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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The only thing more frustrating to diagnose than a circuit that fails all the time is a circuit that fails some of the time. Trying to correct the issue becomes a lot harder if you don’t have a way to reliably reproduce the problem.

    With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely. And I think if the manufacturer started cheaping out on those chips after the fact then it would be a stain on their reputation as suppliers of no longer reliable parts.

    For every few cents the manufacturer might save on lowering the quality of an existing part they’re likely going to lose many more dollars on engineers no longer trusting that manufacturer to continue to provide parts they want to trust will be good when they’re producing their second 10,000 unit batch for the same circuit, or when that engineer is 5 projects down the line and needs that chip again.




  • If you’re too poor to afford video games, then you shouldn’t be playing them.

    Shame there isn’t a gaming platform that often has tons of really cheap and often completely free games. One that has multiple storefronts, each with regular sales. Darn I guess that just means I’ll have to quit games entirely. For the sole reason of being too poor to afford overpriced hardware and overpriced games from a singular company regularly known for overcharging nostalgia bait games. Entirely because one person on the internet told me to, all so he could defend a billion dollar international company.


  • From what I’ve read, that’s only a story that it was based on climate temperatures in his hometown. According to the story phycist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit defined the 0 and 100 degree points of his scale as the highest and lowest temperatures regularly observed in his hometown of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, then later when he needed to recreate the 0 point of his scale he came up with a brine that stabilizes at a specific temperature.

    What we do know for certain is that the brine existed, was made of water, ice, and ammonium chloride, it did indeed stabilize at 0°F, and according to a letter he wrote the scale was based on the Rømer scale, but adjusted in magnitude so he could make 32 divisions between the brine stable temperature and the freezing point of a regular water solution, then 64 divisions between that point and what he observed to be the normal human temperature. The reason for 32 and 64 divisions was that since those numbers were factors of 2, they would be easier to divide linearly between their respective upper and lower bounds.

    Fahrenheit observed that using this scale water boiled at roughly 212°F then after the popularity of the Celsius scale some 50 years later redefined his scale so that it kept the original freezing point of 32, but now had 180 divisions between Fahrenheit’s boiling point. This kept his existing scales fairly accurate to the new definition (the upper bound which was 96°F was now measured to be 98.6°F and the lower bound of the brine was 0°F now measured at 4°F) and used the new convention of defining the scale by water while keeping some nice number of divisions between their points, although they are a little more arbitrary now than they were before.



  • “Manga” is the Japanese word for basically “comic”. In the English speaking communities it generally refers to Japanese comics where the primary difference is that the panels are generally read right to left whereas the text inside (if it’s been translated) is usually read in our typical left to right.

    There’s more cultural differences largely stemming from how in the West (or at least my experience here in America) comics were often considered for kids or niche nerd communities, whereas in Japan it’s been more acceptable for a wider audience to read them for a longer time, but webcomics have been making the medium more accessible and thereby more acceptable for wider audiences so that stigma has been slowly being diminished.



  • I’m just confused by the notion that discord could replace forums. To me it’s always been a messaging service first and foremost. You can have something resembling a forum discussion on some servers, but that’s really just allowing users on a specific server to make a channel with a specific subject for live discussion to happen at, it just happens that since it’s so niche that people leave messages and come back to it later forum style.

    And that’s not even to mention how discord’s search functionality is garbage, or how anything on a discord server is basically non-existent to search engines.



  • Nightreign has essentially that with one of the bosses you can fight and it’s genuinely the worst boss in the game, imo. You spend 30-45 minutes building up a kit with your teammates only to be given a sword which is literally mandatory to damage the boss in phase 2. And even then basically all you do with it is charge up then fire off projectiles while the boss flies around in the sky. Easily the least interesting boss fight in the game.


    • Reviews are mixed: not a great start

    Agreed, puts a damper on everything else that follows.

    • Requires 3rd-party account: fuck that

    Also agreed. If I buy a Steam game, I’d generally much rather it be accessible through Steam and do not appreciate when games are sold on Steam for other platforms.

    • 60 euros base game: expensive, especially when the game has mixed reviews

    Not the worst price, but yeah I’d definitely expect a much better review score to justify that price. In the absence of a good review score this would be something I’d have to know I’m going to enjoy before I’d consider buying it full price.

    • 175 euros DLC’s: are you fucking kidding me? On top of 60 euros for the base game, there’s another 175 fees for content?

    I don’t know for certain about this particular game, but I do know people were shitting on Monster Hunter: Rise for the exact same reason: a seemingly exorbitant amount of DLC available from release implying it’s a cash grab and just trying to milk more cash out of the player.

    That being said, in my opinion MHR wasn’t even half as bad as the naysayers would have you believe. MHR on release on Steam had a lot of DLC, sure, but it didn’t launch on Steam. It launched on the Switch then later was ported to Steam with all of the same DLC they had worked on since its launch a year prior.

