wizardbeard
@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Games where an emulated console version outclasses the PC port? 1 day ago:
Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 (and their console remasters, DX and Battle).
Mods fix them up and make them better than emulation though.
- Comment on Games where an emulated console version outclasses the PC port? 1 day ago:
Silent Hill 2 is a special case. They lost the source code and original asset library for the game, so it’s a remake using assets ripped from the PS2 release copy.
A very, very poorly done and buggy remake that was also underfunded and rushed out the door.
- Comment on Are there any games you're planning to pick up during the Steam and GOG sales? 1 day ago:
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Dying Light, and Hades. $10 a piece on Steam.
I put a ton of hours into Bloodstained RotN when it was on gamepass, but never beat it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a game I end up replaying every few years, so I really enjoyed its spiritual succesor back then (around when it first released), and they’ve only added more content (three new playable characters, a few game modes) to it over time.
For Dying Light, I love the Dead Rising series, but the moment to moment moving around is nothing to write home about. Dying Light has a focus on movement, and got a lot of good reviews, so I figured I’d give it a try.
For Hades, I’ve always loved Supergiant Games since their first game, Bastion, and I never picked up Hades because it was never priced low enough when I had money to burn. Now that Hades 2 is in early access, I watched some gameplay of that and the first shot up on my list to buy. I’ve been craving an isometric real time combat game too.
- Comment on 'SuperSega' FPGA Console Will Play Genesis/Mega Drive, Master System, Saturn And Dreamcast Games | Time Extension 1 day ago:
More an issue to have another existing company as part of your product’s name. Slam dunk legal case for Sega right there.
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 3 days ago:
There is one benefit, at least for now. You aren’t locked into long term contracts like cable has/had.
- Comment on Verizon screwup caused 911 outage in 6 states—carrier agrees to $1M fine 5 days ago:
This sort of disclaimer needs to be beside every article concerning corporate fines. Fucking ridiculous.
- Comment on Neo-Nazis Are All-In on AI 1 week ago:
I think this is a misunderstanding of how most of the AI that feed into workflows work. Most of them don’t dynamically re-train live based off how users are using them. At least not outside of the context of that user/chat instance.
Most likely what these and others are doing is to download pre-trained open source AI datasets thrn and run them locally so they aren’t restrained by any of the commercial AI’s limitations on what they will and won’t output to users. I highly doubt there’s enough material out there to truly train a new AI model on only explicitly racist material. This is just a bunch of assholes doing prompt engineering on open source models running locally.
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 1 week ago:
You can also toggle it on precompiled binaries with the right tool (or a hex editor if you’re insane), which was my main use case. Lots of old games that never got 64-bit releases that benefit from having access to the extra RAM, especially if you’re modding them. It’s a great way to avoid out of memory crashes.
- Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win 1 week ago:
This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.
- Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win 1 week ago:
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That’s literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
- Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win 1 week ago:
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
- Comment on 500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library 1 week ago:
This is upsetting, but yet again this is ignoring the real reason they are being slammed and is misrepresenting things to try and support (the legitimately amazing) internet archive.
They willfully, intentionally, and very loudly broke the laws/agreements about how many copies of each book they could lend out simultaneously. I hope they win this. I hope more people become aware of this situation.
I also hope more coverage about this starts to be more honest and straightforward about why this is occurring.
- Comment on Tacos. 5 weeks ago:
It absolutely confounds me how Christianity has become a stereotypically right-wing thing when in the context of the time Jesus’s actions are mostly that of a radical progressive who amassed such a following that the power structures of the time had him killed.
Like how in the hell can you run around hating homosexuals and immigrants when you account for the company Jesus kept in the context of the time? Only if you completely fucking ignore it.
My wife’s grandfather was a pastor, and a saying that has passed through her family is “On the day of judgment, there’s going to be a lot of Christians facing a very unhappy surprise”.
Signed, former apostate who has found his way back to being an incredibly frustrated Christian.
- Comment on Maths 1 month ago:
Likewise in one of the later books they visit “God’s last message to the universe” or something like that and if I recall correctly it’s “Sorry for the inconvenience”
Great great author.
