Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever
@Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
- Comment on Lemmy.world removes its rules against discrimination 1 year ago:
The difference is that if a TOS needs to be changed to support shitty behavior, it changes. That is often a canary in the coal mine as it were and people STILL cite google removing “Do no evil” and so forth. Same with the Unity debacle where a few people noticed things had been rewritten… and nobody listened until it became a massive kerfluffle.
Because yes. Admins can do (and see) whatever they want. Welcome to message boards. And I do think having a written TOS is a good step forward (even if this TOS is probably objectively bad for a lot of reasons). It provides a contract of sorts.
But also: I would very much say that NOT providing provisions for discrimination based on ethnicity/sexuality/gender/religion/whatever is a pretty big red flag almost to the level of “I don’t see color”. Because yes, it is not in and of itself support for bigotry (even if many will view it as such). It is an indication of not understanding the problems that others are facing and not realizing how important it is to call that out.
- Comment on Lemmy.world removes its rules against discrimination 1 year ago:
“Just trust me bro” is never a good model.
Because maybe the current admins are all great people who will do right. But we don’t know if all future admins will be. And if we get a “rules lawyer” coming down on a complaint that some community is being horrifically racist as “Well, it isn’t against the rules…”
But also? The world is an increasingly shitty place. Twitter is run by a straight up white supremacist. Having this kind of verbiage goes a long way toward indicating if a place can even possibly be a “safe space” as it were.
But also: If the idea is that we should just trust the admins: Why have any rules at all?
- Comment on AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it' 1 year ago:
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
- Comment on AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it' 1 year ago:
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
- All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
- Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
- Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
- Comment on Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU 1 year ago:
Do you have a link to the EU requiring consent to detect ad blocking?
Most of what I can find is from the late 2010s but specifically says that consent is not required for adblock detection. adguard.com/…/eu-defines-its-stance-on-ad-blocker…
iabeurope.eu/…/20160516-IABEU_Guidance_AdBlockerD…
But also: I assume consent can be obtained with a mandatory TOS update.
- Comment on Job Hunting Sucks. This Programmer Filled Out 250 Applications to Find Out Why 1 year ago:
This predates the pandemic.
I have been on both sides of things. I have had to deal with the literally hundreds of applicants that are completely fake CVs or so underqualified that I would be better off grabbing a random kid at a high school job fair.
And the reality is that if I have had to sift through hundreds of bullshit CVs, I am not going to be giving anyone “a chance”. Unless you specifically meet every single requirement AND look amazing on paper, you are in the bin because I already wasted hours of my life doing due diligence on the assholes.
I hate everything about workaday. I hate that it incorrectly parses my CV in new and exciting ways every time AND means I need a new account for every company, if not every opening. But I also understand what happens if you ACTUALLY make it as simple as filling out a template once.
And while the article is complete bullshit (gotta love the mysterious loophole of OPT as though it is some secret…), I do agree with the outcome. If you are a “skilled” worker going into a comparatively niche field, favor the openings that aren’t using workaday. My best interviews have been from using the automated linkedin application system that basically just sends an email. Hell, that is where my current job is from. But that is also because these were jobs in specific subsets of fields and not entry level positions or openings at Google.
- Comment on Job Hunting Sucks. This Programmer Filled Out 250 Applications to Find Out Why 1 year ago:
If you’re applying, you probably want the job
In the sense that you would like a paycheck? Sure
In the sense that you are remotely qualified for the position or meet any of the requirements? Not necessarily. And I don’t mean “This entry level position needs twenty years of experience”. I mean “Understands that python is a language”
And a lot of those obnoxious timeouts and headaches are related to minimizing the “just apply for everything” impact on an applicant pool.
- Comment on Tom Clancy Ghosh Recon Wildlands vs Breakpoint 1 year ago:
Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.
That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.
- Comment on Elite Dangerous studio Frontier Developments announce layoffs and "organisational review" 1 year ago:
I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.
And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.
It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…
Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.
- Comment on Rockstar, Necrosoft and other game devs slam Epic and Songtradr for "trashing" Bandcamp as layoffs announced 1 year ago:
Again, the normal case is not people maintaining their own giant collection of mp3 files. Just like with physical copies of games and movies, most people have decided they want the convenience of not having to manage an mp3 player library.
