Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Copyright if elements of the game such as 3D models, images and code have been copied.

  Trademark if the name of the game is used (i.e. “Stardew Valley Romance Sims”).

  Patents for game mechanics.

  As a side note, personally I think that game mechanics shouldn’t be at all patentable

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Makes sense⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, grad school and academia drove him to madness. Makes sense.

  Further, that explains the Nutty Professor stereotype.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Accused of 'Secret Data Collection' in Single-Player Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In Lutris there’s a “Command prefix” configuration option both per-game and in the global config with the dfeauot for all games which is where the firejail command line goes (basically sandbox with firejail you’re supposed to run “firejail firejail-options original-command original-options” and putting firejail and its options in “command prefix” does that).

  Note that there are other sandboxing options that run in the same way as firejail but I found firejail to have more straightforward options.

  Also note that this won’t sandboxes the actual setup of a game, only the running of the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Accused of 'Secret Data Collection' in Single-Player Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I run all my games in Linux and everything but Steam goes via Lutris which I configured to, by default, launch them inside a Firejail sandbox with no network access (plus a bunch of other security related limitations) something which I can override for specific games if needed.

  It’s interesting that Steam games are actually the least secure to run in Linux and with a configuration as I have it’s literally safer to run pirated shit downloaded from the Internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m curious about that too.

  My life experience includes environments (Physics at University level) with a significant number of exceptionally intelligent people and in my observation they weren’t any more “flawed” than everybody else, just with different quirks than most people.

  Granted “smart and perceived as intelligent” isn’t actually the same as high IQ, but I’ve also worked in environments with lots of people like that (Investment banking) and again they weren’t any more “flawed” than everybody else and just had different kinds of quirks than most people.

  One think I did notice was that more intelligent people tend to have more “compensation layers” over their disfunctions than less intelligent people.

  That said, all this is my opinion from my own life experience, so just as unsupported as the previous poster’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also one might be aware of the problem but not actually understand the underlying causes.

  One can be a bloody genious and still be unable to self-rationalize one’s way out of certain negative behaviours because they’re driven by things at an emotional level (fear, pleasure, habit, need for approval, low self-esteem and so on), because they became entrenched as behavioural patterns when one was too young to understand any of it (as a child or teenager - it’s not by chance that a lot of Psychology “blames” one’s parents) and because without the distancing that comes from looking at it from the outside with no interest in seeing certain things rather than others (nobody wants to see elements of one’s personality as negative) it’s extremelly hard to spot certain things which for an observant trained outsider are very obvious.

  Also I totally agree that one shouldn’t be going into it wanting the therapist to like you: people who worry about the impression they make on the therapist are likely not being fully open and honest about themselves to him or her, which kinda defeats the point of going to theraphy (if one was 100% perfect and all qualities, why go to theraphy).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨34% of the US population doesn't vote. Why do polticalitcians cling to the idea that these voters can't be reached?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From my own impression as a member of a small political party in my own country who joined not out of tribalism but simply because they seemed to mostly want the same things as I do, party members live in a bubble of people who are heavilly into politics and understand the importance of politics, whilst the leadership specifically in addition to this are also mostly surrounded by generally unquestioningly hero worship from the common party members plus they tend to have quite limited life experience outside the party as they’ve joined it as young adults (maybe when they were at university and involved in student movements) and it and its internal environment have always been a large part of their lives.

  Those people usually see the supporters of their political adversaries in the same way as fans of a sports club see fans of other clubs, and don’t really “get” the point of view of people who don’t vote at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Beware⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Beware of shape-shifting murderous alien” would’ve required a bigger board, so it’s cheaper to put it like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that in the database space MS-SQL was never the best option at any level or at least not for long.

  Oracle could be said to still be the best amongst databases for high performance and very large datasets, but in my experience in the smaller and mid-sized databases space things like Postegres and even No-SQL databases surprassed MS-SQL already back in the late 90s, early 00s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Apache Web Server

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hope she found herself⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Curious how the name of the person we’re calling for is the same as my name”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hope she found herself⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When it comes to finding oneself, the journey matters more than the destination…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know.

