rhondda Cynon Taf council said it received a noise complaint in June relating to music being played after 20:00 BST, which it investigated and found to be valid.
The council said the law required a 19:00 cut-off time for ice cream van operators to use their chimes, but it did not “prevent them from trading after this time”.
- Comment on Households near new pylons to get £250 taken off annual energy bills 20 hours ago:
That’s a neat idea. I’ve seen similar proposals in the past, and it’s a way to help deal with NIMBYism.
- Comment on More People Are Pre-ordering The $100 Edition Of GTA 6 3 days ago:
It appears that most people don’t care about spending $100 on a video game.
I’m fine with spending $100 on a video game. I mean, said video game needs to provide reasonable value, but the amount of time I play a game varies way more than game price, is the dominant factor.
I didn’t really like what I played of GTA 5 and probably won’t play this one, but for the right game, sure. If I could get a game I like similar to Oxygen Not Included, which I’ve played for many, many hours, I’d do $100 happily.
pre-orders
Now that I will agree with being a problem.
- Comment on Arizona teas at $1.59… we used to be a proper country. 5 days ago:
You could get a Thermos and brew up a bunch yourself, just take a chilled drink with you.
Gives you a wider selection and doesn’t take long for the Thermos to pay itself back.
I don’t usually take iced tea, but I have been known to take a Thermos of ice water.
- Comment on This bookstore wraps all books in plastic. 1 week ago:
Most commercial establishments in the US are air-conditioned. Taiwan has — as you point out — a pretty warm, humid climate. Are Taiwanese bookstores not not typically air-conditioned? I’d think that they’d be a prime candidate.
I was reading about public library humidity and temperature control a month or two back, and it sounded like it was also pretty much the norm to air condition those, for the preservation reasons that you mention.
- Comment on Local Walmart just installed cameras in the aisles… 1 week ago:
I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the roof.
- Comment on Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font 1 week ago:
Ehh. It’d kill browser “search text” functionality, as well as Reader Mode on Firefox.
- Comment on The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins 1 week ago:
There used to be a convention of having authors who would, at least occasionally, write deliberately-enraging opinion articles in magazines. In my experience, they were typically at the end of magazines. Maybe not outright wrong articles, but they’d make statements that many readers of the magazine would object to.
The idea, as I understand it, was to — and this was before social media, in the Internet-based sense of the word, developed a focus on this — drive engagement. People would write letters to the editor complaining and arguing against it, and then the magazine could print some of these in the next issue in the letters section.
John C. Dvorak was the most-prominent example of this that I recall — he put articles in a few computer magazines — and was notable in that I recall him publicly-admitting that he did this.
Huh. Looking at his WP article, it looks like he just died last week.
Anyway, my point is that I could believe that publications might still have authors who do this sort of thing.
- Comment on "I didn’t fully appreciate the scope of it": a year on from taking over, Nexus Mods owners reflect on the challenges of their push to minimise modding hassle 2 weeks ago:
A year and a bit on from taking the reigns, Folmann’s put up a post reflecting on the new regime’s first year running the modding site and outlining hopes to turn it into “an operating system for user-generated content in gaming” in the long term.
I think that that’s a nice idea, but I think that ultimately, it’s going to be really hard to do that on the distribution side.
There are definitely improvements that can be made on that side.
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Trying to deal with malware. Some of this is arguably more of a platform vendor or Steam problem — almost all games really could run just fine in a sandbox, without access to the broader system. But mods massively exacerbate the problem, because you have lots of very small programs from anonymous authors and little review present.
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Making it easier for end users to diagnose conflicts. I remember Conflict Catcher, an extension manager for the classic Mac OS, that had quite a good system for this — I’ve set to see a similar software package that implements this to the same level. The first bit I have seen elsewhere: when you have a problem, switch off approximately half of the mods (though if you have mod dependencies, you’ll need to take that into account in selecting the ones to flip off). Ask the user if the problem is still recurring. Repeat. For a single-mod problem (this mod just doesn’t work on this system), this isolates a problematic mod in O(log N) tries, where N is the number of mods. But what Conflict Catcher would do is to also extend this to identify conflicts between two (and IIRC, more) mods that had problems with each other.
