kuberoot

@kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please choose one⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure it is a wrapper in the way it looks up game-specific information to apply specific tweaks to how the game is ran and how the prefix is set up… But it is also true that it does also include a modified version of wine, so the terminology is difficult to pin down.

  That said, I don’t mean it in a disingenuous way, at least I don’t think it is such. I do believe valve is often attributed excessive credit for proton’s creation, but I don’t think they did anything wrong, much less “just nab it”. Open-source is open-source, and I’d imagine people who put work towards making wine viable are happy that Valve brought it to the mainstream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please choose one⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  also literally wrote proton

  It’s getting weird how often I find myself saying this… But Valve mostly took already existing software and built a wrapper around it, integrated into their platform. I love what they did, but the credit for literally writing it goes to all the people who spent years building wine and related software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're still on Reddit...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You should probably start by washing your hands though, and maybe touching less grass

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable.

  Reminds me of Roll out the Fallout by The Chalkeaters

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.

  I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.

  I do just want to point out, Valve didn’t do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not an official/proper feature on steam, there’s nothing in the interface to select an older version, right? Just the beta system that lets developers have multiple branches available, which is often used to keep a limited number of previous versions available.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.

  Sounds like that’s just where we disagree. I would instead say that magic is part of the world being shown in the story, and it should have an explanation, just like laws of physics. The hints come not from the narrator knowing things and dropping clues, but from the underlying logic of how magic works and the behaviors of people shaped by the magic of the world. And of course the reader can’t anticipate everything - but I also want there to be a sense of what’s possible and what’s not, and for the cases where the reader’s understanding is broken to be impactful and bring new understanding.

  So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of preference. I can look at HP and think “man, the magic just does whatever the fuck the author needs”, and other people can look at it and enjoy the whimsical adventure for what it is. Or, in a way, I guess it’s both - I can still appreciate the story, but it’s underlined with a sense of shallowness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is that the wands being made from the same core doesn’t have any explained effect before this event, when an explanation conveniently appears, now being a known event that has happened before. The issue is that, to my knowledge, things just happen that have no prior explanation, which sugests they’re just being made up on the fly to fit the narrative, which in turn means the reader/viewer has no way to anticipate them.

  In what I’d consider a “good” magic system, things fit together. They don’t have to be revealed immediately, but often there will be hints, and when the reveal is made it’s gonna at least fit into the void in prior knowledge. This is, of course, my subjective preference, but I think HP goes so far into the opposite that it’s just random stuff made up to justify whatever the author wanted to happen with no reasonable explanation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think so, I believe the reasoning only showed up shortly after the event, though it’s been a really long time since I’ve read HP, I’d be interested in knowing if I’m wrong

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I looked it up and found the name - pretty sure it was explained shortly after the event as “Priori Incantatem”, showing it’s a known phenomenon in the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry, no Deus ex machina? Am I misremembering the bit where suddenly two wizards casting a spell at each other at the same time for a prolonged duration reverses cause and effect and makes dead people come back as ghosts to give the protagonist advice?

  I can agree that stories don’t need a “good” magic system, but I also feel like HP has glaring holes in places that negatively affect the experience. It’s still a fun story, but I definitely think it could be better if the magic made more sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine some instances might ban users for upvoting certain things, you know…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Humane Ai Pin Will Become E-Waste Next Week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a meme, but relevant youtu.be/-ZNoNHk8lbQ

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I would let a chip be installed in my brain if it would allow me to erase memories of the games I have played to play them again as the first time.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s many games out there, but only one Outer Wilds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patch this Bish!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is, plants do that by combining water and CO2 into energetic compounds, with an oxygen byproduct - then they do the same our bodies do, which is breaking up those energetic compounds using oxygen to release the stored energy. And yes, plants consume oxygen and produce CO2 - they just do more of the opposite turning the excess into structural materials.

  This requires a supply of energy in a form that can be consumed (laws of physics prevent you doing it by cooling your body down), so you’d need to, for example, receive enough energy from sunlight to match your energy consumption, and generating oxygen through that would actively make you fatter.

  Oh, and as an addendum, we could maybe use less oxygen to break up those energetic compounds, similarly to how fuel can burn with reduced oxygen - but the fun thing about that is, that produces carbon monoxide, actual poison, so that’s also a no-go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Le Reddit Army is Here⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, hear me out, maybe people were tied of way too many posts in the community being about recent politics, so moderators took action on that?

  It’s not a good look to be broadly banning those words, but it seems to me like there’s a reasonable and obvious expansion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-Generated Fake War Images Passed Off as Real⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think this is a realistic proposal - this is a technological advancements. You might be able to force companies to put invisible steganographic signatures in their services’ output, maybe provide some method for hashing the output to provide a way to determine if an image was generated by them…

  But what’s stopping them from using the underlying model on the side, off the books. They could sell/leak the model to external entities. If they just generate outputs without any watermarks, those systems won’t be able to detect them, potentially only lending more legitimacy to those fakes.

  And, ultimately, nothing’s stopping independent organizations from developing their own models capable of generating such fakes. What help is it that big companies are limited, if the technology needed to generate images is already known, and might end up easily reproducible by anybody sooner than later?

  That said, individual instances of such illegal/immoral services should be dealt with - it’s horrible, but I believe those are inevitable. Pandora’s box has been opened by creating the technology, it was going to happen sooner or later, and we have to deal with the results.