tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on What are your favourite PSP games? 2 days 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 4 days 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 5 days 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' 6 days 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' 6 days 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' 6 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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] 1 week 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 1 week 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? 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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' 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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? 2 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.
-
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.
-
Discretion is the better part of valor. If it looks risky, don’t take the fight.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
- Comment on [Caves of Qud] Would Grit gate recoil transport me right to the Barathrumites? 2 weeks ago:
Yes, but honestly, it won’t help you that much.
IMHO, the major challenge to reaching the exterior of Grit Gate is learning to handle goatfolk (especially goatfolk sowers, where you need to break line of sight until close up). It’s not that hard to get there.
I’d say that being able to handle Golgotha, which you need to beat to get the Barathrumites to open the city up, is the larger issue.
- Comment on Update: 136 workers have been laid off at id Software 2 weeks ago:
For a while, video game sales were shooting up, during COVID-19. Lot of people inside with nothing to do.
My guess is that the people acquiring studios expected the increase in sales to outlast the pandemic, that it was a permanent change, and that change did not persist.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi…
The video game industry was substantially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as most industries were. The restrictions to social events and movement globally led to a sudden interest in gaming worldwide. This was credited with bolstering the success of many games, particularly games that launched in the March 2020 window, when gatherings were first restricted in many countries. A “gold rush” of video game acquisitions and investment ensued, marked by multi-billion dollar studio deals such as Microsoft’s $75bn acquisition of Activision. However, this would prove unsustainable as the rapid pandemic-era growth was temporary. Major layoffs occurred when restrictions began to ease in 2022, and it was clear that the rapid industry expansion would not be sustained.[1]
The NPD Group reported that video game sales in North America in March 2020 were up 34% from those in March 2019, and video game hardware up by 63% – which included more than twice the number of units of the Nintendo Switch console. Net spending across the first quarter of 2020 in the United States reached US$10.9 billion, up 9% in 2020 compared to 2019 according to NPD. An increase at this point, near the planned end of the eighth generation of video game consoles, was unusual and was attributed to the pandemic.[128][129] By July 2020, NPD Group reported that the total sales of video game hardware and software within the United States in the first six months of 2020 reached US$6.6 billion, the highest since 2010.[130]
Post-COVID
Towards the end of 2023 and continuing into 2024, the video game industry saw a large number of layoffs, with over 10,000 jobs lost in 2023 and at least 8,000 in 2024 by February 2024. While other factors contributed to the layoffs, such as previous acquisitions and mergers that came after 2021, the return to normalcy after COVID changed the profitability of video games, lowering market forecasts, which the inflated industry could not sustain.[300]
- Comment on Curing Ironshank in Caves of Qud made me feel like I'm playing NetHack 2 weeks ago:
If you’re playing a non-Esper mutant and get the physical mutation Regeneration to level 5 prior to Golgotha, you can more-or-less ignore disease.
wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Regeneration
I normally go for Regeneration just because (a) it’s so much of a pain in the butt to deal with fungal infections, and just at level 1, the mutation makes it mathematically extremely unlikely for incubation to complete and (b) gamma moths can inflict mutating and at level 5 or above, Regeneration has a reasonable chance of curing it before it completes incubation. Level 9 and it becomes very unlikely, though that’s a lot of points to spend.
Level 5 Regeneration has a 2% chance of curing a major debuff per turn. Mutating has a short incubation period, 100 turns. So your chance of incubation succeeding at level 5 is 0.98¹⁰⁰, or about 13.3%.
At Level 9, it has a 4% chance per turn. So the chance of completion of incubation of mutating goes down to ~1.7%. And there’s a small chance that mutating will have a beneficial effect even if it completes.
There are a few other ways of dealing with mutating, like becoming friendly with the insects faction to keep gamma moths onside or building a character that can stay out-of-phase, and I imagine a character with a high DV might also work.
rarest and most expensive one
Wine isn’t the rarest and most expensive liquid. It is more expensive than water, four times by volume. You can easily get it at the Six Day Stilt.