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Improve the creation and distribution of “mod sets”. For very moddable games, where you’re dealing with maybe thousands of mods, this is important. Right now, Wabbajack does something like this — I actually just used this successfully under Linux for the first time the other day, using Jackify — things have come a long way on Linux — and while they build on NexusMods, NexusMods doesn’t natively have the ability to do this.
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Improve the situation for load order dependency. Maybe let mods provide partial ordering recommendations WRT other mods and versions; not sure what the best solution is here.
But a lot of the work to make games moddable in the first place, or to work well when being modded, really needs to happen on the game developer side.
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Some of the ability to diagnose problems with mods really has to happen on the game side.
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Trying to track down the performance impact of mods in anything more-sophisticated than a “restart and see if problem is present” Conflict Catcher-style approach — and some games don’t deal well with disabling some mods that have already been used in a game, so it can be very time consuming to run a pass.
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In particular, I’d like support from the game for trying to run mod code in parallel, where possible. Like, “this code module doesn’t mutate anything, just looks at the world state and computes a result”, and runs in a VM that enforces that non-mutability, so all of that code can run in parallel each frame. A lot of mods have historically relied on running in various game scripting systems that do not support parallelization, which is nice from an “avoiding bugs introduced by scripts written by people who aren’t writing correct parallel compute code”, but not so great from a performance standpoint, given that modern computers have a lot of cores and as the amount of script code run by mods increases, it can place increasing pressure on a single thread bottleneck.
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Improving startup times for modded games. For me, this is a pet peeve with very large modsets in Bethesda games. They need a system — maybe it’s building an index and caching it, or allowing init code to run lazily, or a dependency system or something (“this flag indicates whether this mod need to be loaded before the menus creen is displayed”) — to allow mods to be loaded intelligently in a way that doesn’t massively increase game startup time.
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- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
endorsement of the prime minister
Technically Starmer didn’t endorse him. IIRC his statement was something like “I don’t think that I’m actually allowed to endorse a member of another party” or something along those lines.
searches
theguardian.com/…/clacton-byelection-likely-to-be…
The prime minister, Keir Starmer, even addressed his candidacy on the sidelines of the Nato summit. “I think it’s actually against Labour party rules to endorse another [candidate],” he said.
- Comment on I hate Android! 2 weeks ago:
I’m increasingly trying to use my (GNU/Linux) laptop where I can, and just tether the phone to it when I need mobile data connectivity.
It’s not a complete drop-in solution. You can’t just use a laptop with one hand while waiting in a line (well, there used to be palmtops, but those seem to be a mostly-dead class of PCs today). It consumes more power. Desktop OS software doesn’t really natively have a concept of “being on WiFi versus being on mobile data”, which is nice to have in phone software.
But where you can sit down and use one…man, it eliminates a ton of my irritations with phones. The locked-down stuff in most phone OSes. Those fiddly, limited onscreen keyboards. The tradeoffs that the systems make to try to minimize power use and simplify memory management from an end user standpoint (because a lot of users don’t get the concept of closing programs) like the one you mention go away. Hardware is more capable and expandable, and the manufacturers have way more physical space to work with, so you don’t have manufacturers throwing out things like physical headphones jacks to try to get a bit more space. The limited cooling on phones goes away. Better in terms of repairability — I just replaced a laptop battery. If my phone’s battery died, I’d throw out the phone. Using multiple programs at once, as you were doing, is much better; phone OSes just aren’t really optimal for that.
I’m honestly impressed with what smartphone vendors have done within the constraints of what they have to work with, especially in how much better touchscreens have gotten over the decades — they used to be far, far worse. But they still just face a ton of limitations imposed by the form factor.
- Comment on What are your favourite PSP games? 3 weeks ago:
Probably Lumines. Nothing amazing from a gameplay standpoint — lots of falling block games out there — but the music makes it a fun experience.
That being said, you can get it on Steam now, so don’t need a PSP.
- Comment on this absolute bullshit from reddit 3 weeks ago:
Works fine for me without logging in in a quick test (from the US).
