SirEDCaLot

@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

  Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

  Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

  Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In a sense, you’re right. And there’s a bit of magic involved. If you cut a certain special rock into slices, engrave runes on one side of it, and inject lightning, the rock starts to think. I don’t see how you can describe that as anything other than magic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

  I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

  VGW

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has priorities⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s an old quote, ‘never blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence’.

  I would adapt that to be, ‘never blame on homosexuality that which can be explained by stupidity’…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has priorities⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Should have invited her to go watch the eclipse together

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The smallest ones are the most agile and the least to lose by going virtual.
  Big ones however have a conundrum. If the company has spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars building a giant headquarters, and then they go virtual or largely remote, then that money becomes basically a wasted investment. And so they have to admit to their investors that money was wasted, much of which can’t be recouped even if they sell the building. That goes triple for companies with big campuses like Apple or Google. That’s why you get a lot of companies demanding things like in office 3 days a week, to create justification for having the office in the first place.

  There’s also a simple human factor. A lot of management, even tech management, still has the attitude that being able to physically watch the employee somehow enables better control or management or increases productivity. It’s crap of course, unless you have lazy unmotivated employees they will work just as well from somewhere else as they will with you breathing down their neck.

  But it’s caused some interesting shake-ups. A while back I read a great interview with a (fully virtual) tech startup CEO, he said whenever their bigger competitors announce RTO his HR department quickly buys a bunch of LinkedIn keywords targeting them.
  He found, as almost anybody could figure out with basic logic, that the best and most valuable employees know their worth and thus are the first to quit rather than RTO, and his company is right there with an offer of ‘work on some exciting new tech and we will never push RTO because we have no office to return to’. Said he’s gotten some of his best people that way.

  So when the bigger CEOs are now saying they don’t see full return to office, I think that’s because they are realizing they have no other choice, the labor market has changed and demanding full-time in person or even hybrid has become the same as a significant salary cut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is absolutely the way. One of the companies I work with, a couple years ago had a great employee who was moving out of the state. They had an office, but they didn’t want to lose her, so they let her go remote. That employee became unintentionally a work from home trial. She did just as well remote as she did in the office. So when COVID happened everybody got a laptop and the exact same VPN setup she had. Business continued and the sky did not fall due to lack of ‘water cooler chat’.

  So when lockdown lifted, it was ‘welcome back to the office everybody it’s great to have you back here, first order of business pack your shit and get it out of the building cuz we’re breaking the lease next month’.

  They moved all their servers to the cloud and became a totally virtual company. Now they can recruit from anywhere in the country and pick the best people for the job no matter where they live. And what they pay for cloud costs is a tiny fraction of what they paid for office space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’ve been locked out of PayPal for years because of their mistake⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
  Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
  You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500. After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t participate in wanton consumerism.

  This is the answer. And it comes with other benefits also.

  I do okay financially. I don’t have problems affording necessities. But I have found there is also a lot of satisfaction in being more self-sufficient, in relying less on supply companies to deliver my every need. And it saves a ton of money.

  Food is a big one. I used to spend a ton of money on takeout, delivery, junk food. But here’s the thing, basic cooking really isn’t that hard. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, especially if you meal prep. And the resulting food is both better in quality and better for you.

  On that same thread, the grocery store is not always your friend. Especially if it’s one of the big national chains. You will find much better quality produce at your local farmer’s market, and it’s often cheaper too. Certainly way more flavorful, the vegetable that was in the dirt yesterday tastes way better than the one that’s been in a warehouse for a month. Happier chickens lay tastier eggs. Etc.

  And there’s a lot of stuff you can do yourself. A vegetable garden is a great place to start, if you have even a tiny backyard. Think folding table size. Plant yourself some tomatoes and put up a net frame so animals don’t eat them, they will be the best tomatoes you’ve ever had. But planting and growing stuff is one of the most efficient ways to get food- Stick it in the dirt and water it and you get food for free!

  Then think about all the shit we buy. How much of it do we really need? How much of it ends up in the landfill in a year or two? When purchasing things, think about the product entire life cycle and how each step will affect you. IE, Don’t just think about the dopamine rush you’ll get from unboxing your shiny new toy, or the novelty of using it the first couple times, ask yourself is it going to enhance your life owning it over the long term, and is that amount of enhancement worth its purchase price and the space it consumes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possible headcanon reason why consoles always explode on the bridge⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy. Electroplasma is very hot and very energetic. When it ruptures out of the conduit, The hot energetic plasma not only mechanically fractures the materials around it, but the plasma itself is a form of matter that will, when it’s energy is released and it cools, return to whatever state it would normally be at room temperature.