Same with purchasing. It is great that you want to pay the people who did the creative work. … Does that mean you buy every single album you listen to? Because you ARE going to have to buy a “massive collection” unless you only listen to one or two bands endlessly. Or, more likely, you will do what everyone does and decide “Well, I barely listen to that band and only like one or two of their songs so it it really worth buying?”.
It sucks for the artists who have lost their bandcamp revenue. But it was bound to happen because the model itself is fundamentally incompatible with the modern consumer base.
- Comment on Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle 1 year ago:
Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.
But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.
- Comment on Rockstar, Necrosoft and other game devs slam Epic and Songtradr for "trashing" Bandcamp as layoffs announced 1 year ago:
I mean… it is basically the same problem as youtube/video. Audio is orders of magnitude less storage (unless you are a FLAC sicko), but it is also played a lot more. And people generally don’t want to have to plug their zune into their computer to grab mp3s before they go for a drive, so you still need a content delivery service. All of which costs money.
And then you have monetization. Just look around at all the people losing their god damned minds over youtube caring about adblockers. Hell, just look at how every single youtube video gets a bot reply that basically says “Hey, want to dick over this content creator? use this link instead”. And, evil google or not, most creators (who don’t get demonetized because of their content…) will point out that youtube is pretty nice in terms of revenue and that they give a very good cut of the premium ad-free subscribers.
Which gets back to music. Someone will probably pay for Tay-Tay’s latest album because she is the biggest musician on the planet. But Biffy Clyro? They are great to listen to in a mix but are they REALLY worth the 15 bucks for an album? I mean, sure you listen to them every single day but…
These kinds of arguments remind me of when someone (I think it was Snoop?) was ranting about how much they hate spotify and gave what, on paper, sounded like a small number. And if you actually broke down the amount of money per listen they were asking for and then normalized against the cost of an ad on various services, it was actually REALLY expensive.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Its both, but it is also more SEO than copyright. Because yes, that theoretically protects you if someone steals the entire page (not really but let’s pretend it does). But stripping the actual recipe steps out is trivial. at which point we are back to “Can you really copyright adding 420 grams of flour and then mixing it?”
Whereas the giant blog post? If you talk about how your grandmother made this for you on cold November days, you now will show up if someone searches “recipe my grandma made” or “November dish” and so forth.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Bigot
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
The vast majority of recipes are derived from other recipes and combinations. The more ethical sources will be open about that. J Kenji Lopez-Alt, Andrew “Babish” Rea, and Alvin Zhou are VERY open about what inspired a given recipe whether it is another cook, a dish they had a t a restaurant, or just “tradition” and other cookbooks. Ethan Chlebowski and Brian Lagerstorm focus more on the underlying cooking techniques but will also generally credit the “inspiration”.
And then it is just iteration. Which is where Lagerstorm and Chlebowski are great sources as they had a semi-recent “podcast” where they made Taco Bell live or some shit and talked about how a single cheesecake video means they made cheesecake dozens of times over the course of a week or two.
This is WHY most of those recipe sites are hellscape blogposts. Because even the amateur chef likely put a couple hundred dollars worth of time and effort into that “ten dollar weeknight meal” and either they or the company that paid for the recipe need to try and make back some of that cash. Which generally means long ass blog posts for SEO and a shit ton of ads and affiliate links.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
From message boards that steal content from all other sites?
Failing that: Paywalled sites that have a source of income that is not dependent on ads and SEO.
- Comment on Netflix to open branded retail stores for some reason 1 year ago:
That is very much a rose tinted glasses scenario.
It wasn’t that going to Blockbuster was an inconvenience. Those things were like modern day Starbucks where you don’t even bother to check a map. You just drive in one direction for three or four minutes and find at least two. Hell, the one we went to was across the parking lot from the Pathmark and it was pretty common for mom to send me and my sister to go pick out a movie or a game while she went through the checkout line.
The reality is that there just wasn’t a good alternative. Some people would use mail order catalogs but those came out with enough of a delay that it was never worth it. This month (or quarter’s) magazine arrives three weeks after Mission Impossible has hit VHS. And by the time the order is sent and arrives, it has been another two weeks. And then you either have a video for a week longer than you need or you need to remember to go to the post office on Monday.
It was The Internet that made this viable because you could see what was available the moment it was available. And your order was instant so you only had the shipping time to worry about.
But also? Once The Internet became available, there was almost no need to stare at shelves to figure out what movie you wanted to watch (I hear Harvey Keitel hangs dong in that one) because you could do exactly that from the comfort of your own home… so long as you weren’t expecting a phone call.
