Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Private parking rules review prompted by £2,000 five-minute fine 2 weeks ago:
Here in Germany, 5 minutes of leaving your car would not count as “parking”. It’d still be in the realm of just “stopping” your car. If you walk away from your car like the defendant did, then it can be viewed differently, but in practice, it still means that no one’s mad enough to try to fine you in that time.
- Comment on xkcd #3034: Features of Adulthood 3 weeks ago:
To be honest, I’m still annoyed that middle names don’t have more relevance. Maybe five or so people know my middle name, all of which are family or relatives. Aside from that, it just makes it more complicated to fill out forms for various government organizations.
- Comment on Fallout creator asks why triple-A RPGs focus on violence, doesn't provide very hopeful answer 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I tried to create a non-violent game for a while in a genre that’s typically violent (roguelike) and so often, I’d play some existing roguelike and then have an idea, like for example, I could make the ice spell cover an area in the shape of a snowflake. Yeah, alright brain, what exactly is that ice spell for? Cooling the snacks?
And if you decide – fuck it, we’ll cool some snacks – a food-themed roguelike sounds nice and non-violent, then that leaves you with a ton of new questions. If the ice spell targets snacks, does that mean you’re defending against them? Why are you defending against snacks? Do they just make you fat? How do you reflect that in the gameplay?
And then you spend two days coming up with all kinds of ideas for making this work, until you realize it sounds like a fever dream and you have no idea, if it’d be any fun. - Comment on Infamous vs Prototype | 15 Years Later 4 weeks ago:
I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.
- Comment on We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition. 4 weeks ago:
More wild speculation:
- Patterns make brain release happiness hormones, because it rewards itself for correctly guessing how the pattern continues. The rewards stop when the pattern is overly repetitive, because the brain recognizes that this isn’t a challenge to guess correctly. And then it also quickly becomes not worth paying attention to, because if it’s not going to change, it’s irrelevant to our continued survival and all.
- This applies to anything where humans perceive beauty. A painting with a consistent color scheme or technique is nice, but just a blue canvas is pretty boring. A poem that rhymes is nice, but if it rhymes twice or thrice by using precisely the same device, then it doesn’t entice.
- Comment on What games did you complete in 2024? 5 weeks ago:
Not quite in the spirit of this post, but I managed to complete Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for the first time this year. It’s been my favorite game for a few years now, but it’s a roguelike and doesn’t allow for many mistakes, so lots of starting over.
That is also the complete list of games I completed this year. I started replaying Thomas Was Alone, but somehow the platforming passages were a lot more frustrating to me, so haven’t finished it…
- Comment on A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections 1 month ago:
Damn, don’t think I’ve seen so many links in an article in quite some years.
- Comment on Why Long COVID is looking more and more like it's driven by 'long infection' 1 month ago:
I mean, you could also post this article in the health community of any other instance. It’s not exactly specific to Australia…
- Comment on 20 years of Firefox: How a community project changed the web 2 months ago:
I feel like we need to bring back a lot of that early grassroots energy. Back then it was Internet Explorer, now it’s becoming Chrome, that you’ll be forced to use despite it being awful.
- Comment on Production quality often has in inverse relationship to information quality in youtube videos 2 months ago:
It’s so dumb, too. It really didn’t take long for TikTok to start skyrocketing after they made that change. But of course, they don’t realize their fuckup and roll it back, no no, short videos are a completely different offering. So, instead they glue YouTube Shorts onto the side and I guess, to convince themselves that it’s different, they restrict videos to 60 seconds.
Now you’ve got videos that are less than a minute long, which basically don’t ever contain useful infirmation, because they’re so short.
And you’ve got the 5+ minute videos, which try to insert enough padding to make it movie-length, so you essentially won’t find useful information in them either. - Comment on Whoogle: How can I use the preferences URL? 2 months ago:
Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.
Three things I can imagine:
- Something in your hosting stack strips the URL parameters, like maybe your reverse proxy, if you use one. You might be able to see in the Whoogle or web server logs, which URLs actually reach it. Might need to set it to debug/trace logging.
- Maybe there’s a flag in the Whoogle configuration you need to enable to accept these preference URLs.
- It’s a bug in that Whoogle version.
- Comment on Minecraft-like free and open source game VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) hits over 500K downloads 2 months ago:
I mean, the bulk of the work on this happens for the fun of it. The underlying game engine, Luanti, has a really lovely community. Some folks love creating mods/content, others love playing that content.
If you really want a hard reason, it’s that Microsoft bought Minecraft and has forced changes, such as a Microsoft account being a requirement now.
