frezik
@frezik@midwest.social
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 3 days ago:
Zelda 64 on the Switch was a mess at release, but the emulator has improved greatly since then.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
I think I’m anarchist in terms of personality, but I’m not quite there politically. Like you, I’m not quite sure how to get there from here. If we do things like mutual aid and support unions, I don’t think we’ll go wrong, and that could end up leading to anarchism at some point in the future.
Where I’m anarchist in personality is that I fundamentally don’t understand why you would want to be an authoritarian. When I first read 1984 and there’s the bit from O’Brien about how the system is there for power as an end to itself, I didn’t understand why anybody would want that. I can kinda see power as a way of gaining a comfortable life for yourself–usually at the expense of others–but not as its own end. I still don’t understand it, but have come to accept that there are people like that.
Some of those people are draped in thin blue line flags, and some of those people are draped in a hammer and sickle.
- Comment on Are there any games like Starfield? 6 days ago:
Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
- Comment on Photons 1 week ago:
The science on this is relatively recent, but it turns out there is a photomolecular effect on evaporating water that can’t be explained with heat.
news.mit.edu/…/how-light-can-vaporize-water-witho….
Not quite sure how this would affect melting ice cream. It does fill in some missing pieces to climate models. There are more clouds around than the models predict, which raises the planet’s albedo.
- Comment on rarted 1 week ago:
It’s common for autistic people to be called “retarted”, and that’s probably what this is.
Fuck Musk, but this is a thing that happened and still does.
- Comment on JeSUS 1 week ago:
You probably grew up brushing your teeth with modern toothpaste, and had fluoride in the water.
This isn’t universally true, even today, in the United States. So says the diner in Indianapolis I went to where almost all the staff were missing teeth.
- Comment on JeSUS 1 week ago:
There’s nothing that points to Mary Magdalene being a prostitute. She’s conflated with another character who was, but they aren’t directly connected.
- Comment on JeSUS 1 week ago:
By my very fundamentalist upbringing, this was all supposedly a metaphor for God’s love of the nation of Israel. Which is exactly the sort of “reading between the lines” that they said you weren’t supposed to do.
It’s not that complicated. Solomon was horny, someone a long time ago decided his hornyness should be canon, and now biblical literalists have to deal with it and don’t know how.
no missing teeth (lol)
Harder than you think without modern dental care.
- Comment on A job well done 1 week ago:
Let’s cut him some slack. He was arguing against a physics system that thought heavier things sank because they have more earth element in them.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
It’s generally one piece of software, a browser extension, that works for all. Even mobile apps are often just webpages with extra steps, so the code base is the same.
The underlying storage must be encrypted the same way on each.
Yes, there are still potentially issues. I’ll come back to what I said at the start: passwords are a bad system in general, all methods for handling them are flawed, but password managers have the fewest flaws.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
Quite a few. Data dumps of passwords from sites can be from sites that used full hashing. If you used a fully random password of at least 20 characters, even unsalted md5 storage would be unbreakable.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
What an idiotic argument, the level of entropy comes from the rules first and foremost, putting a 1 and an A together is the exact same entropy as using 2 and B.
Oh dear, no. You cannot match a cryptographic (P)RNG for generating passwords. Not even close.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
Yeah, that’s going to be a terrible system. The human brain isn’t capable of keeping track of enough entropy to create a secure password system.
More generally, it’s a big red flag when anybody thinks they can make a better system than publicly available and verified systems. You’re not capable of that, I’m not capable of that, Bruce Schneier is not capable of that. No matter how smart you are, you missed something. That’s why I didn’t need to know a single detail.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces RTX 50's Graphic Card Blackwell Series: RTX 5090 ($1999), RTX 5080 ($999), RTX 5070 Ti ($749), RTX 5070 ($549) 1 week ago:
Nvidia claims the 5070 will give 4090 performance. That’s a huge generation uplift if it’s true. Of course, we’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks to confirm that.
The best ray tracing games I’ve seen are applying it to older games, like Quake II or Minecraft.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces RTX 50's Graphic Card Blackwell Series: RTX 5090 ($1999), RTX 5080 ($999), RTX 5070 Ti ($749), RTX 5070 ($549) 1 week ago:
Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
My personal system has guaranteed no vulnerabilities
If you think that’s true, then you don’t have the experience to make a secure system.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
Passwords suck as an authentication system in general. Your own system is probably worse than what password managers do. Yes, there are problems, but so does every other solution to this, and password managers win out in the comparison.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
Bcrypt/Scrypt have a 72 byte limit. Developers can get around that by putting it through a regular hash first, but that’s not common.
- Comment on Please create a non-secure password. 1 week ago:
State actors don’t generally need to break passwords. They ask the company “nicely” and they get what they want. The exception would be if that password is being used to encrypt data.
- Comment on Caption this. 1 week ago:
Bill Nye graciously accepts the Power Bottom Lifetime Achievement award.
- Comment on Time to make your decesion 1 week ago:
Presumably, she won’t “just got engaged” for more than a week. Or she has a very interesting personal life, I dunno.
- Comment on Return to monke 2 weeks ago:
I’m not even sure who the “return to monke” bros are at this point. It’s so covered in layers of satire by basically every political grouping that the original is lost.
- Comment on Pointless existence 3 weeks ago:
It’s way more complicated than that. Can depend on the sect, or even the individual. There’s a lot of Buddhist stereotypes that persist from how westerners first reported back about Buddhists to other westerners.
- Comment on Frostpunk creators cancel "Project 8" and lay off staff amid concerns that "narrative-driven, story-rich games" don't sell 4 weeks ago:
I haven’t played it, but based on everything I’ve read about it, that alone puts the headline to shame.
- Comment on I predict that this post will get approximately 01000011100101100000000000000000 4 weeks ago:
Have had too many debates with senior programmers who don’t understand why multiplying by 0.1 doesn’t work.
“It works in <favorite language>, why doesn’t it work in <not favorite language>?”
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 4 weeks ago:
Stop digging. That’s completely beside the point.
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 4 weeks ago:
Looking up the size of coins compared to shotgun gauges, I’m guessing the tale was dimes rather than nickles. Dimes would fit in a 12 gauge just fine. A half penny would need a 6 gauge, and a full penny would need a 10 gauge. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think 6 or 10 gauges were ever popular shotgun sizes.
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 4 weeks ago:
Please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself. Yes, you can jam all that stuff in a shotgun shell and make a crude anti-drone shot.
No, it’s not going to be an MQ-1 Predator (which is bigger than many WWII fighter planes), but nobody said that, either. Most of the drones in Ukraine are the size of a DJI Phantom.
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 4 weeks ago:
There’s an old story that cowboys would load nickles. It ends up being something like $1.25 in nickles, which would be enough to spend the evening with several prostitutes at the time. So probably no unless they were in a real pinch.
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 4 weeks ago:
She forgot the One Drop rule of racism.