addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask just got an unofficial PC port 1 week ago:
Been playing it on Arch all morning - runs beautifully straight out the box on a gaming desktop. Forgotten how (a) dark (b) bastard hard it is. Superb game, tho, and all the loading screens being essentially gone adds back a bit of pace it was missing.
And yeah, mapping the weird N64 controller to an xbox pad is always going to be strange - been wasting a lot of items when I’d been intending to look around.
- Comment on Eric S. Raymond / autodafe · Tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of autotools. 5 weeks ago:
Not that I’m the biggest fan of CMake’s syntax, but they are fairly concise and standardised. The XZ backdoor hid in amongst thousands of lines of autotools jank that very few people would be able to audit. A short CMakeList that generates a Makefile is a much harder place to hide something nefarious.
- Comment on Copilot key is based on a button you probably haven’t seen since IBM’s Model M 1 month ago:
But will that stop me from rebinding it as my ‘compose’ key? Normally I use AltGr for that, but more modifier keys are always welcome…
- Comment on Now that ChatGPT is being trained using Reddit posts 2 months ago:
I prefer the must of white grapes for wine making than the must of red grapes.
- Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI. 2 months ago:
Using LLMs for corporate communications - automatically-generated complaint responses, and the like - usually has swearing disabled, so if you want to fuck up their shit, be sure to express yourself with as many fucking swears as possible. Let’s get that shit into those cunt’s language models ASAP.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
The sound will eventually dissipate in the air as heat. The light will be absorbed into surfaces, like any other radiation, as heat. Still 100%, but with a couple extra stops along the way.
- Comment on Will this run GTA 6 and why not? 3 months ago:
I reckon it’ll probably play level six of the first GTA, which I presume is what you’re asking.
Nice build, though - most PCs of that era tend to be a bit dusty and yellowed, but that one’s a beauty. Takes me back.
- Comment on Reddit ☕ 4 months ago:
Fuck Spez.
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 4 months ago:
Between ‘caps lock’ -> ‘actual control key’, ‘alt gr’ -> ‘compose’, and ‘right ctrl’ -> ‘virtualbox functions’, I’m running out of things that I actually need to remap, or have enough fingers to press without stopping touch-typing. But hey, might come in handy for something…
- Comment on Zelda Producer Eiji Aonuma Doesn't Really Care About the Series' Chronology 5 months ago:
Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they’ve just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There’s a couple of games that qualify as ‘direct sequels’ (Ocarina -> Majora’s, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn’t benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as ‘fanon’ anyway.
- Comment on John Romero: Happy 30th birthday, DOOM. [...] Thank you for playing our games, and thank you for keeping DOOM alive, all these many years. 5 months ago:
Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn’t stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it’s more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you’d believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.
The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.
- Comment on How can I get better at remembering names in video games? 5 months ago:
Fine advice generally, but I don’t know that many Panams or Reginas…
- Comment on Implementing Tic Tac Toe with 170mb of HTML - no JS or CSS 5 months ago:
Well now. A few things, here:
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there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × … possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there’s at most 9 × 8 × 7 × … = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.
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we don’t care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there’s (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don’t need to store ‘the computer’s move’, just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let’s guess we need at most a quarter of that.
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we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn’t have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the ‘lay it out with tables’ style we had at the time.
Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing ‘new’ things, though, so it’s in their interest to pass it off?
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- Comment on logarithms 5 months ago:
💧🪵(😄)=🪵(😅) 🍑 🪵(😅) ≠💧🪵(😄) when 😄∈Z ?
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 dev shows off the level of optimization achieved for the Xbox Series S port, which bodes well for future PC updates 6 months ago:
Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It’s after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn’t got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.
The end of the game doesn’t look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.
- Comment on The newest of new news! 🤦😮💨 6 months ago:
It’s not really the same Chinese Room any more - they basically closed the studio after Little Orpheus, and have restarted it with a new team.
Now, whether you think a bunch of randoms might make a better or worse job of it than Hardsuit Labs, who for reasons still unclear were dropped by the original publisher, is a reasonable question. I don’t see why they shouldn’t make a better job of it. If they do turn out something with great promise but a slew of game-breaking bugs, it’ll be exactly in the spirit of Troika’s original, for sure, and we can have another twenty years of fan patches trying to put it right.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3's Japan Release to Censor Nudity, Some Torture 6 months ago:
But I hear that Everard’s Black Tentacles are free to be much naughtier?
- Comment on Fewer trains to run from London to Manchester 6 months ago:
Yeah, they can fuck off with trying to blame their problems on drivers refusing to work overtime, as if being on a reasonable-but-not-exceptional wage is somehow the root cause. Drivers need to be sharp - they’re responsible for a lot of people’s safety! - and I’d prefer they did no overtime at all thank you. Perhaps twenty years of underinvestment following privitisation might be more the problem here, eh?
Train strikes have caused me a bit of disruption over the summer, but that is exactly the point of them going on strike. Keep laying into the bastards and make sure that we’ve got the safe service that we need. 100% behind you all the way.
