sushibowl
@sushibowl@feddit.nl
- Comment on Makes more sense than the Imperial system 2 weeks ago:
The question what this area represents is left as an exercise to the reader.
what-if.xkcd.com/11/ is relevant.
- Comment on Meal prep 3 weeks ago:
That’s true, because you use a 110V based system you have less power available to the kettle. It’s still a lot faster than an electric stove though. Not faster than an induction stove, probably.
- Comment on Calculatable 1 month ago:
I think people exaggerate how bad QWERTY is. Studies have not consistently found an advantage for one keyboard layout over another, and some studies even show that typists can reach equivalent speeds even with randomised layouts. This suggests that experience and practice with a particular layout is far more important to typing speed than the particular placement of letters. Which is a good argument for keeping qwerty around.
(reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time),
This story is quite common but there is little evidence that it’s actually true. The designer of qwerty actually made a late adjustment to move R next to E (swapping it with period), even though ER is the second most common letter combination in English.
- Comment on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Disbanded After Critically Lauded Platformer Fails to Meet Expectations - Report 1 month ago:
How the mighty have fallen eh? Prince of Persia was a big franchise once upon a time.
- Comment on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Disbanded After Critically Lauded Platformer Fails to Meet Expectations - Report 1 month ago:
The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).
It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:
similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time
The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.
On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.
What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.
- Comment on Don't do it. 2 months ago:
Telling your tenants what they can and cannot do with their rented property should be some kind of violation of the right to quiet enjoyment of property.
This and the HOA shit is really weird to me. America is all like “we highly value our personal freedom and private property” but then HOA’s and landlords come in and want to tell you exactly what you have to do with your yard. What the hell?
- Comment on Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda and DLCs of all time 2 months ago:
Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.
- Comment on Men: What sequence do you fellow to dry your body off after showering or bathing? 2 months ago:
Why is it weird? It’s just your butt. Are you scared of your butt?
- Comment on Why do phone manufacturers use in-display fingerprint readers instead of fingerprint readers on the power button? 2 months ago:
It really depends on the sensor tech. The fingerprint reader in my pixel 7 pro is absolute dogshit. I’ve heard the pixel 9 line improves things though.
- Comment on Launches 3 months ago:
The problem is, you have so much speed that you keep missing.
- Comment on Launches 3 months ago:
So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.
This is true, but the possibility of gravity assists mostly nullifies the difference. If you can get out to Jupiter you can basically choose: either let it sling you out of the system, or let it cancel out all your orbital velocity so you fall into the sun.
- Comment on Launches 3 months ago:
These are all technically correct but fairly inconsequential. Even just to graze the sun you need to lose 90% of your orbital velocity. And although everything orbiting the sun will eventually fall in, the friction is really low. It will take billions of years to lose enough velocity to fall in.
- Comment on Thank you! 3 months ago:
I’m confused now, because espresso is also coffee? Like, it’s all made from coffee beans. I agree that Americano is espresso with water, but to me that is absolutely a kind of coffee.
- Comment on Thank you! 3 months ago:
I guess I’ve never really thought of “black” as a type of coffee. Where I live black usually just means you don’t want any milk in whatever type of coffee you ordered.
- Comment on Thank you! 3 months ago:
an Americano is not a black coffee.
It is however, coffee that is black,
Hold on now, I’m not getting this. What meaning could “black coffee” possibly have other than a coffee that is black?
- Comment on Thank you! 3 months ago:
So that’s hot water that went through pressed coffee powder.
The “pressed” doesn’t refer to the coffee powder but to the water: the water is pressed through the coffee grounds using high pressure (around 9 bars or so).
- Comment on Moss 3 months ago:
Sort of, yeah. Plant matter with lignins still partially decayed into peat. So it’s not exactly 50 million years of dead trees on top of each other. It’s more like layers and layers of peat, with still “fresh” trees at the top.
- Comment on Moss 3 months ago:
Note that although species can be described as tree-like, they didn’t quite look like modern trees do. Also, much of the world was swamp, and much of the dead plant material sank into these bogs and decayed into peat.
The amount of CO2 trapped during this period caused the atmosphere to be around 35% oxygen. This allowed life with inefficient respiratory systems to grow much bigger in size without suffocating, mainly insects. Think woodlice 6 feet long, spiders the size of dogs, millipedes as big as cars, and dragonflies as big as eagles.
- Comment on Moss 3 months ago:
Nowadays, trees absorb CO2 and produce oxygen, and when they die and rot the opposite happens, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
However, during the carboniferous period, when plants first developed the ability to produce lignin (i.e. wood, essentially) there was not yet any bacteria or fungus that could break this material down. The result is that when trees died they would kinda just lay there. For 50 million years, trees absorbed CO2 and then toppled over and piled on the ground and in water. Most of the world was swamp and rainforest. Millions of years of plant growth all dying and laying on top of each other
So much CO2 was turned into oxygen that O2 levels were 15% higher compared to today. This allowed some truly large lifeforms to develop: trees 150 feet tall, dragonflies with wings 13 inches long, millipedes the size of a car.
