addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it works it works⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking as someone with a chemical engineering degree and twenty years in industry:

  • we have some really complicated computer programs and simulations for all the important stuff, then we add ten percent for safety and round it up to the next standard size. We don’t buy 292 mm pipe, we just use 300 mm, because that’s what’s on the shelves.

  • you need to be able to decide quickly whether results you’re seeing are sensible, usually to order-of-magnitude, and whether eg. it will take an hour to fill a tank, or a week. We usually don’t care whether it’s 55 minutes or 56. You need to be able to do those sums in your head, though.

  3 is more than accurate enough as an engineering approximation for pi. In fact, 5 is close enough, and much easier to work with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is making every Windows 11 PC an AI PC⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no committee that approves words being added to the English language. Anything that’s understood by the group that uses it is a real word. We make up new words and change the definition of old ones all the time; dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.

  That doesn’t stop the concept of ‘agentic AI’ being a pile of bullshit being peddled by snake-oil salesmen, of course, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be permitted to make up new words.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.

  That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.

  Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Republican? Democrat? There is a third option:⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s UK. We’ve a million streets like that, those trees in the park-looking bit opposite. I’d imagine the house with the bins is a hotel or a B&B, something like that, because otherwise it would be odd to have so many the same colour - green is compostable and black is ‘bottles and cans’ where I live, and you normally just get one of each.

  Don’t know what the green stripe on the road is. Our cycle lanes don’t look like that, aren’t that colour. I’m guessing it’s some “who’s allowed to park where in London” thing, residents-only or something like that. They’re a strange bunch, Londoners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, nice. I destroyed my first one playing Sekiro; the trigger buttons are really awkward to get to pieces to replace the internals, and my replacement Steam controller is almost too valuable to use, since I can’t replace it any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Famicom Disk Writer Kiosk Advert⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As well as being able to ‘rent’ disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.

  In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Famicom Disk Writer Kiosk Advert⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Being able to ‘rent’ games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don’t need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.

  Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.

  In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.

  Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t ask for this.

  The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.

  All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox invests big into indies, signs Game Pass deals with over 50 studios⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  48 studios will be closed before they get a game out, and then the other two will be closed after making something award-winning and genre-redefining, and the IP will never see the light of day again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel says Arc GPUs will live on after Nvidia deal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reads like Intel will be using Nvidia’s stuff for integrated systems, and doesn’t say anything at all about discrete graphics cards.

  If you’re integrating a GPU, then it’s going to be either for a laptop, in which case performance-per-watt and total die size are very important, or it’s for a generic business PC, in which case ‘as cheap as they can get away with’ takes over. A B580 might be the best mid-range graphics card, but those aren’t the areas where it shines. Using someone else’s tech makes sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piss off!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m subscribed to oxygennotincluded@lemmy.ml - seems dead, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘I’m a modern-day luddite’: Meet the students who don’t use laptops⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.

  As such, it’s completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D’n’D notes, maps for games that I’ve been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you’re meeting someone - they can see you’re just making notes and writing to-dos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ladies get urself a mothman⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I prefer to pretend that Dune and Dune Messiah are the only books in the series, and in particular that his son never wrote anything. Makes for a much more satisfying tale.

  Also works for ‘underground worm film’ Tremors. Done perfectly after the first one, no sequels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or ‘love hotels’. You want to rent a room by the hour, Mario gets his cut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Silksong] Patch Version 1.0.28497 Now Live⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The harpoon works just fine too, one-hits the stick insects and does her some damage as well if you can line it up. She’s not very dangerous if you know her moveset, but that’s an education learned by many runbacks.

  Doesn’t say they’ve fixed the comedy bug where if you look at the map while on one of the collapsing platforms, then when you fall through then the game stops accepting input, Hornet just stares at it forever. Only glitch I’ve found, quite impressive for a day one purchase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fifty million? The “StarGate” talk was more like five hundred billion bro, just trust me, one more nuclear reactor main, that’s all we need, just one more hand and we’re going to win it big, bro.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got hooked on browsing openalternative.co is "Most Popular" list⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agree with you completely, but the explanation is probably in order.