- Comment on Fucked around, found out 6 months ago:
Ah - that’s happened to me before. Making banana wine, crushed and boiled my fruit selection, didn’t filter it very well before fermenting, blocked the airtrap in my demijon, first I knew about it was an almighty bang and then I had to repaint the kitchen.
Joy of homebrewing, am afraid. Sometimes you do stupid things and they turn out amazing, and sometimes you do sensible things and just forget one tiny but essential step. I heartily recommend making snakebite-and-black homebrew, btw - lager kit, cider kit, couple of bottles of blackcurrant juice all in your fermenter; loses all its sweetness and most of its purple colour and the result is a very tasty brew.
- Comment on Lords of the Fallen’s Steam reviews improve as performance patch lands, devs advise players not to use graphics settings “their rigs cannot handle” 7 months ago:
Rated ‘Gold’, ie. crashes no more or less than Windows.
- Comment on [HN] Newly discovered Terry Pratchett stories published 7 months ago:
He did. This is a collection of all his short stories and such that he’d submitted to newspapers in the 1970s under a pseudonym. Review says that basically they’re mostly a bit crap, but that won’t stop this selling like hotcakes. Very disrespectful even so, like you say.
- Comment on Hard platformers with banging chiptune soundtracks? 7 months ago:
I’m a big fan of those games, and I really enjoyed HUNTDOWN. It’s a shooting platformer, more Contra than anything on your list, but is good times and has top choons to listen to while you’re playing.
- Comment on 15 More Free to Play Overwhelmingly Positive Steam Games 7 months ago:
It would still be a fun little puzzler, but it’s very much a single-note satire, and a lot of it would come off as “lol random” rather than taking the piss out of The Witness. Which is also brilliant, love them both.
- Comment on How AES Is Implemented 8 months ago:
The side channel resistance includes such matters as ensuring that the cypher takes the same amount of time, regardless of the key, but also such super-sneaky insights as the amount of power used to run the cypher, which can be measured from the CPU temperature. Every bit of the cypher that you can be sure of makes it easier to guess the rest. And even if you coded this algorithm in assembly, the CPU will interpret it as microcode and run that, potentially leaving you vulnerable - this is not straightforward stuff.
Like vzq says, implementing this properly is for a cross-disciplinary team of experts in their fields.
- Comment on Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down 8 months ago:
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
- Comment on In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. 8 months ago:
RockPaperShotgun did a performance analysis on this - long story short, a 30xx card will be good for about medium settings, a 40xx for high, and really a 4090 for ultra. According to the Steam hardware survey, that’s about one-in-five PC gamers that could start this up if they wanted to; a few percent can run it with all the flashy graphics. Combine the hardware exclusivity and the distinctly ‘meh’ reviews, get some seriously low player numbers.
- Comment on Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11 9 months ago:
Bungie Studios had a habit of naming their AIs after mythological French swords; Durandal in Marathon, and Cortana in Halo. Microsoft ought to name their new AI assistant Hauteclaire or Joyeuse or something else that follows the theme, but I very much suspect that it’s going to be named by a committee of marketing execs. Much more likely to find scholars and poets developing software than in the C-suite.
- Comment on Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11 9 months ago:
You a non-native English speaker? I’d have thought the letter X would have made Alexa and Bixby hardest to pronounce for most people, and Siri and Cortana the easiest. Spanish stress pattern for ‘Cortana’ doesn’t match English, making it harder to say it in a way that it recognises. But that’s obviously just me - I’m Scottish, and none of these things have ever recognised a single word I say.
One of the most-requested features on these smart assistants would be the ability to rename / nickname them, but that’s an expensive ask. They all offload their actual voice processing to a cloud server somewhere, and then have their ‘activation sounds’ hard-coded into them. Needs to be either a few syllables in a row (hay-see-ree) or some unusual sequence (bicks-bee) to not have hundreds of false positives. Giving them nicknames would require them to send their voice samples to their back-end servers basically 24/7, which would cost them a fortune to run. And also be a privacy nightmare, but I’m sure the operators would be just fine with that if they could afford it.
- Comment on The most popular Chinese keyboard app which is used by more than 450 million monthly users sends every key typed to Tencent in China. 9 months ago:
It’s not called the ‘Tiananmen Square’ by the Chinese - that’s just the name of the place. Either 六四屠殺 (June 4 massacre) or 六四鎮壓 (June 4 crackdown) would be more likely. And yes, expect loads of downvoting on Lemmy if you’re ever critical of China.
- Comment on Why is it usually advised to power off your computer to have Bluetooth work again if it stopped working after a kernel update? 9 months ago:
Could also be that the Bluetooth kernel module is a loadable one, and if you’ve updated the kernel (which will usually take place pretty soon after a first install) then you won’t have the matching folder of modules to load up until you restart. Arch is a bugger for this - I’ve an external mouse that works fine if you keep it plugged in during a kernel update, but it won’t be recognised after an update until you restart again. Not a big deal - you can choose when to update.