  Surface ships use deuterium and anti-deuterium as fuel, deuterium is liquid at room temperature. Assuming the combined plasma is also deuterium, that would mean it is eventually condensing to liquid. So I imagine the interaction between the plasma and some other material would turn the other material into a sort of spongy texture, which is probably dark due to being scorched. Thus, I don’t think that’s rock at all. It is scorched material from around the plasma conduit, that has been melted and integrated with the plasma which then returned to a lower energy state, namely deuterium steam or liquid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possible headcanon reason why consoles always explode on the bridge⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The explanation I’ve always had- I think this was from some official source but I could have just made it up.

  Starfleet ships use EPS (Electro-Plasma System) to route power around the ship in the form of electro-plasma (a highly energized form of plasma). The warp core generates a lot of this plasma, which is piped through conduits to various devices around the ship. The EPS system and its related systems generate a lot of treknobabble about ‘scrubbing plasma conduits’ (apparently done from the outside using a field generator tool, but still boring), ‘replacing plasma relays’ (the valves that route plasma around, apparently they go bad frequently); problems like ruptured plasma conduits are dangerous and require immediate repair, etc.

  Because this all works in a grid system, whenever the ship takes damage (especially energetic damage like weapons fire) the EPS conduits can carry energy spikes all over the ship. That’s why as the ship takes damage you see random small explosions and sparks all over the place- something hits or spikes the EPS grid and the shockwave ends up, well, wherever in the grid it ends up.

  Of course many EPS conduits go to bridge terminals, especially as those terminals may have direct connections to the ship systems in question.

  ---

  Of course in reality this would be seen as a horrible safety risk, and a bridge terminal that could probably run on a car battery shouldn’t have explosive plasma running through it especially when it can explode and harm the operator. In fact one could argue a safe starship should keep all EPS stuff as far away from any essential human-inhabited areas of the ship as possible (especially the bridge).

  One counter to that might be that perhaps the consoles actually play some role in EPS switching, but that seems a bad tradeoff to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Florida restaurant chain says boosting pay and offering better benefits helped it end its labor shortage⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Came here to post just this. How fucking stupid are the people in charge of these places? That offering higher wages gets you more/better employees is such a revolutionary concept that not only has nobody else tried it, but when one does and realizes it works, it becomes a Business Insider article?

  You don’t have to be an MBA to understand supply and demand. If there is less supply of workers and more demand for workers the market price of work will rise. Did they think the labor market was a slave trade?

  I really genuinely do not understand how so many supposedly smart successful business people can be so stupid as to not understand such a simple concept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome to Clock 2.0, the new time and reminder experience from Microsoft! Powered by Bing AI and Microsoft OneDrive.

  • Sync your time zones, alarms, and reminders to all your devices via Microsoft OneDrive
  • Get suggested wake-up times powered by Bing AI and your calendar!
  • Use of Clock is governed by the Microsoft Cloud Connected Experiences Privacy Policy (click here to view).
  • Click I Agree to start your use of Microsoft Clock!

  and for all this, your alarm reminders become yet another datapoint for personalized ads, your phone alarm to wake you up then plays at full blast through the living room computer and wakes everybody else up, and you agreed to a 750kb privacy policy that displays in a 2"x3" window with 500 pages to scroll through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Look at permissions.

  • retrieve running apps (why does it need to know what else is running on my phone?)
  • View WiFi connections (allows accurate geolocation by retrieving available WiFi networks and comparing them against a database server side)
  • connect and disconnect from WiFi (why ever would this be needed to order food? might be part of the above geolocation system)
  • full network access (can access local area network, not necessary to just make HTTP(s) requests to a server
  • Read Google service configuration (hard to find info on this one but appears to grant access to some account IDs and perhaps the Google login ID)
  • Use accounts on the device (probably to see what accounts are available- more tracking

  Now look at the data safety thing:

  • Financial info may be shared with other companies for advertising or marketing
  • App activity may be shared with other companies for advertising or marketing
  • Device or other IDs may be shared with other companies for advertising or marketing

  Personally though I think you could argue the ‘data safety’ screen is fraudulent- it mentions nothing about collecting location information, so why does the app need location info? Even if they are just collecting which mcdonalds you are near, that’s collecting location info.

  ---

  Then you have the issue of the terms of service. As others have mentioned, if you agree to those terms, you waive your right to participate in any class action lawsuit against McDonalds. And even if you ignore this data collection issue, that right there should be a big reason to say HELL NO to this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just not worth going there unless I use the app and that’s only for when it’s got one person.

  You look at the privacy policy or app permissions for the McDonalds app? The thing is datamining your life.