And it is not like people ever truly hated the idea of physical stores. Clothes shopping online is still a mess and that is why Amazon specifically have easily reasealable bags so you just buy three sizes of pants and return the two that don’t fit.
But also? Once you know the sizing for a given brand/range of clothes, you don’t need to do that anymore. You know what to order in what size and it will fit. Maybe you have to try stuff on if you try a new brand/store but…
Which becomes a problem because all those brick and mortar stores are now getting a few sales a month, rather than a couple dozen per day.
- Comment on Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK 1 year ago:
Oh yeah. King is freaking massive
My point is more that I don’t know how much of that is because of how insane the mobile gaming market is versus king still being particularly dominant in that market.
- Comment on Netflix to open branded retail stores for some reason 1 year ago:
If they get good prices for the location, I think this is actually a really good idea.
Most of the time, you are a hot topic selling stranger things shit. Whatever
But when something like tiger king or squid game or whatever becomes a cultural hit? Just look at how every single big youtuber tried to do a “real life squid game” event. People will love to go to an “escape room” style situation where you spend an evening playing a live action video game. And you likely cover the profits for the entire year in a few weeks.
- Comment on Netflix to open branded retail stores for some reason 1 year ago:
Gonna be honest: if your idea of date night is frantically playing a game for 24 hours straight to try and get your money’s worth, you are going to have a VERY small compatibility pool.
- Comment on Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators 1 year ago:
Where is the “solidarity” with the devs?
People will constantly point to grey market sites like g2a and even gmg (g2a is really more of a black market site but…) and smugly mock anyone who DARES to buy a game new. Everyone cheers for (one of the daddies of gamergate) Total Biscuit’s mantra of never preorder and will insist that publishers and devs are trying to nickle and dime/steal from them for daring to release DLC for a three year old game.
And then we wonder why studios shut down.
So no, you aren’t looking for “solidarity”. You are so self obsessed with not getting what you want that you are recontextualizing it as everyone else is taking things away from you to get what they want.
Because: I would love it if there weren’t giant conglomerations of studios. But then I remember how some of the best studios out there, such as Digital Extremes and Larian, have stories of “Yeah, it was make or break and we really lucked out with getting in on the ground floor of some new concept or marketing gimmick”. Like, we would not have Baldurs Gate 3 if Larian had waited even a year or so longer before starting the D:OS kickstarter. Because rather than people saying “oh shit, we can get a new classic CRPG” it would have been “Fuck kickstarter. It is all vaporware. You are a fucking mark if you give them money”.
And if the choice is between having a different publisher on a game and hoping that enough folk from Obsidian end up in the same place to make another Pentiment or Tyranny? Fuck it, I’ll gladly let whoever keep the lights on.
- Comment on Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators 1 year ago:
It won’t fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:
PC more or less is THE second platform (or first, with console as second) for a lot of people at this point. So if the option is:
- Studio goes out of business because a great game didn’t sell amazingly well. See Mimimi for a “good” example of this
- Soft or hard acquisition results in games trapped on a single platform with questionable backwards compatibility policies. Bayonetta 2 and 3 being nintendo exclusives until the end of Nintendo is a “good” example of this
- Soft or hard acquisition results in game that is console exclusive to one platform, but also on PC
I’ll always pick 3. Because as console prices increase? A “couple years old” gaming PC is not horrifically expensive (so long as crypto stays in the shitter…).
But also? Shit like Geforce Now and other streaming solutions means that people (who don’t live in the ass end of nowhere and have such horrible internet they wouldn’t be able to download the day one patches anyway) can play these games on their macbooks or even their chromebooks.
- Comment on Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK 1 year ago:
I am in a similar boat, but i don’t think this is THAT big of a deal.
Blizzard is mostly a shell of its former self. FF14 has taken over as the default theme park MMO and Riot own the majority of the sweaty RTS super genre. Also whatever Overwatch counted as.
As for Activision proper? Mostly they’ve let their IPs languish in favor of CoD. And CoD is still huge, but it is not the industry controlling monster it used to be AND MS are “committed” to keeping that multi-platform (because that is where the money is).
I still think Bethesda/Zenimax was the big “holy shit” acquisition. Obviously Skyrim is one of the biggest games of all time and prints money. But it was mostly all the sub-studios (Machine Games, for example) that very much dominate the “third party” market.
