AnyOldName3

@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder that you do not own digital games⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depending on the era of the game, you might well own a copy of a game on a disk, just like you own a copy of a book when you buy a book. Weaselling out of first-sale-doctrine stuff came a long time after people started buying video games. A century ago, publishers were trying exactly the same thing with books, and depending on the country, either legislation was introduced that made it explicitly illegal, or the courts determined that putting a licence agreement in a book just meant that the customer got a copy of a licence agreement with their book, not that they were bound by its terms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You have my consent to kill me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well is your writing your way of expressing how you felt when you found out your uncle was Welsh? That’s the real key to Lovecraft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Existential dread⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess this is slightly less disturbing than the previous approach to cyborg cockroaches where their antennae were snipped and enamelled wire was inserted into the stubs to directly stimulate their nerves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is lemm.we actually shutting down?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t necessarily want to just ask for volunteers as that’s a great way to summon exactly the kind of people you don’t want to put in charge of online communities. The best way is usually to notice people who are already part of the community and consistently make positive contributions, then ask for their help. If none of those people want to, though, you’re stuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm a bit freaked out⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ducks are omnivores. When they stick their heads underwater, they’re trying to catch prey like small fish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm a bit freaked out⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ducks and chickens aren’t the same animal. They’re both birds, but plenty of birds eat other birds from other species.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, I’m not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think for something like this, you’d rent cloud servers as you’d expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it’s actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The Olympics have allowed trans women to compete against cis women since the 90s, and yet there’s never been a trans medalist. If there was a genuine advantage to being trans in sport, at least one country in the past three decades would have loaded their team with trans women and cleaned house. However, taking enough hormones to make a masculine body into a feminine one after it’s already grown means you’ve got way less testosterone than a cis woman, so that counters out any initial advantage. Claiming otherwise is misinformation. Spreading misinformation to the detriment of trans people is transphobic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oblivion Remastered troubleshooting⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone else said, installing things outside of Program Files is generally only necessary if they were made for XP or older, and the developers didn’t test on Vista or newer or read the bit of the Windows documentation that said not to write to an application’s installation directory because it might not work on future versions that was there since the early nineties. Regular Oblivion works fine in Program Files (although it makes it more of a pain to mod) and the Remaster was obviously made post-Vista.

  All that said, none of this is relevant because you’ve got the Windows App version, which uses a completely different system and works in a partial sandbox so doesn’t interact with the rest of the computer like a traditional program would.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meow >:)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d need to test every cell in the embryo to be sure none of them had off-target mutations, and DNA sequencing doesn’t leave the cell alive, so you can’t prove it worked without killing the embryo. He tested some of the cells and discarded embryos where those cells were damaged, but there’s no way to know if the untested cells in the embryos were fine, and given what we know about the reliability, it’s more likely that there are problems than not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meow >:)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The linked Wikipedia article says only their fathers were HIV-positive, and typically that wouldn’t lead to a parent infecting their child unless they decided to share needles etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meow >:)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He was found guilty of medical malpractice after gene editing babies by treating their embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. He claims that he was trying to make them resistant to HIV, and that medical ethics are preventing cures from being discovered, but his critics say that we know CRISPR is too unreliable to use on a genome the size of a human’s, and is more likely to introduce dangerous mutations than apply the intended change, hence why no one else has done this before.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could you grind up a loaf of bread back into a flour and make a new loaf of bread?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It’s a massive improvement, but it’s not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What TV show were you highly excited for, but ended up quickly disappointing you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Outside the show, it’s not even known whether Spartan IIs have skin below the neck, let alone genitals. Things from Halo are just shoehorned into an unrelated story, which is thought by some to have started out as an adaptation of Mass Effect. Commander Shepherd definitely has skin and genitals in the games, and isn’t afraid to use them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the worst actor miscasts in TV?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Other people took the role for short periods of the first season due to the whole premise of the show being body switching, and they were all competent at being Takeshi Kovach. If the second season had been as competently executed as the first season, the recast wouldn’t have been a problem (but probably wouldn’t have chosen Mackie unless it turned out the problem really was just the director making him act badly).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Least extreme biophysics phd⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it’s stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who’s been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren’t much use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not so much a loophole as they’d reasonably have expected mods that chopped up voice lines to make new sentences, and mods have been doing that for Bethesda games for years, sometimes with surprisingly effective results, but that’s obviously super time-consuming and not as good as someone just reading aloud, let alone actually acting. Generative AI can suddenly chop up voice lines to make newer ones way faster with next to no effort, and give comparable quality to the original voice actor reading lines aloud, even though it can’t do the acting part.

  It’s no skin off Bethesda’s nose if people use generative AI to voice modded dialogue, but it could be a problem for the voice actors. Wes Johnson’s done voice work for mods before, so mods aren’t operating in a completely separate space to the voice actors who worked on the games. From a quick search, it doesn’t seem like he charged for any of the work he did for mods (one was specifically for a charity fundraiser), but it wouldn’t be immoral of him, or any other voice actor, to take paid commissions for mod dialogue. That’s not as viable if generative AI can compete.

  Anyway, none of this is really relevant to OpenMW specifically - sound files are game content, and we don’t deal with game content

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You have made a mistake and in doing so summoned an OpenMW developer to this thread. Lua is not an acronym, it’s Portuguese for moon, so should not be written in ALL CAPS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fringe example where it’s legally okay as the Construction Set EULA that you have to agree to to use the original engine’s modding tools grants you the right to make derivative works of the game’s assets (including the sound files) provided it’s only to make mods for Morrowind (and some other restrictions, e.g. not charging any money). For nearly any other game, no one’s granted you that right, so it’s not legal, but any other kind of modding that requires you to make things based off the game’s original files and distribute them wouldn’t be legal either.

  Morally, it’s dicey as a modern voice actor contract would either have a clause about being unable to use the recordings to train voice synthesis, or charge more for the privilege, so the voice actors for Morrowind signed a right away that they didn’t intend to because their agents failed to realise it was something they could do or predict that it would ever become relevant. No one tricked anyone, but it’s not what would have been agreed to if everyone involved was clairvoyant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Entropy? Never heard of it.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developers: "Yes, the users love cluttered homes, just put everything there and ignore guidelines"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything’s Unix. You’ll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that’s the one that’s ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There’s no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re connected to an RCD, as modern UK wiring has all sockets connected via an overall RCD in the fusebox, but the switches on the socket are just basic on/off switches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All modern wiring in the UK has every socket in the building connected via RCD (the more common name for GFCI outside America), but they’re usually in the main fusebox/consumer unit rather than individually per socket. These are just normal on/off switches for the convenience of being able to turn things on and off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are already slats so the only hole you can get a fork into is the earth, unless you’ve already got something convincingly shaped like an earth pin in the earth hole to open the slats over the live and neutral. If you’re going to that much effort to zap yourself, the switch isn’t going to be much of a hurdle.

  I’d suspect that it’s largely because it’s more convenient to have a switch than to unplug things and plug them back in again, especially as our plugs are a nightmare to step on to the point that Americans complaining about stepping on lego seems comical to anyone who’s stepped on lego and a plug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you do Onlyfans if needed the money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of the inactive accounts will be people who signed up and started, but made no or too little money, so abandoned the idea. They’re still worth counting when working out how likely a new person will be to make money. Other inactive accounts will be bots or catfish where there was never any intention to make money the way people expect the site to be used, so you can still discount a lot of them, but it’s not all of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon's strict mom⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What better time for prank signs than right after a real flood?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon's strict mom⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Printing off those signs and sticking them in the showers is a common student prank, so I wouldn’t assume they were real.