Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I would personally love it if apps would allow images on posts that have been flagged to appear blurred prior to admin review, or just to have a blur applied to all images unless you hover over it/hold your finger on the image.

I know I saw one vulgar troll post that I could’ve lived life without ever seeing.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Saber interactive is based in Florida … So I can see the confusion (😉) but no, they’re not Russians

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saber_Interactive

It originally did employ some Russian artists though it seems/wouldn’t be shocking if there was still a relationship there.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

It does list Saber Belarus, Saber St. Petersburg, and Stuntworks even in the English page. There are plenty of non-Russian subsidiary studios.

You’re right in the sense they do have some presence there though I guess. I’m not sure what the extent of operation of those offices would be at this point given sanctions.

I can definitely understand not wanting to take any chances with supporting Russia since you said you’re from Ukraine.

That said, might be a bit more correct to call them a Russian supporting company vs a Russian company going forward.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I hope they get Linux servers going first … or at least continue to improve their wine support. The idle server usage is still unacceptably high

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

It’s really one of the better options in terms of compromise.

Server side is always the best, but server side is hard for a lot of situations…

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I kind of enjoy this take lol

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

There may be some Russian employees. The founders were using Russian artists at least in the early days per Wikipedia (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saber_Interactive).

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Yes!!! I’m so excited to see Andrew Gower finally is going to be launching his secret big game on this new engine he built!

I have a feeling this is going to be a really cool game!

For those that don’t know, Andrew Gower sold his shares in Jagex back in ~2010 and started a research company. That research company was to come up with a new game engine and accompanying programming language to make it easy to build multiplayer games. They released a smaller game and up until this point we knew there was a big game coming built on this tech but it was only speculation what that would actually be.

It looks like he did what I was hoping he would and made a nearly direct competitor with his previous work, RuneScape. It will be very interesting to see how this affects RuneScape and how this game itself plays.

EDIT: So excited I made a community !brightershores

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

they’ve done a fair bit to divest them selves from china at this point. If

As a Chinese company, that’s impossible. That’s kind of like saying Mojang has done a lot to distance itself from Microsoft. Microsoft at the end of the day calls the shots whenever it suits Microsoft to do so.

I suspect the main reason so many establishment politicians are terrified of it is because of how it suggest content.

That’s the biggest issue for sure. It’s the recommendation algorithm. You can use all the data you use for marketing based on feeds that people have followed to algorithmically create a sort of psychological profile.

Once you have that, you have a weapon because you can spoon feed an active user through radicalizing content. YouTube did it accidentally for years (though this has largely been fixed from what I’ve seen recently).

The CCP could do it intentionally and as they have the final say over anything and everything that happens at ByteDance, that’s a huge risk. We don’t need the millions of TikTok users being subject to an information psychological warfare operation.

They don’t care too much about the data, though that might be useful to them as well. I think that’s why they went along with protect Texas. They can still get the data out into China if they really want some of it. However, their main goal is influence and a direct line of communication to a large number of Americans.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I find it interesting that you’re implying the CCP is better than the US. You’re implying you’re a TikTok user. You’re also implying that the US government is somehow censoring Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc to suppress information and TikTok is the lone bastion of free information.

The last time I heard someone talking about something being the lone bastion of free information, they were talking about Fox News. A network that directly interacted with them and spoon-fed them right wing talking points.

So you’re assuming you haven’t been affected just like the Fox News supporting folks I’ve struggled with for years. However, you’re out here advocating on China’s behalf… Because let’s face it, it’s not an anti-TikTok bill, it’s an anti-CCP bill. The ownership and control of TikTok and control over its recommendation algorithm are the central issue.

We’ve already accidentally had US tech companies create radicalization algorithms called social media algorithms, YouTube as an example. There’s been a lot of work done to stop YouTube from promoting right wing radicalization content. What exactly is stopping TikTok from intentionally implementing a recommendation algorithm that both benefits the CCP and targets the most vulnerable to its influence campaigns?

It is 100% possible to look at folks viewing habits, find content creators that have messaging that benefits you, then test that content and observe the response. If they don’t take the bait and engage back off. If they do take the bait, turn the knob a little more, slowly add more politicized content. If they’re following a farming content creator that’s a US liberal… Maybe see if they’ll follow a leftist… Maybe see if they’ll follow a pro-CCP leftist… etc. then promote the content in their subscriptions that more closely aliens with your goals.

You don’t even need to have your message be the one that wins to have a win. You literally just have to create arguments and division. You can promote both arguments at the same time. You’ll get some additional mind share and you’ll get more people arguing on your platform and other platforms … no press is bad press after all.

investopedia.com/…/why-facebook-banned-china.aspen.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitteren.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube

It’s almost like the CCP understands the threat of algorithmically spoon-fed promoted propaganda.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Most of that storage is just in assets, it’s not really about the limits of the hardware.

