Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest! 23 hours ago:
Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…
- Comment on This world is cruel… 2 days ago:
Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is really just about it being correlated to a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments.
- Comment on PS5 Pro is struggling to improve some games, despite its power advantage 2 days ago:
They’ll paint flames on the side to make it go faster.
- Comment on They must not be tired 6 days ago:
They’re running around looking for the thiefs.
- Comment on Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end 1 week ago:
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on.
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as often does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players are beyond that self driven to just explore just because liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
- Comment on Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end 1 week ago:
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
- Comment on Withdrawal is going to make people go mad 1 week ago:
Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.
- Comment on Am I the only one who does this? 1 week ago:
Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggest whilst agreeing with the objectives.
It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.
There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it or in disagreement with it but to try and help improve that idea even further.
- Comment on Monster 1 week ago:
One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and that being a monster wasn’t even his choice.
Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.
- Comment on Premium Ads 1 week ago:
Maybe they’re premium ads because the advertisers pay extra for access to a pool of self-selected suckers.
- Comment on The most powerful brain on Twitter 2 weeks ago:
Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.
One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.
- Comment on Yep, it's me 3 weeks ago:
Little kid: “Why is there a bright ball of light in the sky?” Me (thinking): “Oh, shit…”
- Comment on Why Do LED Bulbs fail? An Autopsy! - The Doubtful Technician 3 weeks ago:
Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.
Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.
As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the one with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters).
- Comment on Why Do LED Bulbs fail? An Autopsy! - The Doubtful Technician 3 weeks ago:
Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000 of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there are also some maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness after manufacturing).
The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate.
So you might try choosing the ones with CE marks.
- Comment on Since when does a clock need a privacy policy? 3 weeks ago:
If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.
A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).
- Comment on Since when does a clock need a privacy policy? 3 weeks ago:
That’s because it’s not a clock, it’s a private information stealing app disguised as a clock.
- Comment on I can't figure out if this is a baby, or a cat 3 weeks ago:
In all fairness, he never had any in choice in your relationship.
- Comment on Be happy if you woke up today and your throat didn’t hurt. 3 weeks ago:
I’ve lived in a couple of cities in Europe and I can tell you my nose was runny far more often in a poluted place like London (UK) than it is in the small city I live in now in Portugal or the places I lived in when in The Netherlands.
I suspect that the tendency to catch colds and suffer from alergies is often coupled with all the Sulfur Oxide gases around in cities with lots of car polution which turn into various sulfur oxiacids when those gases mix with water in the nose and airways.
- Comment on Cognitive Biases 4 weeks ago:
That’s a good point.
Ever since I’ve became more aware of those I’ve found myself doing similar kind of “disarming” of such falacies when I notice I’m using them.
My point it’s that it generally feels like swimming against the current.
- Comment on Cognitive Biases 4 weeks ago:
I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.
It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy).
Personally I try to “balance” this by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investin days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.
- Comment on Cognitive Biases 4 weeks ago:
What’s interesting is how, even when knowing these biases, one has a tendency to often have and display at least some of them.
(At least, that’s the case for me)
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
Any process unless specifically adjusted to compensate for it (and the adjustment itself is a distortion of it and has secondary effects) will be affected by the environment it is working in.
So specifically for Capitalism and the practice of Science under it, funding and the societal pressure on everybody including scientists to have more money - as wealth is a status symbol in that environment - are he main pathways via which Capitalism influences the practice of Science.
It’s incredibly Reductionist and even anti-Scientific to start from the axiom that environment does not at all influence the way Science is practiced (hence Capitalism is unrelated to Science) and then just make an entire argument on top of such a deeply flawed assumption
- Comment on Get good. 4 weeks ago:
You had a cardboard box?!
Luxury!
When I was young …
- Comment on Get good. 4 weeks ago:
You’re supposed to use baby talk with them from about 15 years old and until they’re 18, to really piss them off.
- Comment on Can someone give me an overview on the Jill Stein situation? 4 weeks ago:
Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.
(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)
This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.
Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.
- Comment on Birmingham Travel Guide 4 weeks ago:
White vans, no less.
- Comment on Birmingham Travel Guide 4 weeks ago:
The style of architecture (notice the roof shingles, chimney shape, the dark red brick low wall between the street and the pump court and the iron fence in the middle of the road that goes by the pump - the photo was taken from the other side of the road), the kind of cars there, the weather and even the guy working with a reflective vest (all the way to the right of the picture) all suggest UK.
In fact even without the title the whole thing looks very UK (as opposed to other places in Europe, though I wouldn’t be as sure).
I lived in Britain and this picture immediatelly said “familiar” and “UK” as soon as I saw it. What’s funny is that to write this post I had to try and understand what elements made it so familiar.
- Comment on Anon questions physics 5 weeks ago:
Clearly most of the development went into highly detailed graphics so some compromises had to be made on simulation rules and gameplay.
- Comment on Anon questions physics 5 weeks ago:
Hence why there’s “boiling” and there’s “evaporating” - two things that aren’t the same hence two different words.
- Comment on Bing translate got it spot on 5 weeks ago:
I all fairness, such the short sentence “Person X with a fan in France” could just a easily be meant either way. Probabilistically I wouldn’t be surprise the that the fan that blows is more likely that the person fan simply because most people don’t really have legions of human fans they take pictures with, but once in a while some of them might in fact be in a picture were there is a fan of the blowing kind.
It’s only the picture and us recognizing Lana Del Rey as a celebrity that lets us know it’s one kind of fan rather than the other kind.