Ferk

Ferk , 5 months ago

And please, get all countries to actually start properly accepting ISO 8601 format for dates as a mandatory universal standard...

Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1179/

Ferk , 5 months ago

I think it was Mandrake Linux for me.
It no longer exists though. ...I guess I'm old.

Ferk , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

someone painting him as a morally righteous

The first thing @seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM said was: "Assange is a bit of a scumbag" ...

The closest thing to "righteousness" said was: "his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others."

Which, being true, it's absolutely not challenged or contradicted by anything you said in response.

Note that "freedom of information" is totally compatible with "picking and choosing" the manner in which you exercise that freedom. In fact, I'd argue that the freedom of "picking and choosing" what's published without external pressure is fundamentally what the freedom of press is about.

Assagne (like any other journalist) should have the freedom of "picking and choosing" what facts he wants to expose, as long as they are not fabrications. If they are shown to be intentionally fabricated then that's when things would be different... but if he's just informing, a mouthpiece, even if the information is filtered based on an editorial, then that's just journalism. That's a freedom that should be protected, instead of attacking him because he's publishing (or not publishing) this or that.

Ferk , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Flatpak still depends on runtimes though, I have a few different runtimes I had to install just because of one or two flatpaks that required them (like for example I have both the gnome and kde flatpak runtimes, despite not running either of those desktop environments)... and they can depend on specific versions of runtimes too! I remember one time flatpak recommended me to uninstall one flatpak program I had because it depended on a deprecated runtime that was no longer supported.

Also, some flatpaks can depend on another flatpak, like how for Godot they are preparing a "parent" flatpak (I don't remember the terminology) that godot games can depend on in order to reduce redundancies when having multiple godot games installed.

Because of those things, you are still likely to require a flatpak remote configured and an internet connection when you install a flatpak. It's not really a fully self contained thing.

Appimages are more self contained.. but even those might make assumptions on what libraries the system might have, which makes them not as universal as they might seem. That or the file needs to be really big, unnecessarily so. Usually, a combination or compromise between both problems, at the discretion of the dev doing the packaging.

The advantage with Nix is that it's more efficient with the users space (because it makes sure you don't get the exact same version of a library installed twice), while making it impossible to have a dependency conflict regardless of how old or new is what you wanna install (which is something the package manager from your typical distro can't do).

Ferk , 7 months ago

The nice thing about Nix/Guix is that each version of a library only needs to be installed once and it wont really be "bundled" with the app itself. So it would be a lot easier to hunt down the packages that are depending on a bad library.

Ferk , 7 months ago

Huh? as far as I know it has its own libraries and dependency system. What do you mean?

Ferk , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

The packager always should "explicitly require" what are the dependencies in a Nix package... it's not like it's a choice, if there are missing dependencies then that'd be a bug.

If the package is not declaring its dependencies properly then it might not run properly in NixOS, since there are no "system libraries" in that OS other than the ones that were installed from Nix packages.

And one of its advantages over AppImages is that instead of bundling everything together causing redundancies and inefficient use of resources, you actually have shared libraries with Nix (not the system ones, but Nix dependencies). If you have multiple AppImages that bundle the same libraries you can end up having the exact same version of the library installed multiple times (or loaded in memory, when running). Appimages do not scale, you would be wasting a lot of resources if you were to make heavy use of them, whereas with Nix you can run an entire OS built with Nix packages.

Ferk , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Were the earlier series not focused on shared values to more or less a similar extent too?
Kirk has usually been given the reputation of being a rule-breaker, often ignoring Starfleet rules when they are in conflict with his values. Even off-camera (in DS9 I think) they attribute him 17 temporal violations, and I think he has been accused of violating the prime directive multiple times.

Ferk , 7 months ago

But C syntax clearly hints to int *p being the expected format.

Otherwise you would only need to do int* p, q to declare two pointers... however doing that only declares p as pointer. You are actually required to type * in front of each variable name intended to hold a pointer in the declaration: int *p, *q;

Ferk , 8 months ago

At least it's just a "considering"...

I remember back when they scrapped the multiplayer promises they made for Cyberpunk 2077 there was also word about them preparing some separate standalone multiplayer game for the future instead. To me this "considering" is more of an indication that the new game won't be multiplayer focused (if it has multiplayer at all), rather than a promise of anything.

Ferk , 8 months ago

And that was just the warm up.
850k concurrent players and rising right now...

Ferk , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Yes... how is "reducing exclamation marks" a good thing when you do it by adding a ' (not to be confused with , ´,‘or’` ..which are all different characters).

Does this rely on the assumption that everyone uses a US QWERTY keyboard where ! happens to be slightly more inconvenient than typing '?