    Almost all of the DLC was exclusively cosmetic skins, and almost all of those were part of bundles available for significantly cheaper prices than each one individually. I don’t recall the exact prices but I believe it was something like buy 10 skins individually for $2/ea or buy all of them in a bundle for $5. The real price for any sane person for all 10 skins would be $5, but this showed up on Steam as 11 DLC items with a total of $25. Multiply this by the 6-10 ish bundles they had on the title’s release on Steam to get a huge quantity of items and a massively inflated price compared to what anyone who wanted everything would realistically pay, assuming they paid attention.

    I don’t know that CoD is doing a similar thing here, and I certainly wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but I dislike this argument against them because it can be very misleading.

    • purchasable CoD points: so pay to win?

    Not necessarily P2W, but yeah I’m not a fan of MTX either and again wouldn’t give CoD the benefit of the doubt to have a good or fair monetization model.


  • tl;dr: I use a Note 20 Ultra with stock Samsung ROM because I’m not convinced there’s a good custom or stock ROM that well supports the stylus, but I’m open to suggestions if anyone has one.

    My number 1 feature in a phone is having a built in/included stylus. I do a lot of programming stuff which I usually find is easier to plan out ideas for how I want to structure things by drawing it, it’s also easier for writing out math for some of said ideas, when an interesting question comes up, or when I want to show someone the math on how something’s done, and I’m currently learning Japanese so it’s helpful for working on my kana penmanship and learning kanji, especially learning kanji stroke order.

    I’ve used other styli in the past and know that palm rejection is pretty much a must have feature. It’s incredibly annoying and cumbersome to hover over your phone to not engage the touchscreen, or have to specifically hold your phone in portrait mode so that your hand is naturally off to the side which doesn’t pair well with how we generally write horizontally. Because of this, I don’t consider dumb styli at all and only really consider powered styli that have an active connection to the phone.

    The last time I was searching for a new phone, this requirement (and a few others like expandable storage via microSD card, 5G support, supported my network, etc) ruled out almost every phone on the market save 2. There was some Moto 5G discount model that for some reason had a smart stylus, then the Samsung Note 20 Ultra. I don’t recall the exact reason I didn’t go with the Moto 5G, but I believe it was something like issues with build quality (being a discount model) and the stylus wasn’t very good meaning it would defeat the entire point of getting the phone. So I went with my current Note 20 Ultra.

    All of this is to say, I never really considered changing the ROM because I have doubts how well other ROMs would support the stylus. I’ll fully admit it’s not my most used feature on the phone, but there are hundreds of other phones that have a good screen, support fast charging, support Bluetooth, and have expandable storage. My first feature that would significantly rule out options unfortunately rules out almost all options, so I don’t trust that there are many ROMs out there that would even decently support the stylus.

    That all being said, I’d be very happy to be proven wrong. I don’t like Samsung’s bloat and would love to move away from a lot of it. The only other Samsung device I own is their galaxy tag trackers which is currently the only reason I’ve logged into a Samsung account on my device otherwise I’d be happy to get rid of it and not give them more information.



  • That’s survivorship bias tainting your nostalgia. We collectively remember the passion poured into games like this but forget all of the the movie tie in games, cereal box games, unplayable tier of poorly made games, and games that were so mediocre to not even fall into the previous categories. Some of them get remembered but often more because of how exceptionally bad they were, such as E.T., Superman 64, Pepsiman, Phillips CDi LoZ, etc.

    It’s easy to remember years like 1998 for games like LoZ OoT, Half Life, Spyro, StarCraft, Final Fantasy 7, Goldeneye 007, and DDR. It’s harder to remember the other 158 major titles released that year. While I don’t doubt there were at least some passionate people on the team of most if not every one of those titles, I’d sooner believe many of those titles were just being pushed out the door closer to release than they were passionate works from a team of faithful devs able to fully realize their vision.

    I will agree that I think there’s a larger volume of no-passion games today that companies are just churning out to try to make a quick buck, but I think that’s more because it’s easier to do today than it was back in the day. I don’t think it’s because the devs of days past were more passionate about their titles. I will also agree that because of the aforementioned churned out titles that it can be harder to find titles made by truly passionate teams.

    Source for my number of games released in 1998, by my own count as I didn’t see one listed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games



  • The first generation Pokemon games all used significantly less power to maintain their RAM battery saves than Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Crystal by virtue of not having a real time clock constantly ticking the power away. RBY saves only needed to maintain the power for the save itself and did no additional work on top of that.

    Original GSC cartridges would last about 10-15 years, whereas RBY could last 20-30 years. We’re currently in the span of time where many RBY cartridge batteries will be failing but it’s still possible to find ones with functional original saves on batteries just barely holding on.

    Many people like to try using physically larger batteries when doing replacements, but most of them don’t realize the batteries aren’t losing charge at the end of those many years because they’re drained and out of power. RBY saves use so little power from the battery in the cartridge that they won’t fully drain it after 30 ish years. Instead the battery saves fail because the batteries themselves fail after 20-30 years. Picking the larger button cell batteries won’t help since they’ll still have the same total lifespan and will still lose charge at almost the same rate as the spare batteries that weren’t installed in your cartridge of choice.


  • MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldPop it in your calendars
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    10 months ago

    Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn’t happen. I’m apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn’t care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.