Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 days ago:
If I remember it correctly, the Dodi repack just needs some audio library configured in the Wine instance via Winetricks as a built-in library.
If using Lutris, you need to enable logging for that game, then try and run it. After it fails to run, look at the log and near where it stops you’ll see it complain about failing to load a certain DLL (and after that lots of failing to load other DLLs as a consequence of failing to load that original DLL). Google the name of that DLL and you’ll find which library it is part of. From Lutris, run Wintricks for that game (it’s in a pull-down next to the “Start” button for the game) and under Winetricks “Libraries” add that library to that Wine instance as a built-in library (if that doesn’t work, download the DLL, put it in the game dir and try adding it as native).
If what you see in the logs is, instead of a “Couldn’t load DLL”, a “Couldn’t find function in DLL” what you have is not a missing library but instead a library version mismatch. Go to Winetricks an try to force the use of the native version of the library (sometimes the built-in version of a common DLL in Wine is the wrong version, and you need to force Wine to use the version of that DL that comes with the game, i.e. the “native” version).
If all that fails, Google that game’s name together with “Linux” to see if somebody else has figured it out.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 days ago:
At least from Lutris you can run your games (pirated our otherwise) genuinelly sandboxed with something like Bubblewrap or Firejail, which as far as I can tell you can’t do in Steam (unless you sandbox Steam itself, which is problematic if for example you want to deny networking to some games but not others).
IMHO, if you sandbox them it’s actually safer to run pirated versions of games in Linux than running the official versions from Steam with no sandboxing, at least for AAA since pretty much all those companies have done or do abusive shit.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 days ago:
I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now, and most of my games library was on GoG, though I also have a number of games on Steam.
Using Lutris for GoG games, in my experience the rate of “just runs out of the box” games (via Wine) is pretty much the same as for Steam (via Proton), both being somewhere around the 9 in 10.
The Steam App basically wrapps the whole Proton thing with automated configuration, including game-specific configuration scripts, and that’s the same as launchers like Lutris and Heroic doing with Wine, but if you’re trying to use Wine directly without such a launcher its like trying to run Steam games without Steam and just doing all the Proton configuration (both general and game-specific) yourself - the old way of running games in Linux from a decade ago with was a complete total PITA.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 days ago:
It’s funny you say that.
I started pirating games again when the official version of The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, but a pirated version (which I got just to check if I could get it to work) ran just fine.
Once I figured out how to run that version of the game in Linux (as well as how to sandbox it with Firejail), that knowledge meant I could just as easilly run other pirated versions of games.
Now, generally I’m the ultimated patient gamer (notice how all of that was for The Sims 3, which is from 2009, with its latest DLC being from 2013), but in my Redbeard persona I can just as easilly get recent AAA games as I can any other (probably more easilly, even, as those are the game torrents with the most users).
So I’ve downloaded a number of those, and installed a couple.
And you know what: even the supposedly best ones are BORING. Even highly regarded large open world ones, with their beautifully crafted supposedly alive worlds feel shallow and formulaic in terms of game play and don’t really hold my attention for all that long. I literally have 4 or 5 downloaded recent AAA games waiting to be tried, which I simply can’t be arsed to install because everytime I do try one it just turns out to be dissapointing and I find myself going back to Indie games I’ve played again and again like Project Zomboid or The Lone Dark, or even really old AAA games like The Sims 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all bought and paid for, BTW).
Even when the only costs are my time and storage space, modern AAA games aren’t worth it over Indie games of older AAA games with far less dazzling graphics.
As I refuse to pirate Indie games, by now I’ve pretty much given up on piracy simply because all the games I’m willing to pirate are kinda shit.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 days ago:
I went back to sailing the high seas for games when The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, whilst a pirate version run just fine.
Pirating in Linux is actually much more complicated than running the game from Steam, or from other stores via something like Lutris, because for official versions of a game there are usually scripts doing all the necessary Wine/Proton configuration, but not for the pirate versions of a game, so if it fails to run directly you have to enable logging, dig through the logs yourself and figure out which libraries need to be configured with Winetricks, which is how gaming in Linux used to work 5 years ago (and why very few people did it).
- Comment on Cause and Effect 6 days ago:
IMHO, understanding the Scientific Method and, maybe more importantly, why it is as it is (so, understanding things like Confirmation Bias, including that we ourselves have it without noticing it, which skews our perception, recollection and conclusions as well as Logical Falacies) is what makes the most difference in how we mentally handle data, information and even offered knowledge from the outside.
Even subtle but common Propaganda techniques used in the modern age are a lot more obvious once one is aware of one’s one natural biases and how these techniques act on and via those biases, purposefully avoiding logic.
Personally I feel that that’s the part of my training in Science (which I never finished, since I changed the degree I was taking from Physics to EE half way) is what makes me a bit more robust (though not immune: none of us are, IMHO) to Propaganda.
- Comment on Samsung phones embedded with 'unremovable' Israeli spyware 2 weeks ago:
Even a smallish LiPo battery will give you some time. The question is how little becomes too little.
