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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Thing is, if they have backups, even editing data doesn’t do anything. Or they could even just have it set up to only display the most recent version but still keep each edit on the db. Wouldn’t even be hard to implement. Hell, it wouldn’t even be that hard to implement a historical series of diffs so they don’t have to store the full comments for each edit if the edit is a small one.

    Like if I wanted to run a service that made it easier to find interesting data, part of that would be to flag deletes and edits as “whatever was there before has a higher chance of being interesting”.

    Once something is posted, IMO just assume that it can’t be unposted and trying to unpost it might work similarly to the Streisand effect.

    Even here. Sure, the source is open and I’d bet looking at the delete and edit functions would make it look like everything is fine. But other federated servers don’t have to run the same code and can react to delete and edit directives from other servers however they want. The main difference between this platform and Reddit in regards to control over posted information is the fediverse can’t prevent entities from accessing the data for free (albeit with less user metadata like IP and email).


  • Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.

    Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.

    My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.



  • Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!

    Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.

    I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.

    It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.




  • Doesn’t really apply in this case.

    TSMC charges per wafer. If yield improves, that means each wafer will have higher quality chips, on average. Which could mean less junk chips and/or more chips that will make it to a higher bin (which could mean more speed or less that needs to be fused off due to a flaw).

    Also, you’re not the customer they are talking about. They mean their customers, like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, etc.

    Though you might see some savings because higher yields means inventory levels increase, which could mean a lower optimal price on the supply/demand curve. Even if the MSRP is lower than the optimal price, it would still mean less opportunity to scalp the chips for profit.


  • A part that complicates it is nutrition. Nutrients are related to food cravings, but if you don’t have access to food that has the nutrients your body is craving, you might eat other things in an attempt to satisfy that craving. But since they don’t contain what your body needs, the craving doesn’t go away, so the drive to eat more remains.

    It’s like the difference between being satisfied and full. For the first one, your body decides it doesn’t need anything more and the desire to eat just isn’t urgent (comfort/habit eating can still be a thing though). When you’re full, it just means your stomach is full and you can’t eat more without discomfort. But once there’s room again, the hunger might return.

    It was something I’d always notice with McDonald’s. One big Mac never felt like it was enough. I’d eat the food and then be disappointed because it was all gone but I still wanted to eat.

    But a good meal with a variety of ingredients can satisfy even if the volume of food isn’t high. Like I’ve only tried fine dining once and went in to the 9 course meal expecting to need to stop for a burger or something afterwards because I knew the portions of each course would be tiny. I walked out of that restaurant with room in my belly but no desire to fill it with anything else.

    It’s also why pregnancy cravings are so strong. The body needs more nutrients when building another body, plus the timing of accessing those nutrients is more important.


  • It’s a story that’s been repeating for decades now. Company creates a new market with new useful tech, run by engineers passionate about the tech, experiences exceptional growth, becomes large corporation, much larger than any competition. Uses relative wealth to keep competition from catching up. Eventually saturates market to the point where market growth doesn’t finance the growing R&D expenses (which were tuned assuming previous rate of growth would just continue). At some point, profit increases start coming from business/marketing side of things more than engineering side, resulting in MBAs and marketers getting more promotions and eventually control of the company. Then tech stagnates because they don’t think investing in R&D is as worthwhile. Also aren’t able to prioritize what R&D is still happening effectively because they don’t really understand the tech as well as engineers. But they tread water and even increase profits because they dominate the market.

    Until competition that is engineering focused (often also made up of former engineers from the dominant company) catches up or creates a new market that makes theirs start going obsolete. Suddenly trouble, then they either pivot to quietly supporting businesses that continue using their products, or gets in trouble with the law because of increasingly anticompetitive practices.

    Xerox could have owned the PC market but thought they could continue being a household name sticking with copiers. IBM outsourced everything and people eventually realized they didn’t need IBM. FoxconnFairchild had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company. And now Intel coasted while AMD floundered and was completely unprepared for TSMC and AMD to make large technical leaps and surpass them.



  • Could have a system where a government site cryptographically signs a birth year plus random token provided by the site you want to use.

    Step 1: access site
    Step 2: site sends random token
    Step 3: user’s browser sends token plus user authentication information
    Step 4: gov site replies with a string containing birth year, token, and signature
    Step 5: send that string to the other site where it uses the government’s public key to verify the signature, showing the birth year is attested by the government

    No need to have any direct connection with the user’s identity and the site or been the gov and site.




  • Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?

    I hate those because:

    1. Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
    2. I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
    3. If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
    4. It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
    5. And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.

  • Even after, some of it is pretty crazy.

    Like the driver for controlling one vendor’s LED lights had a generic PCI FW updater (or something similar) included that it exposed to user space. This meant a) changing the LED colours or parameters required a firmware update rather than the firmware handling input from the system to adjust colours without new code, and b) other software could use this and just change the bus id of the target to update other firmware willy nilly.

    It also had to compete for bus time and sending a full firmware update takes more time than a few colour update parameters. Average case might be ok, but it would make worst case scenarios worse, like OS wants to page in from disk 1 while a game needs to read shader code from disk 2 that it needs to immediately send to the GPU but the led controller decides it’s time to switch to the next theme in the list oh and there’s some packets that just came in over the network and the audio buffer is getting low. GPU ends up missing a frame deadline for the display engine and your screen goes black for a second while it re-establishes the connection between GPU and monitor.


  • With the caveat that there’s a lot of space in which users can do things that even kernel level anti-cheat can’t detect. Like it can’t see what’s going on inside plugged in hardware to know if an attached video capture device and the mouse and keyboard is actually all connected to an embedded system that analyses the video stream and adjusts the actual user input to automatically fire if it detects an enemy that would be hit or to nudge the looking direction a bit so that firing would hit.

    I’ve also seen reports of exploits that use the presence of cheat detection combined with other exploits to install cheats on target systems to get their target banned from the game entirely. Which both forces them to deal with a situation they never intended to in the first place (they never tried to cheat), it also gives plausible deniability to actual cheaters who get caught.

    One of those cases happened during a live tournament. Dude is playing and all of a sudden can see enemy locations through walls. He knew what was up and left the game to avoid being banned, which makes the tournament itself a bit of a joke.



  • Yeah, the line between AAA and Indy games is kinda blurred at this point. Especially because quality has split into production quality and gameplay quality and higher production quality seems to be getting more accessible to smaller dev teams.

    Like I’ve been playing Enshrouded and have been enjoying it. It’s a large game (like I think the map is comparable to a WoW continent with fewer total regions but each region is larger… I think it’s a bit bigger than breath of the wild) but I have no idea if it would fall into the AAA box or not. Nothing about the game screams “Indy” or “small development team” other than the game being (IMO) really well done and not feeling like a product of a ??? step between “start making game” and “profit” like so many AAA games have felt like with all their season passes and MTX.

    Ultimately, “good game” vs “bad game” is more important than “AAA” vs “Indy” (or whatever other categories), which is why I first asked about it. My bias has gotten to the point where I’ll ignore a lot of the games that look like they are AAA games tuned for engagement and profit rather than necessarily being fun, but I could be missing out.


  • Any AWD Lambo in Gran Turismo. Especially after getting used to powerful RWD supercars.

    With FWD cars you start out with, you can pretty much go from full throttle to threshold braking back to full throttle as aggressively as you want while taking turns. As long as your speed is low enough to go around a corner, you’ll make it and if you make a mistake, you have a chance at recovery.

    With RWD, you’ve gotta be super careful with the throttle on turns. If you try the instantly apply full throttle approach, you’ll end up spinning out when the rear tires (that provide stability) lose traction. A lot of the videos of people fucking up their supercar are instances of being too aggressive on the throttle when they weren’t going perfectly straight. I’m not sure how accurate Gran Turismo is for this, but you can give it full throttle while cornering, but you have to ease into it slowly. You don’t have much opportunity for correction, though with careful throttle control you can sometimes turn it into a drift, though that usually doesn’t work out unless you plan on drifting going in to the turn.

    With AWD, just point the tires in the direction you want to go in and give it full throttle. Start losing traction? Try more throttle. It was a fun moment discovering this, after being used to the RWD approach. Might need to max out your tires and tune your suspension for stability to get these results, though. Just angle the tires outwards a bit for camber, go as low as you can without seeing sparks, and add some downforce on the front and back and it feels a bit like an F1 car.

    Though the actual F1 cars they have are pretty awesome, too. A step closer to the arcade style racing where you didn’t need to learn the brake button.