Microsoft has a long history of being extremely hostile to the open-source / libre software community, so after the news broke the community definitely bundled together even moreso to create our own Minecraft, withblackjack and hookersscrewdrivers and mese. - Comment on Oopsies 2 months ago:
Yeah, the formulation is a bit off here. With opt-out, you have no way to measure consent, because you can’t discern between people who actually consent and those who just haven’t opted out, for lack of knowledge or other reasons.
These societies have simply weighed up the two options and decided that saving lives is more important than leaving personal freedom intact at all costs.
- Comment on Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.10.0 out now bringing UI updates, fancier shaders, renaming work 2 months ago:
Hmm, did you try this? blog.rubenwardy.com/2022/…/minetest-steam-deck/#c…
- Comment on aerodynamics 2 months ago:
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 2 months ago:
Yeah, I haven’t read whatever paper this is talking about, but I imagine, it’s looking at the saying in a more literal fashion for the sake of argument…
- Comment on It's a ruff job, but someone has to do it. 2 months ago:
Good thing, it’s not a cleanroom, or they’d need a pretty big hairnet…
- Comment on It’s been 30 years since Intel’s infamous Pentium FDIV bug reared its ugly head – a math bug caused Intel’s first CPU recall 2 months ago:
Huh, I practically only know Intel as having defects and vulnerabilities, but I didn’t know this had such a long history…
- Comment on Couscous is the glitter of foods. 2 months ago:
Ah, “pop like popcorn” was maybe a bit misleading. I mainly meant that it jumped out of the pot violently. It didn’t turn inside-out like maize popcorn does.
So, the taste was essentially unaltered. The seed had burst open, though, so maybe that would help, if you wanted to make a sauce more spicy.
- Comment on Couscous is the glitter of foods. 2 months ago:
Did you know that when you fry mustard seeds, they pop like popcorn?
Well, I didn’t, so I hadn’t put a lid on.
I was still finding the little fuckers several months after the incident, in all kinds of corners of my kitchen.
- Comment on How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"? 2 months ago:
I think, the main problem is that “X” doesn’t look like a name.
When someone’s not starkly aware of the platform being called that, they might think the author typoed.
Or is using it like the idiom “they posted it to X, Y and Z” (so just a nondescript set of platforms).
Or genuinely means the letter X and that just doesn’t make sense in the context presented.“X, formerly Twitter” is just a better name than “X”, because it is recognizable.
- Comment on Carl Sagan be like 2 months ago:
Thanks. 🙂
- Comment on Carl Sagan be like 2 months ago:
A web search tells me the θ (lower-case theta) is used to represent an angle. Do you just fill in 0° – 359.9° one after another to draw that curve?
- Comment on Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? 2 months ago:
Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.
You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.
Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.
I’m guessing, what OP wants is:
- limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
- somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
- Comment on Is there any reason to use the "new" sorting option on Lemmy, except to filter spam? 2 months ago:
I’ll often browse Lemmy by Top 6 Hours or Top 12 Hours, depending on when I last checked, and if I get through all the posts, I’ll start browsing via ‘New’ sorting…
- Comment on After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft. 2 months ago:
Yeah, fair response. I started writing that comment thinking “if it’s in high-end hardware now, it’ll be broadly available in 10–20 years”.
Then with the last sentence, I realized that it isn’t in high-end hardware, not in the form that allows you to throw out all the tricks.
And with publishers simultaneously wanting ever more fidelity, which makes it more expensive to calculate appropriate raytracing, yeah, I would be surprised, if that happens in our lifetime, too.I guess, I’m personally somewhat excited at the thought of not having to learn all the tricks, with me having dabbled in gamedev as a hobbyist.
But yesterday, the (completely unilluminated) 2D gravity simulation I’m working on started kicking in my fans and you see me immediately investigating, because I’m certainly a lot more excited about making it available to as many people as possible… - Comment on After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft. 2 months ago:
I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of
smokes and mirrorstricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it’s just always been out of reach performance-wise.
Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches. - Comment on The universe is bottle-necked at processor speed 2 months ago:
Non-Youtube link: pbs.org/…/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-li…
- Comment on We need a vexillology community! 2 months ago:
- Comment on Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break 2 months ago:
I mean, I don’t know what shoes OP is wearing, but if you’ve got uncushioned shoes (leather shoes or fake leather or whatever), then you do want them to be basically skin-tight. Otherwise, they’ll grind up and down your feet and give you blisters.
But yeah, of course, if they crush your feet, that’s no good either. 🫠