And on the other size you can always give it more battery: after all the original mobile phones were the size of a briefcase.
Ultimatelly how bad it is to go with a Raspberry Pi depends on how much more it with the software it has consumes than what a custom circuit designed for saving power using software configured for that (for example, not running needless services). Further, how much would, say, the extra power used in an HDMI connection over other more lower level protocols of talking to a display really matter next to the power consumption of the display itself or the GSM module which tend to be big power users?
I know for sure that if you design a custom board with a basic STM32 microprocessor and add a 2G GSM module to it, most of the consumption ends up being the 2G module anyway, so you could probably get away with just using some hobbyist board with it instead of designing your own with just what you need and a proper Voltage Converter. However I haven’t really tried doing a battery powered smartphone with an ARM SBC so I don’t really know for sure.
- Comment on Samsung phones embedded with 'unremovable' Israeli spyware 2 weeks ago:
Mobile telephony support just comes as a module, so that’s actually the easy part.
The harder parts are to make the whole thing consume a low enough amount of power that you can keep it running from a non-monster-sized battery, and I suspect that an RPi 5 board isn’t very good for that (hobbyist development boards tend to not have been designed to avoid wasting power, even when the underlying microcontroller/processors is actually decent at it), and integrating an OS with support for a touch interface, especially if you want to avoid Android.
I mean, it’s not too hard to make a brick sized dumb phone and even have it be a mobile phone powered by AA batteries, but if you want a mobile smartphone, it gets more complex.
Unless you have the time and skills to take up the challenge you would probably be better of getting something like a Volla phone with Ubuntu Touch or a Pine phone.
- Comment on How many hands long do they get? 2 weeks ago:
Only if it’s something really old and they can put it in a museum.
- Comment on GOG shares their thoughts on preservation in the face of payment processor crackdowns 3 weeks ago:
Here in Europe, GOG support pretty much all the local payment systems (they’ll make available as selection the ones for your country on checkout) most of which are pretty straightforward to use nowadays an even come integrated with the banking phone apps.
Personally I switched from Paypal to one of those on my GOG purchases due to the whole censorship debacle.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 weeks ago:
Live by the sword …
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
Well, in my experience it’s the immigrants themselves doing it and never the locals.
Further, even in a poorer European country like Portugal I’ve never heard say, Germans or French calling themselves “expats” even though those are much more wealthy nations - it’s pretty much only Brits and Americans living there who speak of themselves as “expats”.
- Comment on Foolproof advice 4 weeks ago:
The stinkier the cheese, the more the fascination!
- Comment on Foolproof advice 4 weeks ago:
… not forgetting to add a term of endearement, such as “sweetie”, “honey” or “babe”.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
In my experience people will use “immigrant” to talk about were they’re from by referring their nationality (i.e. “I’m a Portuguese immigrant”) or explicitly adding a “from” and then using the country name (i.e. “I’m an immigrant from Portugal”).
If talking about where they’re an immigrant in, they will explicitly use “in” (i.e. “I’m an immigrant in The Netherlands”).
Even though “emmigrant” is about where you were born and aren’t living in anymore and “immigrant” is about were you went to, in my experience emmigrant is only ever used when physically in one’s country of original and talking about living elsewhere (i.e. when in Portugal I would say “I’m an emigrant” whilst when in The Netherlands I would say “I’m an immigrant”).
It’s funny since as I’m writting this I remembered that when I first left my country of birth to go live abroad it actually took me a while to figure out the proper usage of the whole immigrant/emmigrant thing.
As I said, I was an immigrant in The Netherlands and worked often with other immigrants from all over there (mainly because until I learned Dutch I could only work in English-speaking environments and in my area - software engineering - those attracted immigrants), and most people would use “immigrant” when talking about were they came from (i.e. “I’m a French immigrant”) and I only ever heard expat used instead of immigrant by people from Anglo-Saxon nations, overwhelmingly Brits and Americans.
That said, “expat” was used as a single word combining both “immigrant” and “emigrant” - in other words, unlike with the immigrant/emmigrant pair, the single word expat is valid both when one is physically on one’s country of origin and when one is physically in one’s host country: when I lived in Britain I did hear Britons saying that they were “expats” and meaning it as “living elsewhere than Britain”.
And yeah, 2nd generation don’t call themselves expats, but they also don’t call themselves immigrants. It’s only people from outside talking in general about people who are the direct descendants of immigrants in a country who will use “2nd generation immigrants” for the groups as a whole. Calling somebody who is a national of that country and has immigrant parents “an immigrant” in that country is only ever used as an insult by Far-Right extremists.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
From my own experience as an immigrant in The Netherlands, “expat” is generally used by Americans and Brits and nobody else. I mean, I’ve seen on or two Ozzies using it but it’s way rarer with them and I’ve never seen, for example, other Europeans immigrants there refereing to themselves as “expats”.