- Comment on The MSI Claw is an embarrassment 1 month ago:
Don’t get me started on how many fear mongering articles keep making it to the top with comments about “Microsoft adding anti-features with no way to disable them” or “Microsoft will just reset it with the next update anyway, why bother” because people can’t be bothered to take 5 minutes to skim through the settings app. Learned helplessness.
I get the frustration that it’s necessary in the first place. I get the frustration when it’s something that needs to be fixed through the registry or group policy because that’s not straight forward.
But the sheer amount of false information being parroted by people who never took the time to look into configuring their own device is absolutely absurd.
- Comment on Microsoft PC Manager App 'Repairs' Your System by Making Bing the Search Default 1 month ago:
Bleachbit is the open source, non trash “replacement” for CCleaner
- Comment on Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows 1 month ago:
Musicbee is a pretty good Foobar alternative.
- Comment on Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports to add proper ray tracing, ultrawide, high FPS, and more 1 month ago:
They basically did similar stuff with some of the stuff in the sm3d collection thingy.
They did not.
For Super Mario 64, they emulated it. They increased the resolution the game renders at (trivial with emulation of 3D systems) and they used basic LUA patches in the emulator to override HUD textures with higher resolution ones adjusted for the Switch controller.
They did not add any further enhancements in any way. Compared to even 64 DS, it was extremely sophomoric. Compared to the Super Mario 64 decomp project, and what its native switch port is capable of (more on that later), it’s an incredibly lazy port. They didn’t even fox the slowdown with Bowser’s Sub that is as simple as adjusting a single compiler flag when you build the ROM from the N64 game source code.
For Sunshine, it’s an admittedly impressive solution of mostly emulation with some sections of the game engine ported (I think it’s the audio processing?). Once again, the game is rendered at a higher resolution, but they did not redo ot improve further any textures (besides some of the HUD again), graphical effects, or game content. Wind Waker HD this ain’t.
For Galaxy they cannibalized the existing port of it to Android on the NVidia Shield. The Switch shares most of the important internals with it (CPU, GPU). It’s a combo of emulation with certain key code ported, like Sunshine. Again, besides resolution and HUD, no improvements.
Beyond that, Nintendo has been content to sell straight up emulation through the Virtual Console service since the Wii. They’ve had multiple instances of straight ports over the years, and some of the most popular Switch games are straight ports with DLC bundled in.
There are numerous impressive remakes they have done over the years, but that is absolutely not the norm.
The Super Mario 64 decomp on the Switch supports (not available in Nintendo’s official port in 3D All Stars):
- Effectively infinite render distance for objects (coins, enemies, stars, etc)
- 60 fps (compared to the original/all stars 30fps at best)
- True analog camera control using the right stick (All Stars is just the original’s clunky button based control mapped to the stick)
- All sorts of QoL options like collecting stars not kicking you out of a level, options for streamlined/faster message boxes
- Optional bugfixes
- Optional cheats
- Variety of HD texture packs to choose from
- Variety of higher quality 3D model packs to choose from
- Support for an astounding variety of mods. Levels, entire new games, new characters, new movement and control options (Odyssey Mario in 64 with full cappy and enemy capture mechanics anyone?)
- Support for many more languages
- Nearly all of the above is toggleable mid-game from the pause menu.
I don’t think anyone was expecting something amazing out of 3D All Stars, but they absolutely fucking phoned it in.
- Comment on Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal | WIRED 1 month ago:
PowerShell Microsoft Graph Module. Most of the official doc pages have at least one section of “TODO” in them.
- Comment on Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal | WIRED 1 month ago:
When I do find relevant answers, lately they’re all so old that they no longer work, or rely on now deprecated functionality of a library or system.
Finding code snippets for interfacing with Azure through PowerShell is a crapshoot because Microsoft keeps deprecating different PowerShell modules for it.
- Comment on The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO 1 month ago:
Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.
It’s astounding how much you can “automate” when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.
I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn’t further compress the meta to an even smaller set of “optimal” options.
- Comment on First human brain implant malfunctioned, Neuralink says 1 month ago:
But those options were available to him without a risky brain implant. There’s a large amount of alternative interface methods and tools available for these purposes, they just don’t have Musk’s marketing budget and they aren’t run by someone that owns a newspaper, so they’re not well known outside the disabled community.