Nintendo has just stuck with simplistic textures and models. Don’t get me wrong they use it in a way that’s very artistic and looks better than some high budget photo realistic games out there.

It’s just… It’s not some great innovation on Nintendo’s part, it’s just an art style choice.

When compare Mario to call of duty or battlefield… The polygon difference, the texture quantity and variety, the water rendering, the particle effects, the model variety, cinematic cutscenes, the dozen skins for the same thing that are more than just recolors, the variety of sounds, etc it’s all just so so so much more.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Remember how the politicians pander to Americans by blaming rich people for all of life’s problems and saying they’ll make them pay their fair share

That’s a minority of US politicians and you know it. Not to mention it’s a minority of a minority of those politicians that get elected.

We got exactly what we voted for and that’s the truly maddening thing.

Part of that is definitely manipulation of representation (i.e. gerrymandering) but not all of it.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

UK knife crime per capita is lower than that of US knife crime and US has gun crime on top of that.

Depends who you ask and comparisons like these are almost definitely flawed by how different countries do reporting.

e.g. this site says the UK has slightly more knife deaths than the US wisevoter.com/…/stabbing-deaths-by-country/#unite…

Then you’ve also got to consider differences in treatment. Are there more stabbings but less deaths because they’re treated better in the US? Conversely, maybe the problem is even worse in the UK but because of their health care system they’re treated better resulting in fewer deaths.

Then we also need to consider repeat offenders and rehabilitation. Is the knife crime higher in the UK but repeat offenders are lower because of treatment?

There is no evidence that overall rates stay the same if gun violence gets reduced, but there is evidence that reductions in gun crime also reduce other types of violence.

Anyways, point being, this is the exact kind of statement that requires pointing out correlation does not equate to causation. In fact, this could be further evidence that guns are not the problem.

As for your source… These are the primary conclusions of the authors (direct quote):

In a comprehensive review of firearm-control legislation worldwide, we identified a range of studies examining the as- sociation between firearm-related laws and firearm deaths. Three general observations emerge from this analysis:

1. The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multi- ple elements of firearms regulations reduced firearm-related deaths in certain countries; 2) some specific restrictions on purchase, access, and use of firearms are associated with re- ductions in firearm deaths; 3) challenges in ecological design and the execution of studies limit the confidence in study findings and the conclusions that can be derived from them.

I didn’t read the whole thing but … If you’ve got a specific page, paragraph, etc on the whole correlation thing, I’d be willing to hear you out.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

They released a new one … It’s good but it’s also still not great. Like Lego could easily have a really cool Mario Kart competitor if they put the effort into it that Nintendo does … but they don’t.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Oh god yes, I played the crap out of that as a kid … Maybe an early inspiration to become a programmer in ways lol

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I think if you look back at the old Mario Karts and look at the success Lego has had with their Lego movies … Lego could come out swinging with a pretty cool cart racer if they really put the effort into it.

Lego Indiana Jones as an example could be an updated spin on/foundation for the dinosaur isle.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

IANAL but I really doubt it would make a difference to have that on every comment, on a profile, etc.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Yeah, I think they would’ve been better off waiting a little longer. I picked up Enshrouded, which is quite good … this also looks like it could be quite good, but I’m not eager to jump on it so soon after Enshrouded.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

This is a misleading headline. It mandates that Tiktok be sold if it’s to continue operating in the US.

Which honestly I support. It’ll probably just be sold. Even if it’s not, the CCP should not have a direct pipeline to feed US citizens whatever they want (even if they’re allegedly “not using it for that”).

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Props for not claiming it anyways

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Maybe if they ever bother to implement a Linux client and start investing in Linux gaming like Valve has.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It may work great, but that store has given me significantly less for my money than Valve has.

For me the investment in a top tier Linux experience is worth the risk of maybe someday (if there’s even DRM in the steam version of these very old games – probably not) I won’t be able to play something I purchased. Which is also true of GOG unless you’re downloading and backing up every game you’ve bought from them.

I don’t tend to play my older video games much at all anyways, so yeah for me the store experience is way more significant than “does this game have DRM?”

Now when it comes to music (ideally movies and shows would also fall into this category but that’s not happening anytime soon)… I agree with you 100% DRM free is very important to me there but that’s a completely different beast.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

social.packetloss.gg/comment/1390533

See my other reply

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I mean more power to you. I’m not out here to defend Valve. I’m here to say “giving GoG isn’t giving me the return on investment giving Valve money is.”

Linux gaming and a stable Linux desktop is my #1 priority. Valve has put a lot of effort and money into making that happen. They also do have (as I said) DRM free stuff in their system.