The trapping of so much CO2 led to a reverse greenhouse effect, cooling the planet, and eventually an ice age. The forest systems collapsed from the climate change (we think) killing about 10% of all life on earth. Eventually a species of fungus developed the ability to eat lignin, and cleaned up the dead trees that remained on the surface within a few generations. The millions of years of tree material that sank into the bogs eventually turned into coal.
Now we’re digging all that good stuff back up and are burning it, yay!
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 3 months ago:
Are you talking about Binas? All the homies love Binas.
- Comment on The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim | Official Trailer 3 months ago:
There’s legal issues. Embracer group owns the rights to make video games based on the lord of the rings and the hobbit, but the Silmarillion and unfinished tales of numenor is still owned by the Tolkien Estate, and they are pretty selective with it. The first age is basically off limits to everyone except Amazon prime right now.
- Comment on Dead Cells has its final update out now with The End is Near 3 months ago:
Is there any reliable source for this information? Or is it rumours only.
- Comment on What games popularized certain mechanics? 3 months ago:
It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.
- Comment on What games popularized certain mechanics? 3 months ago:
WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.
- Comment on Steam’s latest update to user reviews doesn’t find your “jokes, memes, ascii art and other content” as funny as you do 4 months ago:
Every website has been like that for a decade or more. But they are required to tell you now.
- Comment on Can't beat the classics 4 months ago:
At the time, it held the record of most cars destroyed for a film. That has since been eclipsed various times, mainly by films from the fast and furious franchise. But the current record holder is one of the transformers films.
- Comment on Balatro celebrates 2 million sales, will feature major gameplay update in 2025! 4 months ago:
This is basically correct but i would add sometimes it’s better to add chips than to add mult. For example, if your score is something like:
10 x 50 = 500
Adding +50 mult here would give you 10x100=1000 points. Adding +50 chips will give you 60x50=3000 points.
Adding to the lowest of the two numbers improves your score the most. Especially early game, mult is much lower than chips, so you want to improve mult. However once you have some good mult jokers improving chips becomes important. Especially in high card based decks, where you get very few chips from your hand.
If the multiplier jokers come in, the picture can change again. It makes adding mult more valuable because the addition will be multiplied.
- Comment on How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours 4 months ago:
If y’all’s voting system wasn’t so fucked up maybe you’d have more than two viable political parties, and maybe then the primary process wouldn’t be so important.
Here where I live the candidate list is generally selected completely by party insiders, but it doesn’t matter so much because I have a choice of 15+ viable parties in parliament to choose from.
- Comment on Every company should be owned by its employees 4 months ago:
this HN comment at the top illustrates the perspective:
worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit,
In other words, The market system as it currently exists maximizes profit over worker welfare, and that’s why these coops are not successful. That’s a fairly damning indictment of the market.
- Comment on Star Citizen is free for the next few days, please don't accidentally buy a $300 spaceship 5 months ago:
I feel like you’re giving them entirely too much credit here. The things in your list are in my opinion either not that outstanding, or they haven’t actually accomplished them yet:
-They’ve constantly been working on a budget that was only every a fraction of a budget for something like a AAA Star Wars game would get.
Already discussed in a comment below, but this is just demonstrably not true. Their development costs so far are the second highest of all time. Maybe there were some periods where money was tight, but that’s pretty irrelevant to me. More relevant is what they’ve delivered with all that money.
-A ton of the core mechanics had to be made from scratch, because the current industry standard would constrain the game
I’m not 100% sure what this even means. Like, It’s pretty common for games to make their own mechanics, if you’re not Ubisoft. This is not that special.
-They swapped over to using what is close to a brand new game engine.
Swapping engines sure is tough to do, but this is generally not a good sign. The only reasons to change engines partway through is either you’re in development so long that the engine is too outdated to deliver an acceptable game, or the scope of the game has changed so much the engine is no longer suitable. I don’t know which one applies here, but either way it’s just a ton of wasted work.
-They have steadily and slowly rolled out new core game mechanics
I mean, good I guess but that’s sort of the expected standard for early access? Not what I’d call outstanding
-They’re working on simulating an entire galaxy’s economy.
“Working on” is doing an awful lot of lifting in that sentence. So they haven’t actually accomplished this thing yet? Is the asteroid thing you’re describing already in the game? I’m also really sceptical of “an entire galaxy.” How big is the galaxy currently? A real life galaxy is 100 billion stars. They’re not going to have a 100 billion stars, right?
-You can download the game in its current state, and hop on see what they’ve created at any time.
Outstanding accomplishment. You can download and play the game, wow. I sure would hope so after all these years.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to shit on Star Citizen. If you paid money and you’re having fun playing it and feel you’re getting your money’s worth, who am I to object?
Where I do object is, fans of the game seemingly often evaluate the game based on the promises the development team makes, rather than what they have actually delivered. What the team promises is awesomely impressive. What the game currently offers is… not that.