  The whole thing sounds like it will lead into fights amongst true book clubs because the members of each will think theirs is the true book, not the other ones, and the fights might even be worse between the true book clubs that were originally the same. I all sounds kinda dangerous.

  Plus, how would I know if the book of your true book club is in fact the one and only true book if there are other true book clubs which like you book also claim to have the one and only true book and its a different book?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you use your blinker in a car?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First thing: the blinkers are for your own safety, but they’re also for other people’s safety and to help improve the flow of traffic (for example, if somebody waiting at a T-junction to go into your lane sees in a timely fashion that you’re going to exit at the junction, they’ll know earlier they can come in rather than have to wait to see what you actually do and this kind of thing times many such situations adds up to better traffic flow).

  Second thing: it’s a lot easier and cognitively simpler to just do it without thinking rather considering the situation to see if you should do it or not and a good mental trigger point to train that as an instinctive movement on is “if I’m going to turn out of my lane, I’ll turn the blinker on for the side I’m turning to” - so, turning of that road -> blinker on that side; changing lane -> blinker on the side I’m moving to; going to stop and park on a side of the road -> blinker on that side.

  Personally I just use the blinkers for all such situations and don’t even have to think about it, and as for my first point, that just informs how early I do it (I’ve trained myself to do it quite a bit before I turn). This does mean that at times I’ll use the blinkers when there is nobody else around to actually use that information, simply because I’m not actually thinking about “should I do it or should I not?” I’m just unthinkingly executing a trained impulse. Never had any problems with excessive wear and tear of blinker lights and since I don’t need to think about it I can focus on more important things, so as I see it even end at the cost of at times using the blinkers for nobody to see whether is really no point, I’m still better of having trained myself to do it like this.

  That said blinker usage amongst drivers massively depends on the country and the general driving culture there. For example were I come from, Portugal, most people only use the blinkers in situations were they stand to gain from it themselves (for example when exiting a road to the left, crossing a lane, were others might give you way, out of good manners if they know your intentions), then of the rest most will use it for the safety of other cars but almost none will do it for the safety of pedestrians, whilst in The Netherlands (were I picked up my current habits on this) they’re generally pretty thorough on using blinkers in all situations they should quite independently of seeing or not people who might use that information (possibly because of all the bicycles around, as they’re often hard to spot using the mirrors when in certain positions relative to a car which are exactly the positions were knowing that the car wants to turn is important for the safety of the cyclist)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you guys have a new true book per week or is it more of a true book a month club?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  God works in mysterious ways…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Elves, trolls, orcs, dwarves, ents and hobbits are real! It says so on the holy book: The Lord Of The Rings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?

  I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember when she fucked up the economy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also lets not forget how the changes in press-ownership legislation during her time set the way for the growth of the Far-Right which has already delivered Brexit and will quite likely keep on regularly delivering problems to the UK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember when she fucked up the economy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure there were also wonderful moments later on when people had a chance to pissed on her grave.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in Portugal, and it’s definitely not.

  I mean, people are clearly more selfish behind a wheel than they are in person (a lot of Portuguese “good manners” is really just social shame, which isn’t there when people feel anonymous, so many become a lot less polite when inside a car), but everybody just moves over when an ambulance comes and for example you’re more likely to be given way to turn off the road across the other lane, than not.

  You do see some asshole shit (for example, cars trying to scare pedestrians into waiting for the car to pass before entering a zebra crossing), but generally it’s a minority (which the notable exception of people not using direction indicators to help others, only themselves, which is a majority) rather than the majority.

  In my experience Spain is pretty similar.

