addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ 4 days ago:
Years, sadly.
- Comment on Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor 1 week ago:
I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.
- Comment on Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor 1 week ago:
Also, MangoHud has an ability to set
fps_limitin a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144. - Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 2 weeks ago:
Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.
Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.
- Comment on UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25. 2 weeks ago:
So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 2 weeks ago:
Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.
It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 3 weeks ago:
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
- Comment on Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support 3 weeks ago:
They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.
Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.
- Comment on Marathon is delayed 3 weeks ago:
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 4 weeks ago:
You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)
I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.
- Comment on Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it 4 weeks ago:
Think there should be an ‘accessibility’ option in the settings menu? I remember it being pretty decent - god mode, slow down, item highlighting, and the ‘half damage’ option were in there.
- Comment on Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it 4 weeks ago:
Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.
- Comment on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer 5 weeks ago:
Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.
- Comment on Clair Obscur's Composer Talks Going From Unknown To Scoring 2025's Most Celebrated RPG 1 month ago:
I found that too. The animations are misleading - just listen for when you need to press the buttons.
- Comment on The Telegraph has deleted this sob story 1 month ago:
Yeah, Fark used to be great. That bear headline is a beast.
And then they got rid of the ‘foobies’ (ie. nudity) links off of the main page in order to appeal to advertisers, then they got rid of lots of extra stuff that upset advertisers, then they started shadow-banning paying subscribers if their posts didn’t fit the narrative. And then all the users got fed up of it all and moved ever to Reddit, where the mods were more transparent and there was more of a sense of community. How ironic.
If your core site content is users posting links and commenting on them, then there’s probably a lesson to be learned about how important it is to treat your users well and have a welcoming, inclusive community. Probably a lesson that Lemmy users have already learned, mind.
- Comment on if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics? 2 months ago:
Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris 2 months ago:
I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris 2 months ago:
Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.
Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in
openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away. - Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team 2 months ago:
Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.
I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.
Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.
Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.
Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.
- Comment on xkcd #3085: About 20 Pounds 2 months ago:
Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.
The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.
Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.
Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.
- Comment on Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts 2 months ago:
You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:
- load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
- manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.
- Comment on Whenever a beast is shown on screen 2 months ago:
You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.
Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.
- Comment on Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads 2 months ago:
Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.
That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed 3 months ago:
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 3 months ago:
If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.
I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 4 months ago:
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 4 months ago:
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 4 months ago:
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
- Comment on Sun God 4 months ago:
You’re understating it a bit there - the sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system by itself. To the nearest whole percent, the solar system consists of 100% “the sun”. To the nearest 0.1%, it’s 99.9% the sun and 0.1% Jupiter.