merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 15 hours ago:
Ronaldo’s ego is incredible, and he’s almost always looking out for himself in everything he does. But, you can’t deny that he’s one of the best ever players. And his charisma means he’s a great choice for something like this where he has to perform and interact with all the “scientists”. Someone like Messi could do the same kinds of moves, but he wouldn’t be able to chat with the presenters and “scientists” between events in a natural way. (P.S. I love that they got someone named Ronald to be the ordinary guy who couldn’t do anything useful, that was just funny.)
I also think Ronaldo genuinely cares about all the biomechanics and all that, as long as it’s something that applies to him, and that he could use to make himself better. A lot of other players just play on instinct and don’t want to have to think about it.
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 15 hours ago:
Hearing is definitely part of it, but I imagine it’s only hearing the sound of the ball being kicked. After that it’s going to be far too quiet to hear until it gets close, and he’s obviously reacting long before that. Maybe hearing helps him adjust in the last tenth of a second, but he’s not hearing the ball’s entire flight.
As for the body mechanics of a pitch or a kick, it is amazing. Like, a proper powerful punch involves leg muscles, hip muscles, waist muscles, chest muscles, and only then do you start to get to the arms. For most of us, the best way to realize how coordinated everything has to be is to try to do something with your wrong arm/leg. Everything that flows naturally on your strong side is just completely wrong on your weak side.
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 1 day ago:
What’s amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.
There’s a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.
- Comment on AI Elections 1 week ago:
I like that only Iowa and Arizona are the only states with full names labelled without weirdness, and they’re completely wrong. If it were a human completing this map, I’d say those were the two states they were confident about, and they’re obviously wrong.
- Comment on Calcrelatable 1 week ago:
For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.
- Comment on Calcrelatable 1 week ago:
Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It’s pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.
- Comment on Calcrelatable 1 week ago:
Or uses a serious calculator.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 2 weeks ago:
It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 2 weeks ago:
What makes you think there’s a threshold?
- Comment on Gandalf failed to consider incest, half my ancestors are related baby 2 weeks ago:
What’s interesting is that historically a lot of people never had children. But, by definition, none of your ancestors were among them.
So, even if being a childless femboy slut was incredibly common historically, that’s the one thing none of your ancestors would be able to understand.
- Comment on Eat lead 3 weeks ago:
That’s not a paradox though, it’s a silly logic puzzle that isn’t hard to solve. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything about omniscience or gods.
- Comment on Eat lead 3 weeks ago:
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient
Why must that be true by definition? Many of the Greek gods were clearly not omniscient, because the stories about them all involve intrigues and hiding things from each-other.
Also, you can’t disprove a god’s existence by making a logic puzzle that’s hard for you to puzzle out. Just because it’s a toughie for you doesn’t mean that it disproves the existence of gods.
That isn’t even a particularly difficult logic puzzle.
- Comment on Eat lead 3 weeks ago:
The existence of a god is something that can’t be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I’ve been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I’m living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn’t true. I haven’t personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn’t want to believe, there’s really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam’s Razor.
- Comment on Football Manager 25 Delayed until March 2025 5 weeks ago:
Or, just imagine what it says if they actually didn’t know about this last week. That would be even worse, it would mean that the team doing publicity and taking orders didn’t realize that they were half a year away from being done…
But, yeah, I can’t see how this doesn’t result in a disaster. They really do need to release something before then, something with this year’s DBs before they’re irrelevant. They could take the old game, update the DB and just sell it at half price. Or, they could sell it at full price but with a coupon for say 50% off the new game.
The November release date of Football Manager has always been awkward. The FIFA games all come out in late September / early October, right after the teams have been finalized. By the time Football Manager comes out, 1/3 of the season has already been played. IMO their best bet would be to release in the summer before the season starts and then do a post transfer deadline day patch. The initial release could use the squads as they existed at the end of the previous season – probably something a lot of people would want anyway because they could be in charge of all the summer transfers. In fact, I wonder if a release date of early June or something might be ideal.
My guess is that one major motivation for people to buy Football Manager is that they’re saying “I could do a better job of running my team than this bunch of idiots”. And, that feeling is probably strongest right at the end of a season. A Football Manager release at the end of the season might be ideal for people who want to spend the summer doing all the wheeling and dealing they wish their clubs would do well, as they wait for the season to start again.
If they think they can have the new Unity-based game ready and polished in March, just call it FM 26, release it before the season starts, and do a full update once the various transfer windows have all closed and the DBs are all updated. If they don’t do that, who’s going to buy FM 25 when FM 26 will have all the bugs fixed, the new season’s DBs, and is only a few months away?
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to gaming@lemmy.zip | 2 comments
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 1 month ago:
Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to).
But, their business model doesn’t work unless those mods are working for free. So, while they may replace mods, unless people keep signing up to work for free to help a for-profit company deliver value to its shareholders, eventually it’s going to collapse.
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 1 month ago:
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
- Comment on Data is a plural 1 month ago:
It’s a noncount noun.
Even people who pretend to believe it’s a count noun never use the singular, “a datum”.
- Comment on AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs 1 month ago:
At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.
- Comment on AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs 1 month ago:
What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.
AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.
Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.
So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.
I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.
What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.
Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.
I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
If you’re going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you’re not going to be left with many options.
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.
It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.
I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.
- Comment on Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations. 2 months ago:
Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time.
Maybe, in my mind I was picturing a situation where someone had lots of property and didn’t realize that anything had happened. I see your point though, that in theory you’re depriving them of the use of it whereas with copyright infringement there isn’t even a second where they can’t enjoy their own property. They only potentially lose out on a sale.
Sneaking into a concert that isn’t full is probably a better analogy. You get the experience of the concert without paying for it, and the venue owner maybe loses out on a sale without knowing it.
- Comment on Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations. 2 months ago:
Also, “piracy” or “copyright infringement” isn’t theft in any sense.
A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It’s not that you have it. That’s why the punishment for “mischief” where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.
Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You’re not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you’re doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you’re depriving someone of anything, it’s depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.
If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! 2 months ago:
I haven’t gotten into the Beta, so I haven’t played it, but I’m curious, is the game designed so you can’t do anything without walking, or is it so that you can creep along at a snail’s pace without walking but to actually make real progress you have to walk?
It seems to me like you could use the psychology of a Pay To Win / Microtransactions game to motivate people but by using walking instead of money.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! 2 months ago:
Does GPS really require an internet connection? I know it uses the radio, which kills the battery, but AFAIK you can get GPS without Internet access. For example, I’ve downloaded offline areas for Google Maps and have tracked my location that way, while traveling in countries where I didn’t have a SIM allowing me to access the Internet.
- Comment on Check the facts 2 months ago:
No, it abolished slavery with an exception carved out for punishment for crime.
The difference is important. Saying it was “made a punishment” suggests that before the amendment that option didn’t exist. It did. The 13th amendment just clarified that that use was allowed to continue.
But, it’s also worth noting that in the late 1700s and early 1800s imprisonment was uncommon, and a lot of crimes just carried the death penalty. In England, pickpocketing more than the modern equivalent of about $40 could result in a death penalty. Same with cutting down trees, or stealing from a rabbit warren. For less serious crimes there were the stocks, whipping, and fines. England had an option that wasn’t available to the US: transportation. Australia was originally a penal colony, and the people sent there were forced to labour until their sentences were up.
Prisons (along with their work programs) were seen as a new, progressive idea that could potentially reform a prisoner, rather than just killing / punishing them.