I didn’t mean it negatively, really - I much prefer that devs add features to polishing them, and the fact that the quests and the world are so interesting makes up for a lot.

Yes, you can see through the level geometry in places. Yes, the enemies repeat the same barks again and again. But hell yes, it’s a lot of fun to play.

Bethesda have been on a serious downhill slide lately. Fallout 4 wasn’t an rpg imho, Fallout 76 wasn’t in anyone’s opinion, and Starfield was a bit of a disaster. I’m whatever the opposite of ‘hyped’ is for ES6. It’s good to play an RPG in this style that’s so blatantly a labour of love.

Enjoyed the first few hours of it. If you’re on the mood for a much more ambitious, Eurojank take on Oblivion, then it’s probably right up your alley. Highlight of the Steam sales for me so far.

Still wishlisted from the time you posted before! Good luck, FirsTimeDev, hope it goes well, and looking forward to it.

Would have posted the same, but this exactly. Don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing really. Enthusiasm for niche topics is awesome, but you need to maintain that enthusiasm to have a community, and that’s easier with fewer, larger groups.

We also used to have a lot of ‘porn on the front page’, but that’s gone too. Have no objection to a bit of nudity, but there’s plenty of internet for that elsewhere.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can’t deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll have aged badly.

Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.

I wrote one of my own from scratch, back in the day. More to practice my algorithm coding skills than anything else, make sure that I could. Not very difficult - easier than barcodes, in a way.

The thing that I found most interesting was that it uses the same Reed-Solomon error correcting code as CDs and DVDs, and for the same reason. Those codes guarantee that you don’t get too many 1s or 0s in a row. That would cause difficulties with laser tracking in a disc player, or big confusing areas of white or black in a QR code.

The on-off-on-off pattern that joins the inside edge of the three squares isn’t usually that obvious either, but when reading it, makes it quite easy to decide how ‘big the boxes’ are. You can store a very long piece of text in a QR code, although the pattern gets very finely detailed after a while.

“We’ve made a bang-average live service game that both costs money upfront and has ‘monetisation’ features built in. In addition, it’s in a somewhat niche hard-to-describe genre, has a nondescript name, and we pissed our advertising budget up the wall.”

Nice one, AWS. 100K players, easily.

Like you say, if you’re paying money upfront, you want it forever. From the initial “four player dungeon crawler” description, I thought they’d remade Gauntlet or something - I might be up for that, if it was made with love. Instead, they appear to have made an online collection of bonus levels from Spyro, with corporate-approved zaniness and 'tude that’s always asking you for your credit card details, and that they can shut down whenever they like. How about no?

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.

AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn’t really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.

Something needs to change, but I’m not convinced that would be enough…

Which is strange, because Azure’s documentation is complete dogshit.

We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure’s own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don’t exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)

The female ones don’t smell too bad - ‘rodenty’ but not too pungent.

The males are extremely whiffy. Very musky, akin to BO, gets into everything.

My grandad used to keep them as working ferrets, for flushing rabbits out of their warrens, and fed them on leftover rabbit carcasses. You could smell that from quite a distance.

The babies are incredibly cute - size of your thumb, very soft. The adults are also cute, but have sharp claws and a nasty bite when they’re annoyed. They’re faster than you might expect, too - can really cover the distance when they get their bounce on.

Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

I’d be happy if plasma looked a bit more like WinNT. Completely functional, all the information there at a glance. Nothing hidden away in hamburger menus, no guessing about what you can and can’t click on. Does what it needs to then gets out your way. The best-designed that Windows has ever been.

Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.

If you’ve any suggestion on how to implement that, then it’s a million-dollar idea.

The “I’m a human” test that only takes a few seconds and then lets you do what you like for an hour was always vulnerable to ‘auth farms’. Pay some poor bastards in the third world a pittance to pass the test a thousand times an hour, let the bots run wild. And the bots have gained the ability to pass the tests themselves, at least by boiling the oceans in some datacentre while the VC money holds out.

Finding the people running the bots, fitting them with some very heavy boots and then seeing if they can swim in the deep ocean is probably needlessly cruel, but I’d be up for tarring and feathering a few. Once the videos got out, the rest might think harder about their life choices…

I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.

Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.