I think King is probably the really big part of this acquisition but… I’ve never understood the mobile market so I am not even sure if that is still as dominant as I think it is?
- Comment on YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end “$600 less than cable” ads 1 year ago:
Isn’t it a bit late for you to be on the internet on a school night? That’s it, no more tablet time until you finish your homework.
Also: As you get older, you’ll learn that a lot of people value convenience and time over money.
- Comment on YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end “$600 less than cable” ads 1 year ago:
If you can be bothered to call Comcast/Verizon once a year or so? Yeah. They love to bundle plans together and you can get a shockingly good deal.
Which actually makes it annoying if you actively do not want a tv subscription.
- Comment on The New York Times tried to block the Internet Archive: another reason to value the latter 1 year ago:
Honestly? Yeah.
I love The Internet Archive and throw a few bucks at them every couple months. So much lost media and software is ACTUALLY preserved by them* and this is increasingly important as more and more chuds attack libraries.
But… it is pretty fucked that I can grab every 3ds and ps2 game in existence without seeing a single shitty pop-up and even a decent number of newer games.
Out of print and “disney vaulted” content is a mess. And I understand why, legally, IA might not want to make the distinction. But we already have the solution for in print media that better maps to the actual library model. Buy copies/licenses and use DRM to control the number in circulation. Might have some massive wait queues but that can be solved by “outreach”.
*: As an aside, fuck abandonware sites with a rusty metal pole. Loved how the vast majority went from “It is important to preserve these games you can’t otherwise buy” to “fuck it, upload ALL the gog installers” overnight
- Comment on YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end “$600 less than cable” ads 1 year ago:
I know it is incredibly unlikely, but I do hope the outcome of the latest content/streaming apocalypse is actual a la carte ordering.
Had a blast watching Wrestle Dream the other night and wanted to get (more regularly) back into AEW. My options are 60-80 bucks a month for a “full” tv service or dealing with a mess of outdated APKs, sending payment information over VPNs, and all kinds of messes that just aren’t worth it.
Hoping the Max sports thing eventually gets AEW. I would gladly pay 20 or even 30 bucks a month if it got me all the weekly shows (PPVs would be nice but…). But the cheapest I can get is one of the Sling packages for 40 and… 40 bucks a month is a lot.
But yeah. Amazon (and I think also Apple?) have already started paving the way by letting you subscribe to other services as “channels” in theirs. Probably MASSIVE contract issues means it will take a few years, but I could easily see Fox/FX splitting out. Same with whoever owns the block of networks that include USA. And this will even better map to the royalties issue because then you are watching reruns of Frasier instead of having access to the VODs and deciding you want to pretend you liked Becker and getting that crew another few cents this month.
- Comment on The Potential Hidden Perils of Relying on Microsoft Copilot | Redmondmag.com 1 year ago:
Degrees versus radians. Not checking imperial versus metric units when you enter stuff. Button gets stuck. And so forth
Like with anything, you need to be able to glance at the output and say “that looks right”
- Comment on Australia: Undergrad develops cheap kit for hybrid electric vehicle conversion 1 year ago:
That’s for you to decide. But the environmental impact of batteries is drastically reduced if you actually recycle them and so forth.
As for cost effectiveness?
Quick google of a poorly documented site that looks “about right” says the average price of a gallon of gasoline was 7.079 Australian dollars and 4.459 USD, respectively. Normalizing, that is 4.54 and 4.459 USD. And it gets a lot higher in other countries, but those seem the two pertinent to this discussion
So doing a bit of math:
N city miles / X city Miles Per Gallon * 4.5 USD per gallon = Y dollars per retrofitSo get the price of the retrofit, your average city (stop and go) miles per gallon, and figure out if you are likely to travel that distance. Because the effectiveness of a hybrid drops drastically for extended highway (although 100 kilometers is a decent charge size), whereas they use trace amounts of gas during stop and go city driving.
- Comment on The Potential Hidden Perils of Relying on Microsoft Copilot | Redmondmag.com 1 year ago:
Short version: This is the same bullshit that is spewed every time something new comes out. If you ever heard that your calculator will prevent you from being able to do math or your IDE will prevent you from knowing how to write a function signature and so forth, it is that all over again.
And the reality is? Maybe it will. But that is progress. I doubt most people know how to make butter or can preserves. And they don’t need to be cause technology has reached the point that that is an unnecessary skill.