Ferk , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.

Ferk , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I'm not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I'm sure it's much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped.. but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I'm not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I'm convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing "yet another one" in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics... but I don't believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I'd argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy...

Ferk , 8 months ago

Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn't be the first game that relies on the "unreliable narrator" trope.

Ferk , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Apparently, this article is talking about the "Legacy CS:GO Version" that was available (even after the CS2 launch) for devices that were unable to run CS2. It seems that was less than 1% of CS:GO players, so they are ending support for it, even though they claim it should still be available with reduced compatibility.

I think anyone can switch to this version in the "Beta" tab of the properties window for CS2 by selecting "csgo_legacy".

What is the legacy version of CS:GO?

The legacy version of CS:GO is a frozen build of CS:GO. It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking.

What will happen after the end of support for the legacy version of CS:GO?

After January 1, 2024 the game will still be available, but certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail.

Ferk , 10 months ago

be nice

What niceness level exactly?
The most nice I can be in my system is -20.. but being too nice to one process leaves others with less time and resources in their life.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Yes.. honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie.. make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.

Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.

It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape... to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term "deathmatch" was coined by the Doom game mode.

The code relies in transmitting the user actions, similar to how the "demo" format in Doom (and Quake) works.

However, there's no interpolation in Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that "tic" (1/35 of a second), so the experience might be slow for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.

But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn't even have an internet connection at that time, personally.

Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.

Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn't exist.

If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say.. in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it'd starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop... a game can be competitive and be PvE.

Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating a "score".. and almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.

I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it's because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P

Ferk , 11 months ago

Personally, while I appreciate when people add a "snippet of explanation", I do prefer that to be in the comments.

Making it part of the submission can feel like editorializing.

This kind of approach encourages people to repost the same content multiple times just so they can post a different view on it in the "text snippet". And I think the comment section is a more suitable place for that, personally.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

If they can't replicate something that's in meat which gives it a particular smell and/or flavor expected in meat, then they can't replicate meat.
But we are talking about a sci-fi universe with replication technology that, supposedly, makes exact copies even at the molecular level.
So why would they not be able to?

Ferk , 11 months ago

I think it's also safe to presume that in the ultra future tech advanced society of Star Trek, they can remove the bacteria that causes body odor in humans.

A lot of odor-causing bacteria are actually beneficial for us though. And what causes Vulcans to experience that "odor" might not be coming from bacteria to begin with.. for all we know it might be one of the thousand of compounds that leak into the air we exhale directly from our lungs.

Virtually every gas or volatile liquid is susceptible to cause odor. The only reason we interpret pure water as odorless/tasteless is because water is everywhere so our senses evolved in a way that it doesn't trigger a response. There are many other compounds we don't really perceive because we are used to them at the concentrations that exist in our breath.

If let's say an alien species is not used to having 78% Nitrogen in their atmosphere, and they happen to have receptors sensible enough, then being in a ship with breathable air similar to Earth might just make them puke in disgust after having a sniff of what we might consider "clean air".

I'd argue it'd make more sense for everyone to wear the equivalent of a high tech mask (supressants?) rather than having to re-engineer the biology of the species every time they encounter an alien that might have a different set of compounds they might find unpleasant.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Also, I'd argue the wikilinks (internal links) using [[any term here]] from Wikipedia, that optionally allow automatically inferring the link, is much more comfortable (and less error-prone) for the usecase of a wiki system, than the [text required](/link_here_also_required_even_when_redundant) from markdown.

I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension to do something similar, but it seems not.

Ferk , 11 months ago

Me neither? That's why I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension.

I have done it in the past with mardown-it-wikilinks npm package, for example.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

How would you define "Linux distro" though?

Most definitions I've seen would make things like Chrome OS or even Android qualify as distros, so they wouldn't really be wrong, even if they might not be a very "traditional" form of it.

Maybe Stallman wasn't wrong to prefer the term "GNU/Linux" after all?

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Deck Verified Games

▸ verified: 3,886

For contrast, currently the number of PS4 games in existence is around 3,325.
Sure, it does not reach yet the 4,527 from the Switch. But it's a matter of time... specially given that ProtonDB seems to be close to a 8,106 and Valve has still a huge (and ever growing) amount of games left to put a rating to.

Ferk , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Thing is... video games don't really "need" actors. At least not in the same level as they need writers.
Sure, some games might want to add realistic expressions and maybe even voice acting, but it's not something really required for most forms of video game entertainment. Even story-heavy games do perfectly fine with just good writing. In fact, for RPG universes meant to be extensible / moddable, it makes a lot more sense to not be restricted by how many lines of dialogue can the game afford to voice. Morrowind has a lot more dialog options than Oblivion and extensibility / flexibility in how the users interact with NPCs, despite Oblivion having superior AI and a lot more budget.