- Comment on China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns 3 weeks ago:
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ˈɛr.ɛ.hwɒn/, ERR-eh-hwon)[2] is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]
In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a “straightener” (essentially a psychologist) for treatment.[5]
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 3 weeks ago:
Samsung is one of the Big Three memory manufacturers. Samsung’s phone division had some news articles talkimg about how they couldn’t get Samsung’s memory division to give them privileged access, even.
(Though for context, about two years earlier when there was a glut of memory and Samsung’s memory division was losing money, they apparently went to the Samsung phone division and tried to get them to buy a bunch of the excess, which I suppose would have meant putting more memory in their phones than would have been optimal. The phone division told them no way.)
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 3 weeks ago:
It takes 4-5 years to build a new memory fab from scratch for companies in the industry.
They’re talking about no price reductions for 1.5 years.
(And the reason they’re saying thst is because the first significant new production capacity isn’t expected to be up until mid-2027 and isn’t expected to be scaled up to full production until 2028.)
And they already moved that forward by something like six months, probably by spending more on stuff like construction so I doubt that there’s more slack to eliminate.
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 3 weeks ago:
Earlier this month, research showed that memory prices are predicted to rise sharply between now and 2027, with no reductions expected until 2028. Now, Valve has shared its own view of the hardware market, and it’s equally glum.
That’s not really a position new to this month.
- Comment on Bethesda Announces New ‘Fallout’ Roadmap Following Xbox Reset 4 weeks ago:
Whatever Fallout Obsidian is doing is happening now, not after the next Elder Scrolls game is done.
- Comment on Bethesda roadmap: more Fallout is coming, Starfield support continues, but Elder Scrolls VI is the main priority 4 weeks ago:
Obsidian has done a mainline Fallout before, New Vegas. And apparently Tim Cain (original Fallout 1) guy just showed back up and is working at Obsidian and said that he plans to do one last game before re-retiring. And Josh Sawyer is there, and he directed New Vegas.
- Comment on Bethesda Announces New ‘Fallout’ Roadmap Following Xbox Reset 4 weeks ago:
I doubt that they’re going to do a live service thing either, but at least part of the problem was, as I recall from postmortems, that they didn’t have people with experience doing network games going into it and figured that multiplayer capability would be easy to retrofit in. That generally isn’t the case — if you want to permit client-side prediction, to keep the game responsive, which you probably do, then your engine has to support rolling back all state in the event of a misprediction. Like, say my client predicts that another player character keeps walking straight, doesn’t push any keys. Given that, it calculates that the rifle grenade I just fired sails past them and hits a monster and kills it, preventing it from afflicting me with a poisoned status.
Then it gets a new update. Actually, it turns out that a while back, that player veered to the right, right into the path of that rifle grenade, and it hit him and killed him. The player is no longer alive. The monster that my rifle grenade would have hit is not actually dead, and so it survived and afflicted me with poison. All of thst world state needs to be rolled back and recalculated (and this rollback done efficiently). That means that you can’t just leave any state about the world anywhere that doesn’t get rolled back.
Plus, Fallout has a scripting engine, Papyrus, and if it has any state stored, that has to be rolled back too.
That’s not so hard to do if you think about it from the get-go, and are careful about how you store state. But if you’ve been writing a purely-single-player game for decades and not thinking about any of this, it’s easy to stick state somewhere that doesn’t get rolled back.
IIRC, they had to bring in network game people to help out.
But my guess is that that’s also something of a one-off effort to fix most of that. Like, I doubt that doing Fallout 76 2 would be as bad technically as Fallout 76.
That being said, I’m not really looking for a live service game myself, and I doubt that it’s what they’re doing. Plus, from a business standpoint, if you already have a live service game, I suspect that you’re probably better off just extending the existing game and leveraging the existing player base than starting from scratch.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
If you want to encourage political violence, I’m not very supportive of that.
- Comment on British public more likely to prefer Count Binface wins Clacton by-election than Nigel Farage 4 weeks ago:
over a D-list internet celebrity who regularly gets confused with a nearly identical D-list internet celebrity running on the same joke.
I was recently informed that they are one and the same. If you’ll look at the Count Binface WP article you linked to, you’ll see that it’s the same guy who changed things slightly over an intellectual property dispute.