I don’t backup my games because most of my games are multiplayer games that (for me) are play for a while then (fairly) throw away. My favorites right now are Hunt Showdown and Last Epoch (if the servers shut down I’m out of luck).

You started this conversation with “buy them on GOG” (market for a large company … CD Projekt Red … yourself) and I’m saying, “no thanks, if they did these things I’d consider it”.

“Good for you, not for me.” applies here.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

…wikipedia.org/…/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Unit…

Tell me, which states have ranked choice voting and which states are run by the “bad people”?

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Literally, it would do nothing. The supreme court will decide what it decides… They don’t need to be elected.

What does matter is voting in November and getting people to vote for Biden again rather than some third party nutter that won’t even come close to 10% of the vote.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Capital One provides OAuth for (budget) apps to access at least.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

It’s definitely been a problem for CSGO, RuneScape, and Destiny devs in the past to name a few

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I think we do have a problem with too many people in prison. I think private prisons are bad. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you have to work for free while in prison … and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you get paid next to nothing for that work.

Only 2/3 of prisoners work and 80% of that prison labor is basically “keep the prison running” aclu.org/…/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcer…

I think it’s fair to say outside of the private prison world, everyone would rather these folks never went to prison and they were earning a good living with a normal job and paying taxes.

USA literally ran coups in the global south to keep access to cheap labor down there, and now that China is becoming “troublesome” the US is right back to exploiting cheap labor from South America.

This and everything you say about foreign exploitation, I more or less agree with.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I blame Sundar… Wayyy too many duplicated projects (e.g. Allo) and projects terminated too early (e.g., Stadia) under him.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

All true. The monetization wasn’t even that bad, it was more so the marketing. Lots of people didn’t know about Stadia or were against it because of the bad launch they had.

I think the service would’ve done far better had Google made some guarantees like “all your purchases will be refunded if we shutdown in the next 10 years” and then ran a new ad campaign for it.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

ZeroTier is also an option in the same vein as TailScale.

You will share your IP with something like TailScale or ZeroTier.

Reverse proxies can be good but with gaming … there’s only so much you can do because of the custom protocols. Most of that stuff isn’t going to care about the DNS. You’re also introducing additional latency if you use a VPS as a “middle man.”

I think you need to consider who you’re going to be giving access to and what threats you’re trying to protect against.

My advice would be to set up ZeroTier on all the machines that are going to play together and set it up so it only allows connections between clients and the server (there’s a guide for this in their documentation). Then give the gaming machine a ZeroTier IP you put in your DNS.

Most games use different ports so there really isn’t a need for lots of DNS names. However, you could assign multiple ZeroTier IPs to the same machine and give each game server its own DNS and its own IP.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

From what I’ve heard this is necessary. They went too far originally and it ended up with a fair bit of open drug use in public spaces the police couldn’t do anything about.

At least that’s what some lemmy person claiming to be from Oregon once told me.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

And that’s a major over simplification. Biden isn’t God he can’t snap his fingers and make Israel do what he wants, certainly not without putting the alliance between the US and Israel at risk … and it’s getting to be a dangerous time in the world when having friends is important.

Just today they announced the US would be air dropping aid to Gaza. It’s not like nothing is being done. I’d like more to be done, but yeah I’m voting for him either way because the alternative is Trump. I’m not going to pretend I’m not voting for him and the many other things he’s done and his policy objectives that I like because of the actions of another country that he’s supporting… Matching decades of US policy precedent.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

legion.org/…/why-america-cares-about-israel’s-sec…

What you’re proposing would be a pretty radical shake up in the US approach to the middle east. The equivalent of telling all our current friends to fuck off and the people we’ve been saying fuck off to, hey do you want to be friends and let us place this critical military infrastructure in your country?

Some might even call it insane, because who is going to go for that?

Israel depends on the US but the US also depends on Israel. This isn’t a free lunch they’ve been given and they know it. They’ve also got the equivalent of Trump as their prime minister currently and I really don’t think he cares about any of that anymore than you do.

His country was attacked and his policy is scorched earth. He’s not going to stop if the US stops sending help. His “iron dome” will fall though and then he’s going to just throw everything he’s got at eliminating Palestine.

The only thing more dangerous than an angry nation is an angry nation with nothing to lose and a vendetta.

I don’t like any of this. However, for fuck sake Joe Biden is not out there in a cheerleading outfit yelling “go Israel, murder innocent civilians.” Things are rarely so simple as “just (don’t) do X.” Hell, that’s half the problem with Trump, he’ll just say shit like “well let’s just nuke the hurricane.” We end up with two problems a nuclear bomb and a hurricane.

