Quetzalcutlass

@Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Utopia 🌈⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They got in early. I remember researching the Holocaust for a school assignment in the late nineties/early aughts and the top result was a conspiracy theorist/Holocaust denial screed. An openly racist one with slurs and epithets throughout, no less. The early internet was wild.

  There was also Stormfront, a white supremacist forum with hundreds of thousands of members where racists openly detailed their plans to infiltrate police precincts and federal agencies by having fellow members already employed there vouch for them, with the goal of creating a network of supporters throughout the entire law enforcement apparatus to protect them. Looking at the news, it’s not hard to imagine they succeeded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Republicans head home for the summer after a string of losses in Congress⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And it doesn’t have to be this way! This behavior of spending most of their time in office campaigning or acquiring funding for reelection instead of, you know, governing only became the norm in the nineties.

  (Add yet another “fuck Newt Gingrich” to the tally board.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate Android!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Even setting aside the wear and tear issues with flash storage, swap and zram sadly don’t play nice together. Zram will fill up with stale memory while swap gets the fresh stuff, which is the exact opposite of what you want and causes awful performance problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate Android!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got 4 GB of RAM

  Sadly that’s an almost unusable amount these days. The OS will use half of that while sitting idle, and Google Play Services will use a fifth of the remainder (you can enable Developer Mode and view running services to see this yourself). 4 gigs is solidly in the “only one or two apps open at a time” range.

  (It doesn’t help that every Android app includes its own separate copies of all its libraries and dependencies for compatibility reasons. There’s no such thing as a lightweight app without going out of your way to avoid the normal development ecosystem)

  Android also doesn’t use swap (storing unused/rarely accessed memory contents on the disk for later), instead shifting stale memory pages to a compressed block in RAM (zram), so once it starts filling up with cached background apps it has to start killing apps or the system will hang. The less RAM you have, the sooner this will happen, and both Lemmy clients and web browsers use a ton of RAM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Repeating of course⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the linked papers makes the claim that the circuitry would be less complex than that needed for floats, but also includes this note:

  Floats have one advantage over posits for the hardware designer: the fixed location of bits for the exponent and the fraction mean they can be decoded in parallel. With posits, there is a little serialization in having to determine the regime bits before the other bits can be decoded. There is a simple workaround for this in a processor design, similar to a trick used to speed the exception handling of floats: Some extra register bits can be attached to each value to save the need for extracting size information when decoding instructions.

  The proposed system also lacks NaN and separate positive/negative infinities, so it wouldn’t be a drop-in replacement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Repeating of course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve managed to create a compression algorithm that reduces files down to a single bit. I call it “is this file ‘loss.png’?”.

  It’s guaranteed 100% lossless with any input!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Repeating of course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, Apache Commons: for those who felt Java’s standard library wasn’t bloated enough already.

  (I kid, I kid, though it was always funny just how many basic features seemed to be missing from Java back in the day despite its massive bundled library, leading to seemingly every major project adding Commons as a dependency. Not as much as thing these days AFAIK)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Repeating of course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel obligated to post a link to this excellent (albeit incomplete) writeup of posits and unums, which can more accurately represent fractions in memory at the same (or lower) bit size as traditional floating point.

  Said page also includes the single best slightly-above-entry-level explanation of how floating point works I’ve ever seen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🐟💥🫍⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Flashbacks to the Invincible train scene.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At this rate, it will never end⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This explains waterfowl.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This one's for the gardeners ;)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be the lamp you wish to see...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The flying is pretty great. I liked what I played of it, but I’ve been holding off on a full playthrough until they fix the terrible user interface (which is luckily one of their top priorities).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Admit it, you just like Soulmask because it lets you turn into Anubis (the Original Furry) on demand.

  I’m onto you, Kolanaki!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Haven’t exploded their budget on a hiring spree

  The big thing they did with the cash was start a publishing arm to help fund other indies. So far the biggest title to come from that is the pirate survival game Windrose.