- Comment on Would it be possible to retool old transistors/electronics by filling in the increasingly larger gaps created by Moore's Law? 4 weeks ago:
Hypothetically, it might be possible, but there aren’t practical gains to be had from it. Easier to fabricate a new chip.
The optimal design is unlikely to be a straightforward modification of an older chip.
Even if it were, modification would add more variables, where we’re constrained by yields today.
And our processes today aren’t designed for it.
- Comment on British public more likely to prefer Count Binface wins Clacton by-election than Nigel Farage 4 weeks ago:
- In a hypothetical forced choice head-to-head…32% say neither.
Not the conventional way a forced choice works, but…
- Comment on Nine out of ten bestselling novels in UK have one thing in common: a woman is murdered 4 weeks ago:
Critics argue that repeatedly turning women into victims risks normalising violence against them.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Homicide_statistics_by_gender
At a global level, men represent both the majority of victims and the majority of perpetrators of homicide. According to the 2023 UNODC Global Study on Homicide, in 2021, at a global level, 81% of homicide victims were men.[1] In 2021, males accounted for most homicide victims in all jurisdictions except in Austria, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Slovenia and Switzerland, where females were slightly more likely to be homicide victims.[2] The global homicide rate was 9.3 per 100,000 males and 2.2 per 100,000 females; and 90% of homicide suspects brought into formal contact with the police were men.[2]
I wouldn’t be too concerned.
- Comment on Man dressed as fox pulls out of Clacton election because it's become a 'circus' 4 weeks ago:
That fact that the eyes on that fursuit appear to be looking in diverging directions is really bugging me.
- Comment on 500,000 households cancel TV licence putting BBC future in jeopardy 4 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure that a lot more Brits presently have a television than air conditioning.
searches
In 2025, there were 29.0 million households in the UK
en.wikipedia.org/…/Television_licensing_in_the_Un…
In March 2024, there were 23.9 million licences, of which 3,600 (0.015%) were monochrome (black and white).
So about 82% of households have a TV.
theguardian.com/…/air-conditioning-uk-homes-heatw…
An estimated 4m homes have an air conditioner, double the figure from three years ago.
And about 14% have air conditioning.
- Comment on Fuck you Whatsapp 4 weeks ago:
I’d just SMS them and see if they respond. I mean, you’re setting up a viewing. That shouldn’t take that many messages.
- Comment on [Caves of Qud] Would Grit gate recoil transport me right to the Barathrumites? 5 weeks ago:
but I just can’t reach the soulsucker’s village because the goatfolk just keep killing me on my way.
Mamon Souldrinker can be, IMHO, a hard fight, the quest isn’t a prerequisite for anything, and the rewards aren’t anything fantastic. His fight is a quite significant bump in difficulty from regular goatfolk, I’d say. I’d probably back-burner it.
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At least for me — I normally play a melee character — and I assume most people, the biggest problem with the goatfolk is the goatfolk sowers, which have explosive missile weapons. You’re in a jungle. Use the trees to break line of sight with them so that you only engage them in melee. Don’t engage crowds if you aren’t up to it; you can lure lone enemies off onto an adjacent, cleared screen. If you’re a melee character, and can’t use trees to get as close as possible, Charge will let you close the last bit of distance quickly.
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Discretion is the better part of valor. If it looks risky, don’t take the fight.
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When you walk off the current screen to another, enemies who are close to you will follow shortly thereafter. However, if you leave that screen before they enter, you won’t be followed (e.g. leave near a a corner of the current screen, then exit off to another screen prior to the enemies following you to the second screen).
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You have a Sprint ability in your abilities tab. That’ll let you briefly move faster than enemies. “Sprint adds the ability to start sprinting, with a cooldown of 100. While sprinting, a character’s movement speed is doubled, and this effect lasts for 10 turns by default.” That’ll help break line-of-sight or get off the current screen.
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Especially if you’re a mutant, you may have some “escape key” abilities already — most roguelikes tend to favor having some kind of “escape key”. For physical mutations, something like Phasing, or the ability to emit line-of-sight blocking gas (Sleep Gas Generation, Corrosive Gas Generation) for physical mutations. I don’t play espers much, but for them, maybe something like Force Bubble.
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