umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Enough 3 hours ago:
The sign on the door reads “Execution Chamber”
- Comment on Pentagon to start using Grok as part of a $200 million contract with Elon Musk's xAI 1 day ago:
People will no longer laugh at the term “military intelligence” for the obvious irony. Now, they’ll say “remember when the military tried to use artificial intelligence? ha ha what a disaster”
- Comment on Can you see magic eye pictures? 2 days ago:
I wasn’t able to see this on my phone. Almost gave up hope. But. HOLY CRAP. Re-watching the LGR video on my desktop monitor and I can see the stuff again! So… thanks, I guess!
- Comment on Can you see magic eye pictures? 3 days ago:
Tried various distances, that didn’t help too much. I’m afraid I have to hold to the theory that I’m officially old now and need bifocals.
- Comment on Can you see magic eye pictures? 3 days ago:
I can see them.
Or at least I could. When LGR recently made a video about them, I was having a very bad time viewing them. I was either too drunk or not used to seeing them with this TV setup or I just need new glasses. Probably the last one.
- Submitted 4 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 21 comments
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust | The chatbot is also praising Hitler and attacking users with Jewish-sounding names. 6 days ago:
Well, technically, Twitter has employees, so in very strict sense, they’re “manned”. However, thanks to these weird incomprehensible things called “current legislation” and “capitalism”, no employee is in fact personally responsible for the fuckups. And neither is the company as a whole! …Isn’t this great?
- Comment on Ubisoft EULA demanding consumers destroy delisted games adds fuel to Stop Killing Games movement 1 week ago:
You know, I was mildly ambivalent about Ubisoft recently (just burned out by their games and not wanting to buy them until I’ve slept for ages) but… Really? This is the hill they want to die on? Well that does say a lot about them, now doesn’t it?
- Comment on Ok, I'll pay you the 1995 price 1 week ago:
I didn’t like talking to other people in 1995, and I sure as hell aren’t going to start enjoying it now.
- Comment on The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact 1 week ago:
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
- Comment on Is anyone else not feeling that patriotic for July 4? 1 week ago:
I thought you guys don’t celebrate it that much any more? Heard it got replaced with a Trump Birthday Military Parade Day or someshit. And it sucked so much that nobody is doing holidays anymore. Sorry, I’m in Europe, the new are coming in slowly from the US these days
- Comment on The Fediverse Passport: A needed tool. 1 week ago:
What Fediverse could use was some kind of equivalent of Linktree. “Here’s my personal accounts on Fediverse. Here’s some related to my projects. Here’s some other random links.”
Because currently I’m like “maybe check out my Mastodon profile, it has links” - it works, kinda, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution. For example, you could include support for this in the fedi software, so once you specify where your link page is, it’d pull the links and show them on your profile.
…I know, this would be too beautiful for this world and it’d get run over by spammers. But for glorious few days we’d have sensible Fediverse profiles! Think about it!
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, that company has red flags.
Red flag number 1: the contents of the note
Red flag number 2: using duct tape to attach the note to the wall. Hints at a huge managerial Skill Issue.
- Comment on Brazil's supreme court rules that platforms like Facebook and X can be held liable for user posts, requiring them to remove content even without a court order 2 weeks ago:
On the other hand, I think safe-harbour laws are very much necessary if we want the Internet to work for the positive good of the world. We want the companies to take reasonable precautions and act on problematic stuff if it crops up, but that’s probably enough.
But on the other hand, jeez, have you seen what kind of discussion shitholes Facebook and Twitter have cultivated? If your company is being described as an accessory to genocide, maybe something has already gone horribly wrong.
- Comment on The Harbinger of the Dystopia 2 weeks ago:
A couple of minutes in Dystopika, annnnnd…
- Comment on No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites 2 weeks ago:
“No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.
But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.
- Comment on SteamWorld Dig is free on Steam for the next couple of days? Ah, go on then 3 weeks ago:
Ooohh, I liked this game when it was in Game Pass a while ago. Might as well grab the PC version.
…it’s already in my Steam library
…must have been on some Humble Bundle forever ago, then
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 3 weeks ago:
Boot up my dad’s computer and play some shareware off the magazine cover disk I got months ago.
Or go to the library I guess.
- Comment on Trump social media site brought down by Iran hackers 3 weeks ago:
I’m happy that the news over here has to continually specify “the messaging service X”. Though I wish they would avoid potential confusion and also say “formerly known as Twitter”.
- Comment on Trump social media site brought down by Iran hackers 3 weeks ago:
Andrew Tate’s site was based on some OSS software that they didn’t credit (in violation of the license) and was an old version with known vulnerabilities. Which is why it got hacked.
I don’t know if Truth Social is in the same boat, but it’s possible. I think I heard it’s just Mastodon with federation turned off? Or am I thinking of some other crappy alt-right site?
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 3 weeks ago:
Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 4 weeks ago:
Oh, thank you! MO2 seems a lot more clean and simple than Vortex.
…and in related news, now that I’m redownloading everything for funsies anyway, I have graduated from trying to keep my mod lists on a website to scribbling a list down in Joplin. With links and everything. In case these mods I’m using decide to move from Nexus or something.
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 4 weeks ago:
Ok, so what is the current alternative nice option for SkyrimSE mods?
Preferably one with a mod manager/download client. Vortex is kind of janky but it did the job. I’d prefer not to manage any of this stuff manually, like cavemen. it’s been decades you shouldn’t need to do that
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 4 weeks ago:
Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.
And while the law isn’t settled on the topic, it’s wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.
Sure, there’s a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It’s quite similar to the “TiVo loophole” in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 4 weeks ago:
Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.
My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 4 weeks ago:
The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.
Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 4 weeks ago:
Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.
Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 4 weeks ago:
Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 4 weeks ago:
Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.
Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.
This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~magic~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.
I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 4 weeks ago:
The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)