  Here’s hoping Pocketpair continue being as awesome as they’ve been up to this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I play co-op, and multiplayer has the unfortunate quirk that the game lets you pull base Pals you don’t own into your own Palbox and doesn’t show any indication of who the original owner is afterwards. Combine that with raid bosses, where you’re hurriedly swapping out Pals with fresh ones en masse as the boss defeats them, and I have no idea who owns half my Palbox. So I avoided condensing anything that wasn’t fresh out of the incubator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reading the changelog, you may have gotten what you asked for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You hit the nail in the head. I’d describe Palworld as a shameless clone of ARK with Pokemon mechanics bolted on top, and a focus on automating your base vs ARK’s attitude of “do everything yourself”.

  But the main thing Palworld gets right is copying all the good things about ARK that had people play it for thousands of hours, while reducing or eliminating all the bad things people hated about ARK (while still playing it for thousands of hours).

  Mostly it improves the formula by reducing busywork and how long things take - in ARK, basic tasks could take hours and require the player’s constant attention that whole time, whereas in Palworld almost nothing takes more than a few minutes. Hatching eggs is the main exception, and that’s entirely passive outside of putting it in its preferred climate and coming back to hatch it later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can't argue with his logic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As for “Why tell me?” The theory is still that it is better for your life to know and that God’s law is better and more generous than man’s law.

  The Golden Rule has popped up independently in cultures across the globe (including the Abrahamic religions), and I’d argue it’s a much better foundation for morality than anything that assumes the supernatural exists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, boxes weren’t too bad with the filters (at least until late game when you had several hundred Pals), but the Palpedia was nearly unusable without search. You had to manually go down the entire list to know if you’d seen or caught a Pal before or wanted to check where it spawns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That is an absolutely insane changelog that includes nearly everything I wanted changed or fixed in the game, to the point that I’m actually kind of upset how many desperately needed quality-of-life fixes they held back for 1.0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"You Can't Rule Out The Possibility That Executives Are Idiots" - John Carmack On Microsoft's Gutting Of id Software⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry. It’s just dumb clickbait and Carmack is actually saying the complete opposite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Box3D | A revolutionary new physics engine developed by Erin Catto in collaboration with a Valve dev⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A small addendum: Jolt, the other new-ish free physics engine this would be competing against, is also deterministic (with some caveats that Box3D hopefully avoids) and more performant than contemporary commercial offerings (the benefit of being new and not held back by accumulated cruft and early design decisions such as obsolete threading models).

  What sets Box3D apart is that, like you said, many devs are already familiar with the 2d version of this engine and Box3D mimics its APIs aside from the added dimension. This makes it very easy to pick up for a large portion of the indie crowd.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Box3D | A revolutionary new physics engine developed by Erin Catto in collaboration with a Valve dev⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alyx’s physics were genuinely groundbreaking. If this includes all the features they showed off in that game, it’ll be one hell of a contender in the physics engine market.

  Though it would have been more impactful (ha) if they had released it six years ago alongside Alyx, back when the free physics options were all kind of crap compared to the commercial ones. Jolt has become the de facto free 3d physics solution within the past few years and it’s also a huge step up over the old offerings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is selling off four Xbox studios as part of significant gaming cuts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now imagine how bad the other MS execs must be for Spencer to be considered the ‘good one’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is selling off four Xbox studios as part of significant gaming cuts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When COVID relief was handed out, a bunch of corporations immediately used the extra cash to fund stock buybacks instead of using it to shore up their finances - literally putting shareholder profits ahead of the health of their company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is selling off four Xbox studios as part of significant gaming cuts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s part of it, but it’s also because the industry saw a massive spike in profits during COVID when everyone was stuck at home, and shortsighted executives made hires and investments as if that money train was going to continue forever. Once things went back to normal they immediately started canceling projects and firing talent.

  Microsoft is also going through leadership changes, and it’s unfortunately common for incoming executives to can projects started by their predecessor since they won’t get the credit for them.

  Of course it’s the employees who pay for their idiocy and not the ones who actually fucked up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this why people call the ‘power of friendship’ trope cheesy?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hero Core by the same author is also excellent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO says it’s ‘really irresponsible’ of Steam to make studios disclose AI use | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s only mad because Unreal Engine 6 is going all-in on AI development and he’s realizing he just shot his company (and all other users of their engine) in the foot.