  From own experience in Latin America it wasn’t much worse, though it was only in Peru and I wasn’t long in Lima to get a good feeling for their big-city driving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At about 10 seconds on the video you can actually see a guy getting out of the way of the ambulance to let it through, though he was not doing it preemptively.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a non-native English speaker, ages ago I moved to The Netherlands (were they also use “ja” for “yes”) and once I learned Dutch and got used to speak it as much or more than English, I noticed a definite tendency on my English for my “yes” to come out quite “ja”-like (sorta like an “yeah” with a pretty much silent “e”), though granted not as strong as that guy.

  Maybe this is some kind of broader linguistic tendency (non-native English speakers used to a “yes” in a different language that’s pretty close to one of the English words for “yes” - in this case “yeah” - just doing the lazy thing of using the other language word or a softened version of it because English-speakers get it) rather than a German-specific thing.

  I would be curious to hear from Dutch people and people from Scandinavia (if I’m not mistaken most if not all those languages use a “ja” for “yes”) if they tend to do that or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How to give it a go:

  • Get a 256GB SSD and install it on your computer alongside the existing drives.
  • Install a gaming-oriented Linux distro such as Pop!OS, Bazzite, SteamOS or similar, on that drive (don’t let it touch any other drive - those things generally have an install mode were you just tell it “install in this drive” which will ignore all other drives)
  • Unless your machine is 10 years old or older, during boot you can press a key (generally F8) and the BIOS will pop-up a boot menu that lets you choose which OS you want start booting (do it again at a later date if you want to change it back). If your machine is old you might actually have to go into the BIOS and change the boot EFI (or if even older, boot drive) there.
  • Use launchers such as Steam and a Lutris since they come with per-game install scripts that make sure Proton/Wine is properly configured, so that for most game you don’t have to do any tweaking at all for them to run - it’s just install and launch.
  • If it all works fine and you’re satisfied with it, get a bigger SSD and install it alongside the rest. Make one big partition in it and mount you home directory there (at this point you will have to go down to the CLI to copy over your home directory). You’ll need this drive because of all the space you’ll be using for games (both Steam and Lutris will put them under your home directory) especially modern ones.

  As long as you give a dedicated drive to Linux and (if on an old machine before EFI) do not let it install a boot sector anywhere else but that drive, the risk exposure is limited to having spent 20 or 30 bucks on a 256GB SSD and then it turns out Linux is still not good enough for you.

  When NOT to do it:

  • If you don’t know what a BIOS is or that you can press a key to get into it.
  • If you don’t know how to install a new drive on your machine (or even what kind of drive format it takes) and don’t have somebody who can do it for you.
  • If you don’t actually have the free slot for the new drive (for example, notebooks generally only have 2 slots, sometimes only 1).
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux one my main several times since the 90s (yeah, at one point I used Slackware).

  Then I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I’m a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn’t want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).

  Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux (and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted).

  So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:

  • Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I’m using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
  • In general even though I’ve done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I’m just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn’t have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
  • As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn’t get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don’t do multiplayer games anymore, I haven’t had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
  • Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don’t in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no “phone home” for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).

  I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven’t booted into it for many months now.

  Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.

  If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn’t go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs so if each gets their own drive then they don’t even see each other and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.

  For the 20 or 30 bucks it’s worth the try and if you’re comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The country were I was living when I rented videos didn’t have Blockbuster, so 1.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virgin Physicists⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For starters resistance changes with temperature.

  Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn’t change with temperature.

  The joke here isn’t even specifically about resistances and electronics, it’s that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you’re doing things whole in the mathematical world you don’t have to account for, and that’s a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that’s one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

  (In a way, it’s really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

  See also the “assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid” kind of joke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calm your tits⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: “It’s not the dog that barks which bites”

  I’d say it applies here, and I ain’t talking about the corgies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump supporter Rick Fuze was arrested in CA for using a stun gun on peaceful protesters outside a Tesla dealership. The woman kicking this guy’s ass is a retired professor with 16,000 citations.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Worry not: soon the American authorities will treat the former pretty much the same as the latter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

  Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

  Modern MBA business practices just uses the asy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it the I can’t be blamed for it”.

  Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.