Cloning draught is the most expensive liquid, 1250 times by volume. Once you have one dram of it and a gyrocopter backpack (which can contain 128 drams of it), a late game strategy — tedious though effective — is to farm metamorphic polygel. Various merchants, especially Tillifergaewicz at Yd Freehold, have a (small) chance to stock polygel. Polygel can be used to duplicate any item in the game. Cloning draught can duplicate any character in the game, including Tillifergaewicz, effectively increasing the chance of polygel being available when you visit Yd Freehold after a restock. Once you have a metamorphic polygel, you can duplicate a container and all of the liquid it contains, such as a gyrocopter backpack and all of the liquid in it. If you have two containers partially full of liquid, you can pour all of one container into another (well, except for neutron flux, which requires special handling).
- Comment on Mini-marts linked to convicted people smuggler closed after BBC investigation 2 weeks ago:
One of the shops that has been closed is next to the constituency office of the local Conservative MP for South Leicestershire, Alberto Costa.
“Let’s be clear this man should not be in Blaby, should not be in this country,” said Costa. The fact Jamal had been running a business next door to a member of parliament’s constituency office “speaks volumes about the character of this individual”.
Indeed. Most unsavory.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 3 comments
- Comment on Boomers scolding us about how they were able to buy a house working at a gas station... 2 weeks ago:
I just recently sold one of my houses for 900k. Which I bought for 300k 25yrs ago. And it even was due for major renovations. Well, could have. Actually sold to them for 500. Didn’t wanna be an idiot but also didn’t want to rip them off. I did nothing of value to justify that gain. And they were very happy. Still unfair…
300,000 euros in 2001 is, inflation-adjusted, 512,000 euros in 2026. If you sold at 500k euros, you sold for slightly less than you bought it for in real terms.
- Comment on Good offer! Which one should I pick? 2 weeks ago:
I mean, they’re all WireGuard. ProtonVPN is WireGuard. Mulvad VPN – what I assume you’re referencing — is WireGuard.
If you don’t like a given WireGuard VPN provider, then just switch to some other VPN provider that supports WireGuard and use that service instead.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
The city in question is in Canada, if you’re thinking that it’s the US (as you appear to be in the US).
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
people are just shitty
Well, some people. Not like the whole of humanity lined up there.
- Comment on US Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for wind and solar projects” 3 weeks ago:
I mean, there are a bunch of people who are involved in the oil and gas (and coal, but those guys are are a corpse) industry who are terrified of things going away. If coal goes, so does, say, Gillette, Wyoming. That’s part of where Trump got support from.
But it’s not gonna change the general trajectory much on carbon. They might kick the can down the road a little more, but it’s gonna die sooner or later.
- Comment on YouTube Premium Lite 3 weeks ago:
How many different tiers of YouTube are there now so Alphabet can skim off slightly higher margins from each user possible?
I’d rather have more tiers.
I’d pay for a tier where they had a no-log, no-datamining policy, which they don’t currently offer. I’m not demanding that they change their existing tiers. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are not interested in that. But that’s what I’d like, so I’d like to have a different tier.
- Comment on Why are AAA games a rip off in US, UK & EU? 3 weeks ago:
Why does the same cost less in Kazakhstan for example but it’s overpriced in the US for American players
There is an optimal price for a market to produce the biggest return for the publisher.
If I make a widget and then sell it for one cent above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell a lot of units. But I won’t make much profit on each.
If I make a widget and then sell it for ten thousand dollars a pop above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell few units. But I will make more profit on each.
There is a point where a seller maximizes their return. They’ll try to price their product at that point.
An input to that price at which one maximizes their return, as @Hapankaali@lemmy.world points out, is the price elasticity of demand in each market.
People in Kazakhstan are not as well-off as people in the US. They’re more price sensitive, will just not be willing or able to buy something at a given price than people in the US. That means that that optimal price for the seller to set is going to be higher in the US than in Kazahkstan.
What you’ll probably also see — because a digital download of a video game has a marginal cost of production that’s basically zero — is prices slowly decreasing over time, approaching zero. Once a publisher has sold it to everyone willing to buy it at a given price, they’ll probably lower the price to try to sell it to more people who wouldn’t have bought it at the higher price. It’s why you can often get old games sold at lower prices. So down the line, that game may be selling for less, in both the US and Kazakhstan.