I think “expat” is more a thing of people who thing they come from a “great country”, as if somehow it’s a priviledge for the other country to have them there.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
From my observation when living in The Netherlands as an immigrant (from Portugal) sometimes working in companies with lots of foreigners, most of us said of ourselves as being “immigrants”, except Americans and Brits who often said they were “expats”.
Curiously, generally the other people from different nations, including the Dutch, would use immigrant rather than expat when refering to the status of the self-proclaimed “expats” in that country - “expat” was very much their label for themselves.
The Americans and Brits were there in average for just a long as the rest.
I don’t think it’s really length of stay, at least not directly, I think it’s about the immigrant believing or not that their country of origin is a “greater country” than the country they’re living in. You can see this for example in places like Spain where British retirees have retired to and live the rest of their lives in their own Little Britain communities calling themselves “expats”.
This also matched to how some of the British immigrants most pissed of about their homeland (for example, a gay guy who had to move to The Netherlands to marry his partner, as back then that was not allowed in Britain) made a point of using “immigrant” for themselves instead of “expat”.
It’s about national delusions of grandeur, IMHO.
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 4 weeks ago:
There are two ways to deal with one’s position in the Social Ladder: one can either concentrate one’s efforts in climbing up or one can concentrate one’s efforts into keeping the ones below down.
IMHO, the US used to have mainly the former, but not anymore, whilst the UK (at least by the time I got there, in the 00s) has mostly the latter (and judging by this traditional idea that “people should know their place”, it has been so for a long time).
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 4 weeks ago:
I keenly remember this Polish immigrant in Britain interviewed on TV who was in favor of Brexit very overtly so than no more people came.
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 4 weeks ago:
More broadly, it’s all Tribalism.
You’ll see it at many levels, not only towards the “outsiders” in nation terms (and examples are not only the anti-immigrant discourse but also in the discourse mainly blaming a country’s problems on some “foreign power” or other, in both cases as insiders didn’t have vastly more power than such outsiders) but also at various other tribal levels (race, political party, region, city and even town in so-called “small town” environments).
The human tendency from Tribalism will turn even otherwise “good people” (but not very competent when it comes to introspection or having a strong keen sense of what is Just) into mindless “us vs them” drones who are easy to manipulate into blaming outsiders for the outcomes of the actions of insiders.
- Comment on Everyone wants a turn 5 weeks ago:
Free Wheely!
- Comment on Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts 1 month ago:
Steal the cake from the public.
Slice it up and sell the slices to the fatcats at discounted prices.
Throw a few crumbs towards members of the public and claim that “now everybody can own it”.
It’s been the neoliberal strategy for privatizing public assets since the very start.
- Comment on Well that didn't work out as planned 1 month ago:
Interestingly as an European I didn’t even thought about school buses when I read the shitpost and instead a regular public transport bus was what popped into my mind.
- Comment on Well that didn't work out as planned 1 month ago:
Public Transportation is no joke!
- Comment on NANDalf! 1 month ago:
That’s a NAND gate (back is flat like the AND, front has the little ball on the output to indicate it’s negated). The back of the OR/NOR is curvy.
AND is “Only both shall pass” hence NAND is “No more than one one shall pass” (which are the other logical options).
As other pointed out what you’re describing is the negation of a XOR (which is “no more and no less than one shall pass”), i.e. NXOR.
OR would be “One or both shall pass” hence NOR would be “None shall pass”.
- Comment on So Long to Tech's Dream Job: It’s the shut up and grind era, tech workers said, as Apple, Google, Meta and other giants age into large bureaucracies. 1 month ago:
Even the “facilities” they offered before were meant for achieving one objective whilst claiming to have a different purpose, like Google’s “relax areas” which the techies never had time to use and whose purpose was actually to attract candidates by projecting the idea that Google was a relaxed work environment (rather than the neverending death march of it has been for more than a decade) or their free shuttles to work so that people actually worked during their commute without that being counted as work time which were sold as being to help Google employees with their commute.
I was in Tech back in the 90s bubble and already back then things like the Aeron chairs, office get togethers and pizza parties were just hypocrite ploys to get people to work long hours for free and to make their office the center of their social life so that they would be less likely to move jobs.
Companies expecting you to put in 50, 60, 80+ hours a week, don’t actually care about you or your well being and all their non-monetary “benefits” should be examined with a skeptical eye and the assumption that they’ll gain from it in some way until proven otherwise: it’s not always selfish and sometimes one’s direct manager genuinelly wants people on the team to feel good: a good way to spot it is how reacted if you say “not interested, I’ll just take that as time off instead” - if they’re ok with it, then it’s genuine good will, if they try and pressure you or refuse the time off part the whole thing was meant to serve objectives other than what’s good for team members - but anything coming down from HR or upper management is going to be some kind of ploy to directly or indirectly benefit the company.
- Comment on Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed? 1 month ago:
It’s not even “news” - a lot of that shit is just Clown-President does yet another thing that a Clown would do.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.
Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,
If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.
As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.