If the Israel prime minister was anyone but Netanyahu things might be different.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Jokes on you if you wrote the timeoff system

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Did you report that to the lutris devs? That sounds like a very fixable problem that should indeed be fixed.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

To be fair it’s always a crapshoot whether the person at Walmart or BestBuy or wherever really knows their stuff or just has a personal bias.

Sounds like you’re doing good by folks but for a lot of people you’re going to have an uphill credibility battle mostly because they don’t know you.

I’m a professional software engineer that has done all sorts of things involving computers over the years … I’ll always hear people out and some do have some genuinely great advice/say things I would’ve said if somebody asked me (and almost definitely aren’t getting paid what they’re worth by these places). Others are just kinda blowing smoke … and I fear for the customers that listen to them lol.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Big oof…

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

See my (imo unjustly down voted comments social.packetloss.gg/comment/1352608)

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

😬 if you say so lol

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

You can write functions… A static function is not particularly different from a free function written in a namespace. You can even use a static import to allow yourself to call it without qualification.

______ProviderBuilderProvider

No idea what this is in reference to. I have a feeling your issue is more with the frameworks you’ve worked with than Java itself.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I’d give it a few more years before announcing the death of all other languages in favor of Rust.

Everything is tradeoffs and Rust is still quite new compared to Java, C++, or Python (all languages that continue to evolve). Stack overflow didn’t exist to run popularity contests when they were getting off the ground.

The new big thing always becomes a bit … too big and gets applied to areas it really doesn’t help with.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Sounds like you’re working with some bad libraries and writing some bad code IMO.

Java 8 was released over a decade ago. Lambdas in Java are in great shape. Java’s streaming API makes heavy use of them.

Builders should not be used all that much, certainly not in place of default arguments.

The correct way to write that is simply:

<span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">void </span><span style="color:#323232;">doSomething() {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">int</span><span style="color:#323232;"> howManyTimes </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">= </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">10</span><span style="color:#323232;">;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    doSomething(howManyTimes);
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">void </span><span style="color:#323232;">doSomething(</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">int</span><span style="color:#323232;"> howManyTimes) {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">//something
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

Is it more lines that a default argument? Sure. It’s not that bad though. It also resolves some ABI complexity issues that come into play with default arguments. If you use default arguments in C++ anything calling that code needs to be rebuilt if the default argument is updated. In Java because it’s part of the definition of the function not the call site the default is updated by replacing the library. I don’t know how C# handles this, perhaps they create the overload implicitly. It’s not a problem for JavaScript or Python because they’re interpreted.

Bonus points, you can use an interface to provide a default overload like that even if you’re dealing with something that’s abstract.

I’m also mildly concerned by how you’re using JavaScript like function declarations in your examples with C# like naming scheme to demonstrate why Java is bad.

As your own link the builder pattern is an alternative to the factory pattern. Neither of which Java or any other language requires you to use. Note there is not a single “Builder” in the entire sublinks Java codebase.

Late edit: Also going to add in rust-unofficial.github.io/…/builder.html

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

the Java language encourages it

It really doesn’t. Perhaps your teachers and workplace do out of some dated design ideals though.

Like everything else it was a fad and it’s got its time and place.

Yes it is. You’re adding and entire new function block for every single optional parameter. Add three more optional params and you’ve got a page of text to express a single line in other languages.

See my (late) edit (sorry things jump into my head sometimes … and forum software is inferior to chat software in adding that in a sensible way) about what the unobvious consequences of default arguments can be in some languages. Also, do you really write default arguments that often?

If you’re writing functions with tons of arguments that are all defaulted that should also be a red flag there’s probably a refactor that needs done to bundle that data.

Granted, the indirection that can cause in a language without value types (like Java) can be a burden in some very performance critical situations … but those are few and far between in practice.

Lmao, I’m mildly concerned that you don’t understand the concept of pseudo code.

Touche.

That’s awesome, it will be the first Java project I’ve encountered where that’s the case.

There are plenty of them out there… Maybe your code base too if you can figure out why you’re using so many of them. There’s really nothing profoundly unique about Java that predisposes it to needing large numbers of builders.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

I’ve written about my delima with buying a BEV (beyond the price) a bit already … here’s a link to that social.packetloss.gg/comment/1334210

Basically, I do think either the battery technology or the charging infrastructure themselves need a fair bit of improvement before we’ll see the average person adopting them enthusiastically.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

My thought is we could feed electrolysis with nuclear, solar, or tidal generation plants to create hydrogen. That doesn’t mean it would be cheap, but maybe it could get us to the quick refill infrastructure we have with gasoline currently that we’re having trouble mirroring with BEVs for long trips.

I haven’t run the math … so if you have or you know a source that has and this is beyond uneconomically feasible (like it would cost $$$$$ for a single “tank of gas hydrogen”), fair enough.

Dark_Arc , 5 months ago

Did they rake their forests? /s