In fact, a lot of the videogames that do make use of voice acting, only do so for one (or at most, a few) languages... meaning that there's always some subset of players that don't really understand anything the voices say and still enjoy the game. They might as well be speaking autogenerated gibberish, like Animal Crossing characters do.

Add to that how nowadays 3D animators have a good dataset of information to tap into for creating convincing expressions, plus how AI can be very good at generating decent voice lines... and it gets even harder for a walkout like this to have any success. At least when it comes to the video game market.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Honestly, I think that's a good thing, the current one is plenty of powerful for what it is. Specially considering it's a portable device where power consumption and thermals are key.
If anything, it's the games the ones that should try and adapt to more humble hardware. These days it makes no sense to increase so much the requirements for such marginal graphical difference.

A new Steam Controller on the other hand, to match the deck controls, is something that is missing.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Yes, the way his hand is positioned, it would not have worked if they had wanted to make it hold the wooden stick. They'd have needed to edit the hand too much and it would have likely been noticeable / even weirder.

Probably they decided: f*ck it, let them grab it however they want. Maybe it'll even become a thing.

And it looks like it worked, since we are talking about it and spreading the ad. Smart advertising, imho.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Other-phobic

Honestly, the "cosmic horror" or the mere fear of the unknown kind of plays into that as well.

One could argue there's something inherently racist in sci-fi horror that depicts aliens as monsters when in fact they might just simply be different intelligent lifeforms with their own set of needs...

There might be sometimes problems among intelligent lifeforms to properly understand / communicate, or conflicts in our goals. But painting everything alien/unknown as inherently scary is kind of racist, even if in some situations it might be written in our instincts to not trust that which is unfamiliar.

Ferk , 1 year ago

Yes, his relationship with the idea of "Others" is strange... like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him... he using his cat's name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there's letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.

Ferk , 1 year ago

The whole concept of "charity" is political.... all charities are "political groups", no charity would be valid based on that judgement.

Ferk , 1 year ago

Particularly in the US, where having a gun is relatively easy... to the point that even school kids can end up getting hold of them. I'd be scared.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

As far as I understand (someone correct me if I'm wrong) games that are free / non-commercial and have zero revenue are not affected at all by this, they still don't have to pay anything regardless of the number of installs.

If the game is no longer being sold (and thus no longer commercial / having revenue), then I expect that even under those new rules Unity would also not charge the dev.

Ferk , 1 year ago

Another reason to use Godot.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

games like Against the Storm, Anno, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Homeworld, Northgard, OpenTTD, Stellaris, etc

Note that none of those games are "Steam Deck Verified". They are at most "Playable", and often the controls is not the only issue Valve warns about (many also have small text that's hard to read). So playing them, while technically possible, is not really that great of an experience.

The issue is that not everyone wants to fiddle with controller settings, and sadly there's very few games that do take advantage of the trackpad and actually have proper first-class support for the Deck, with seamless idiot-proof integration.

And I say that despite being a Steam Controller owner (and I'd love a SC 2). The experience with "Verified" titles is much more seamless than having to check your controller mappings to understand what you need to press (or having convoluted layers / combinations for the more keyboard heavy ones... like say, ToME).

It's a bit sad that the trackpad is not getting much love from game devs. I'd have hoped that at least some games started allowing simultaneous input for gamepad and mouse, just so that they can earn a "Verified" badge. But that's still a problem, though some engines handle it better than others.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

They already took so much care to handle the suspend feature (they even support save syncing mid-game!). Solving the point you mentioned is the one thing that, in my view, would make it perfect.

The thing is that it's technically possible to handle this use case.. they could have programmed it so it goes into hibernation after X hours of being asleep (which could have been done by setting a wake up timer before the sleep state, the Linux kernel already allows it).

I wish some of the unofficial extensions implemented something like this, but I bet it's not so simple to hook into the pre-sleeping / post-sleeping codepath without messing up too much with the system... plus the risk of potentially causing the device to enter some inescapable loop.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

There's already Mod support, but it's 'unofficial' (https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/).
Most likely, what they actually mean with this announcement is that they'll add some store like they did with Skyrim 'special' edition, where they can sell you the mods and get a cut...