We’ve had wearable (and thus removable and non invasive) neural interfaces for years now that have been able to do mouse control.
- Comment on Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract 1 month ago:
They store the current edit and one previous version back, and deletion does not count as an edit as it only hides the latest version from showing on the front end and through the api.
This was found out by people trying to edit and delete comments in mass during the api exodus.
So you’d want to edit the comment to garbage twice before deleting it, and hope they aren’t willing to restore shit from deeper backups they surely have for system safety (speaking as a systems engineer) that they haven’t pulled from yet.
- Comment on Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract 1 month ago:
Suggesting common sense pratices and understanding of how the world works isn’t being supporting of the state of things. I see no argument in the comment you replied to that it’s ok.
Time isn’t infinite, and if I have to choose only one option then I’d focus on helping people make their way through the world that currently exists, rather than focusing on impotent ranting about how things should be.
We can’t just snap our fingers and live in the world of how things should be. Until we get there we all have to live in the world that is.
- Comment on Robot dogs armed with AI-targeting rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation 1 month ago:
Fucking hell. I had really hoped that the world could have gotten off its collective ass to ratify some international agreement limiting the use of AI for shit like this before we’d start seeing these headlines.
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 month ago:
In what world is that a mobster deal? The game initially released saying that PSN accounts were required, this is in every store front description. The devs clarified that was not enforced due to technical issues at release time.
Sony funded the game in the first place too. They didn’t take advantage of a moment of weakness. This is all contract stuff agreed upon long before release.
It absolutely sucks ass, but this is an incredibly basic business deal. Sony stepped in to provide server support because it’s Sony’s game, and Sony makes money off it. Now that the game is more stable, they likely went back to Arrowhead and said “Hey, it’s time you sorted out the contracted requirement for PSN accounts. You agreed to this.” and here we are.
Maybe Sony told Arrowhead that PSN accounts could be made by everyone. Maybe Arrowhead thought they could push back on the requirement after the game came out without them required. We likely will never know what went on behind closed doors.
But this isn’t shady, just absolutely monumentally fucking shitty.
Unfortunately, as long as refunds are handled reasonably well like they were with Cyberpunk 2077’s PS4 release, gamers won’t really have a leg to stand on. It’ll just be complaining that they can’t play something they wanted to play, after getting a number of hours in it for effectively free.
- Comment on Family matters 1 month ago:
I’ll second this. I’ve seen this with researchers, engineers in a variety of fields, construction supervisors, someone who overaw manufacture of nuclear test equipment, a handyman who makes stuff on an old fashioned loom as one of their many side-gigs, cpas, tech workers of all different stripes, commodities traders.
Any job that even somewhat relies on knowledge can get this way, if the person working it puts effort in and takes pride in what they do. The apparent complexity or prestige from the outside has little to do with it.
- Comment on Microsoft won't fix Windows 0x80070643 errors, manual fix required 1 month ago:
They don’t need to reinstall the OS to resolve this issue though, unless they absolutely fucked their paritions.
Which is why Microsoft couldn’t automate a fix. It’s incredibly easy to fuck your partitions to hell and back, especially through Windows. Too many conditions to check for and try to handle automatically.
- Comment on Microsoft won't fix Windows 0x80070643 errors, manual fix required 1 month ago:
It’s more than strictly a recovery partition. It is also used for updates and the files needed to roll individual ones back. The entire issue was that they had an update that didn’t properly handle when there wasn’t enough space for it in the recovery partition.
- Comment on Microsoft won't fix Windows 0x80070643 errors, manual fix required 1 month ago:
Not dickriding microsoft here, but they have provided all the tools to fix this. They just can’t make them happen automatically on effected machines because they broke something particularly complicated.
You need to have enough space to resolve the issue (which was caused by not having enough space in the recovery partition in the first place). You need to adjust the size of the parition (traditionally a risky operation, especially through Windows). You then need to download a specific update while skipping another, install, and reboot.
They have provided scripts for backing up the recovery partition, expanding it, and restoring the contents from backup if expanding fucks the contents. They have provided a script to download and install the specific update to fix the problem once you have enough space in that paritition. They did not automate restarting the computer (piss easy to automate), or to hide the problematic update (easy through UI, probably a pain to script).