  CoMaps is a fairly recent fork of Organic Maps. There were questions being raised about Organic’s governance - dodgy partnerships, misuse of funds, not being truly open-source due to keeping core libraries private - and so CoMaps was created to ‘do it properly’. The app functionality is basically exactly the same, so moving over is completely painless.

  news.itsfoss.com/organic-maps-fork-comaps/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I’m working on a ticket.

  Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That’s phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking as a developer; I’ve a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll’s version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can ‘upscale anything’. Almost any modern game, I’m going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.

  I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I’m not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I’d still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL about Android Translation Layer (ATL), a way to port Android apps to Linux Mobile⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The Android dev kit includes a copy of QEMU that’s set up to emulate ARM with a selection of popular screen sizes and revisions of the OS, so that you can test your app on a variety of ‘potential phones’ before you upload it to the marketplace. Snapdragons are amazingly performant CPUs for how gently they sip at the battery, but they’re not that strong in the big scheme of things - any random x86 processor should be able to emulate them while using fifty times the power. A Steam deck ought to be able to do it; the request will then be ‘we’d like to play Android games better’, which to me is a much more reasonable ask.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Build a Powerful Reverse Proxy Firewall for Blocking the Evil Web-Scraping Robot Hordes from Hell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m still trying to make ‘sloppers’ happen. Perfectly describes the lack of thought that goes into what they produce.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.

  Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm "use NFS forfilesharing old." what's the current optimal solution for shared drives if I have like 3 linux machines in the house?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You can turn off “delete”, but modification is a danger, it’s true.

  Turning off delete makes it excellent for eg. backing up photographs on your phone. I’ve got it doing this from my Android to my raspberry pi, which puts them on my NAS for me. Saves losing all my pictures if I lose my phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love a good fractal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Think if the GNU project had spent less time working on ‘clever’ recursive acronyms and fitting Scheme into everything, and more time hacking, we might actually be using their kernel.

  Linus locked himself in his bedroom for the summer and got almost all of POSIX working on 386. That’s the level of geek to aspire to. If RMS had just decided to name his kernel after himself rather than messing, we’d all be be using Stallix instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Foundation says yes to NoSQL via DocumentDB⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The ‘traditional’ way of storing a database is on a mainframe or supercomputer, where all the information is stored in tables with the information all uniquely stored, frequently containing id references to other tables. For instance, an ‘orders’ table would have a customer id in it, and the ‘customer’ table would have their name and address. The programming language for databases like that is SQL - PostGres and Oracle are examples. That model gives you a lot of advantages - the data is always consistent, changes are either made completely or not at all - but every query has to go through one machine, so performance can suck, and you waste a lot of time ‘joining’ tables together for certain kinds of query.

  If you’re storing eg. a blog with comments on it, that model doesn’t make sense. Each page has a varied selection of comments, comment will have a username and maybe their icon, which will rarely change, but will need to be evaluated by the database every time. It would make more sense to output the pre-rendered page as a JSON blob, and you could have a hundred machines with a few pages each to share the load. Updating people’s icons and adding new comments would need to be done by telling each machine to make a certain update if they’ve a copy of that page; you’d ‘eventually’ be consistent, but if you don’t care about that then you get a very scalable robust solution quite cheaply. Examples of such ‘NoSQL’ databases are MongoDB, Hadoop and DocumentDB.

  Linux foundation have looked at DocumentDB’s license and said ‘yes, free enough for us’, so they’ll adopt it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uhm⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen that rectum before…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The people developing vegan meat alternatives must have eaten a lot of meat beforehand so they can replicate the taste and texture.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Got a huge amount of Indian and Asian cuisine that happens to be vegan, either incidentally or for religious reasons, and it’s all absolutely delicious; but no, ‘vegan food’ means deep-fried highly processed dinosaur shapes and cheese with a distinct aftertaste of sewage.

  I feel bad for vegetarians. If pubs and restaurants have one meat-free item on the menu then it’s going to be vegan, and if it’s going to be vegan then it’s going to be some awful faux food where the main plant source is chemical plant. Vegetarian meals that celebrate the quality and freshness of the vegetables are the equal of any meat meal, but you’re not having those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They’ve also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.