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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Well, that’s three different genres of game.

    XCOM balances strategy and turn-based tactics in a way that’s a bit unusual. Games like Civ or Crusader Kings let you do the strategy, but you’ve not much influence in battles. Something like Hard West or Invisible Inc. let you do the turn-based tactics, but are fairly light on the strategic choices.

    The STALKER games are survivalist FPS; although you combine looting and shooting, they aren’t looter-shooters. As Strelok, your role-playing choices are quite limited - you can ‘get out of here, stalker’ if you wish - and you’ve no stats. I wouldn’t have described the world as particularly reactive - the ‘bad ending’ in the first one depends on what you’ve been doing.

    Morrowind and the Souls games are both Western RPGs; you fight enemies with weapons and magic, it’s not obvious what’s going on, certainly at first; and the world changes as a result of your decisions. DS doesn’t generally let you know when you’re making a decision, which makes it quite tough to progress some storylines. But as to how the fighting plays out, they’re about as different as can be.

    So I wouldn’t worry about it. Wish there were more XCOM-like games, tho, since I love the mix.


  • They’re quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

    Fortunately, there’s businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won’t run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it’s my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.



  • The squinting cat has quite a pointy face. Testosterone makes cats have ‘rounder’ faces; can be hard to tell on cats that were speyed quite young, but males capable of having children tend to have quite chubby cheeks. Plus, the black cat looks to be going for a nipple underneath; and of course, it’s actually present in the picture, whereas dad cats are all ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ and will usually be miles away once children appear.

    Far be it from me to assume pronouns, but that doesn’t really look like a dad cat to me…



  • Not arguing that PNG is the right choice, but you want something lossless for science purposes, and this is a science image.

    You can tell roughly what order the impact craters were formed by seeing what overlaps what; looks like the small impacts mostly followed the big impacts. Maybe the earth’s orbit cleared out the bigger stuff first? If you had a really good image, you might be able to work out the average impact angle, and therefore the average speed of impact, since we know the speed of the moon, and how they would intersect. Nothing’s filled with lava like it has on the near side of the moon, which makes me think these have mostly happened later in the moon’s life, when it’s cooled down a bit.

    I just love space, I’ve no education in it. I bet someone with a fancy moon science degree would be able to tell you a lot more, and they’d be poring over every pixel. Don’t want any JPEGs getting in the way of that.


  • Azure’s documentation is the worst fucking bullshit that I’ve ever read in all my days, and just about every single page or tool (including the CLI) has an integrated slopbot that routinely recommends commands and REST endpoints that don’t exist; it’s slow as fuck, and to do even the simplest things is agonising. But to give them their dues, their recent uptime has been pretty good.

    Truth be told, I’ve even come round to thinking that I prefer using Azure to Google Cloud Platform. Using any of Azure’s features is a pleasure akin to cutting yourself with a rusty nail and then falling in a sewer, but at least it has some features. GCP is like they implemented a quarter of the very basic functionality and then got fed up, decided to call it a day.



  • StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

    A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you’d expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don’t just have ‘colour textures’, they’re likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that’s another three times. The voice acting isn’t likely to be in a single language any more either, so there’ll be several copies of all the sound files.

    A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. ‘Biggest’ game I have is Baldur’s Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That’s quite good, considering how much game that is!

    I do agree with you. I can’t think of a single useful feature that’s been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it’s worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.


  • Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

    Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.


  • Well, you’ve had a lucky few months off. Our three just did not stop this year.

    If your cat could explain to ours how to either eat all of the mouse or none of the mouse, that would be amazing. I don’t mind them feeding on low-carbon organic meals hand-prepared by local artisans, the hipsters. But I do mind stepping in all the bits and pieces that they didn’t care to finish.


  • Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

    Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.



  • addie@feddit.uktoProgrammer Humor@programming.devSenior devs...
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    4 months ago

    Abstraction is not very compatible with concurrency, so as well as your your beautiful abstract API, you also need some ‘cut through the layers’ functions to return the underlying classes you need to synchronise on. Now you have a right mess that’s incredibly hard to understand, infuriating to debug, and impossible to refactor. Best you can do is put another layer of abstraction on top. Repeat every six months.