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Yes, it's kind of ironic to complain about exclusivity while at the same time wanting to promote a company that has built an empire out of exclusives.

if you wanna fight exclusivity don't buy devices designed to be walled gardens in the first place. Whether it's PS, Xbox or Switch.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

If you can only have one joystick it makes more sense to use it for joystick movement... it's pretty much the one thing joysticks are really good at. The touchpad works much worse as an analog movement control than as a way to control the camera angle.

In fact, the touchpad is superior to the joystick at controlling the camera when games are designed for it and allow simultaneous mouse and gamepad input. The issue is that most games don't, which means you either have to remap everything to keyboard and mouse (which is less user friendly and requires mental training) or you have to use some emulated joystick configuration that makes the touchpad feel janky, since joysticks have such a bad sensitivity when compared to a mouse/touchpad.

However, even with that issue that many games cause, it still feels more janky to use the touchpad for movement.

Ferk , 1 year ago

The fact that they just recently announced more fine-grained categorization on what kind of controllers a game supports makes me think you are probably right.

Ferk , 1 year ago

sea, sir, its, if, all, ball, car, sent

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Wouldn't it be relatively simple to have the ship be automatically stopped as soon as it gets at a certain distance from a land-able object and open some dialog asking whether you want to land / enter atmosphere or something like that to initiate a cutscene / loadscreen?

And if you say no, the ship's computer could make up some in-game excuse, such as needing to avoid the gravity well of the planet, for it to automatically turn around and move away from it.

I mean, I get that they probably didn't expect someone to spend the time to actually go and attempt physically reaching the planet, but after all the attention this thing is getting it could be an appropriate approach to take for when they do the full release, if only to shut people's mouths. It's just one small detail.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

This.
Also, honestly I don't think the screen is a problem with the current deck. No matter how good the screen is, higher resolution image is gonna both burn more battery and have a performance hit, I'd rather see an upgrade in terms of battery (and a proper system to attach it so it's not just glued, maybe also some smarter chipset/bios that allows customizing the power margin to automatically disconnect the battery when docked, so it's not periodically charging it to keep it full and degrading it in the long run).

Looks are also subjective, I don't really think changing a bit the colors is worth it (and it would likely be distorted anyway when using the night filter the software offers anyway), specially considering the price, effort, and the risk of messing things up in the installation. I guess for some people it might be an upgrade, but it's definitely not for me.

Ferk , 1 year ago

:x? Real Programmers use ZZ.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Step 1. Analize what's the possible consequence / event that you find undesirable

Step 2. Determine whether there's something you can do to prevent it: if there is, go to step 3, if there's not go to step 4

Step 3. Do it, do that thing that you believe can prevent it. And after you've done it, go back to step 2 and reevaluate if there's something else.

Step 4. Since there's nothing else you can do to prevent it, accept the fact that this consequence might happen and adapt to it... you already did all you could do given the circumstances and your current state/ability, you can't do anything about it anymore, so why worry? just accept it. Try and make it less "undesirable".

Step 5. Wait. Entertain yourself some other way.. you did your part.

Step 6. Either the event doesn't happen, or it happens but you already prepared to accept the consequences.

Step 7. Analyze what (not) happened and how it happened (or didn't). Try to understand it better so in the future you can better predict / adapt under similar circumstances, and go back to step 1.

Ferk , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Note that "real world truth" is something you can never accurately map with just your senses.

No model of the "real world" is accurate, and not everyone maps the "real world truth" they personally experience through their senses in the same way.. or even necessarily in a way that's really truly "correct", since the senses are often deceiving.

A person who is blind experiences the "real world truth" by mapping it to a different set of models than someone who has additional visual information to mix into that model.

However, that doesn't mean that the blind person can "never understand" the "real world truth" ....it just means that the extent at which they experience that truth is different, since they need to rely in other senses to form their model.

Of course, the more different the senses and experiences between two intelligent beings, the harder it will be for them to communicate with each other in a way they can truly empathize. At the end of the day, when we say we "understand" someone, what we mean is that we have found enough evidence to hold the belief that some aspects of our models are similar enough. It doesn't really mean that what we modeled is truly accurate, nor that if we didn't understand them then our model (or theirs) is somehow invalid. Sometimes people are both technically referring to the same "real world truth", they simply don't understand each other and focus on different aspects/perceptions of it.

Someone (or something) not understanding an idea you hold doesn't mean that they (or you) aren't intelligent. It just means you both perceive/model reality in different ways.

Ferk , 1 year ago

I mean, it would technically be possible to build a computer out or organic and biological live tissue. It wouldn't be very practical but it's technically possible.

I just don't think it would be very reasonable to consider that the one thing making it intelligent is that they are made of proteins and living cells instead of silicates and diodes. I'd argue that such a claim would, on itself, be a strong claim too.