addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 1 week 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.
- Comment on AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds 3 weeks ago:
Dunno why you’re being downvoted. If you’re wanting a somewhat right-wing, pro-establishment, slightly superficial take on the news, mixed in with lots of “celebrity” frippery, then the BBC have got you covered. Their chairmen have historically been a list of old Tories, but that has never stopped the Tory party of accusing their news of being “left leaning” when it’s blatantly not.
- Comment on Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe 3 weeks ago:
Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn’t protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn’t protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn’t protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn’t protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.
“Infrastructure”, to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I’m thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: rockwellautomation.com/…/programmable-controllers….
Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven’t been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it’s up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.
PLCs tend to be coded up in “ladder logic” and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn’t a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there’s a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and “supported by manufacturer” is critical for these industries.
- Comment on The deed is done. 4 weeks ago:
Well, there’s your problem. You’ve plugged a Romantic Robot into the place where your Kempston joystick should be. Never going to win at Daley Thompson’s without perfecting your waggle. Also, the Speccy will probably crash from hammering the keyboard if you try.
Midnight Resistance is one of those weird games where the first level is the hardest; it’s not too bad to finish it if you do the first bit. Fair play on Robocop, though - that’s a hard game.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 4 weeks ago:
AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.
I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.
“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.
- Comment on Germany hits 62.7% renewables in 2024 energy mix, with solar contributing 14% 2 months ago:
Well, we’ve a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So “French Nuclear” should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That’s not the only import, either, so it’s not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.
- Comment on British girls outdrink boys — and most of Europe 2 months ago:
Well, we’ve a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it’s easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.
National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn’t about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.
- Comment on ReiserFS Has Been Deleted From The Linux Kernel 3 months ago:
Yeah. It’s essential that filesystems are actively supported, as they’re so core to the operation of the computer. ReiserFS isn’t supported, and in addition is built on unscaleable ideas, the behaviour of fsck is unjustifiable, and requiring a reformat to upgrade is unacceptable. Use ext3/4 for performance, BtrFS for the journaling properties and checksumming, or ZFS for cluster availability instead.
- Comment on Turkey Temptation 3 months ago:
But cooking a ham is still okay?
- Comment on AMD captures 28.7% market share in desktops 3 months ago:
Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they’ve not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.
Fantastic chips.
- Comment on Unofficial PC port of Zelda: Majora's Mask, 2 Ship 2 Harkinian has a big new release out 3 months ago:
Original release was fantastic - super-smooth, high resolution, “how I remember it on the N64”, ie. not true to the original at all, but like the impression it made on me as a youngster. Super-dark storyline and minimal hand-holding makes it very unusual for a Zelda game, absolutely stunning bit of porting work. Everything you could possibly want in 2024.
And then I got to the down-the-well bit, and that can just fuck off. New release needs a dedicated keybinding to skip that time-wasting shit, could bind it to a mouse button just so that there’s no difficulty finding it when the time comes.
- Comment on Science or some other arcane wizardry PCM 4 months ago:
Why buttplug for tachyons?
- Comment on Can't. Busy. 5 months ago:
Dang. It’s going to take a dedicated regime to fill up a one gallon jar with, eh, fluids.
- Comment on The UK officially closes its last remaining coal power plant 5 months ago:
Yeah, but from the two billion tonnes a year of steel that’s produced, about five percent is carbon added to iron, and about half of that remains in the final product, so that’s about fifty million tonnes released to atmosphere. Whereas about three and a half billion tonnes of coal was burned for power, and that all ends up in the air. A seventy-fold reduction is quite significant; means we can selectively close the higher-sulfur-content mines for an even better improvement in air quality.
- Comment on Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive” 5 months ago:
We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.
Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.
- Comment on 2982: Water Filtration 5 months ago:
Yeah, I’m with you there - worked for twenty years in water treatment myself. Water before it’s been chlorinated / chloraminated for supply? Makes the best cups of tea and coffee ever - you need to boil it, of course. RO water? Vile.
- Comment on 2982: Water Filtration 5 months ago:
The joke about adding well water back in again at the end is “correct”. Reverse osmosis removes 100% of the solids from the water, but drinking water usually contains small quantities of solids - you can see a breakdown on the label of some bottled water. Completely pure water would leach all of the solids that have built up on the insides of water pipes over the decades, and leaches away the protective oxide layer from metal pipework, causing it to corrode surprisingly rapidly. It also tastes pretty shitty - kind of “dead”. So a small amount of high-solids water is mixed back in after RO to bring the water back to normal levels.
All that other shit in the diagram? No. Purification and treatment takes place after the mixing step, it would be crazy not to.
- Comment on Emacs.ch (Mastodon Instance for the Emacs community) will shut down. 5 months ago:
Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.
- Comment on Gearbox's first Risk of Rain 2 expansion gets hammered on Steam as developer admits the PC version 'is in a really bad place' 6 months ago:
It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by
Time.deltaTimewhen you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going. - Comment on Average game chat censorship 6 months ago:
Dark Souls’ implementation is something special. Censors your name based on the language settings you have in place at the time, voice-over dialogue remains in English. So change your system language to either another language you know, or play it a few times so you know what things are, and then put the most offensive shit in as your character name you like.
- Comment on The trouble with England – why rioting in the UK has not spread to Scotland and Wales 6 months ago:
I’d suggest that we do not. How about we split the difference, and drop them off halfway between Belfast and Stranraer, say?
- Comment on 62% of Funded Blockchain and Web3 Companies Attract Fewer Than 100 Monthly Organic Visitors 6 months ago:
Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.
- Comment on New Darksiders game teased by THQ Nordic 7 months ago:
Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?
Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.
- Comment on “ Man Builds an Electricity-Generating Windmill in His Own Garden” 7 months ago:
That would be the 25mm2 stuff, about 9mm diameter. Pretty standard for electric ovens.
The joy of producing electricity from renewables at 12Vdc is that you can run it straight into a whole bank of car and truck batteries for storage. Can then either use it directly for powering things - there’s a lot of things like portable tellies for use in a caravan that are 12V for this reason - or feed it to an inverter to get 240Vac for ‘normal’ usage. Again, large outdoor stores will have them, because they’re intended for this usage.
- Comment on Report: Resident Evil 7 on iOS has earned Capcom $28,140 since launch 7 months ago:
Yeah. Unless they’ve some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you’ve paid out overheads as well.
If they’re planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it “your phone in game”, so you can receive texts from the president’s daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you’re doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.
- Comment on Disney hack leads to 1.2TB of Slack communications leaked online 7 months ago:
I think when Disney demands an internally-hosted version of your product, then the sales team tells engineering that they’ll provide one, and mark the price up accordingly. That kind of thing doesn’t appear on the external listing for everyone else.
- Comment on I aM tHe DeVeLoPeR wHy Do YoU AsK 8 months ago:
Oh, one of our customers’ users deleted the
/vardirectory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was “taking up too much space on disk”. That’s where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.