Thrashy

Thrashy, 8 months ago

Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.

Thrashy, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

Energy is only “available” when there is a region of higher energy density and a region of lower energy density, that you can extract work from by allowing that energy to flow from the former to the latter until they are equalized, at which point no further energy can be extracted from that system.

In the case of air conditioning, you can make heat flow “uphill”, so to speak, by applying additional energy from outside of the inside air / outside air system, usually in the form of electricity generated at a power plant. In the very large picture, though, it’s all just moving energy around from other regions of higher and lower densities, a losing usable energy with each transfer. That’s what entropy means.

Veritasium did a really good video on this idea a couple months ago, if you’re interested: youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=bru50t1VYEKXKmKX

Thrashy, 9 months ago

You trying to start a war, or what?

Thrashy, 9 months ago

W/r/t Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t think the bottleneck is the GPU. Act 3 is incredibly ambitious in terms of NPC density, and AI is one of those things that’s still very hard to parallelize.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

I know demakes are all the rage, but I don’t know if this counts. It’s just… the game, but on console hardware from a decade before Portal. That’s really impressive, especially given just how restrictive some of the limits of the N64 are.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.

Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

He’s on the Kansas side, which for all its own foibles is at least not Missouri.

Thrashy, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Priorities will always shift as we move though the different seasons of life, and for sure the launch of a big marquee title that I’m interested in doesn’t have the same drama it did, now that I’ve lived though a couple-few decades of them. I have to say, though, that I still love the experience of being transported to a fantasy setting, or exploring a strange new world with friends, or testing my skill against other players. I’m looking forward to when I can introduce the hobby to my kid, and share that joy with him.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

We’ll need some major spin to control the PR fallout of this leek!

Thrashy, 10 months ago

I hit a difficulty wall in the Wrecker’s Cave and never picked the game back up. So far BG3 has been more forgiving, but Larian games don’t suffer fools gladly.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

I’ve noticed this a lot in comparisons claiming to show that graphics quality has regressed (either over time, or from an earlier demo reel of the same game), where the person trying to make the point cherry-picks drastically different lighting or atmospheric scenarios that put the later image in a bad light. Like, no crap Lara looks better in the 2013 image, she’s lit from an angle that highlights her facial features and inexplicably wearing makeup while in the midst of a jungle adventure. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider image, by comparison, is of a dirty-faced Lara pulling a face while being lit from an unflattering angle by campfire. Compositionally, of course the first image is prettier – but as you point out, the lack of effective subsurface scattering in the Tomb Raider 2013 skin shader is painfully apparent versus SofTR. The newer image is more realistic, even if it’s not as flattering.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

There’s a certain kind of reactionary-left personality that I think is more common in parts of the west that used to be colonial powers, where if you’re far enough along the political spectrum that the mainstream parties all look like different variations on corporatist-fascists, you’re particularly vulnerable to messaging from geopolitical enemies of your own country for the simple reason that they’re opposed to the political structure you’re also opposed to. Here in the US I’ve run into a few such people, and it’s also clear that Russia’s soft-power operations have made efforts to cultivate relationships with the American left wing (people like Jill Stein and others in the Green Party). It’s pretty obvious, though, that they’ve had less success than they have on the right. It takes a particular kind of useful idiot to think, as a anti-colonial socialist or communist, that an oligarchic and socially-repressive right-wing autocracy is actually in your political corner.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

Yeah, you guys have the Winter War and Continuation War relatively fresh in cultural memory, which probably limits the reach of Russian propaganda. Over here, we remember the Soviet Union primarily as our Cold War rival, and neither side of that conflict came out of it with clean hands. For a certain kind of person, the sins of the American CIA and State Department during the Cold War don’t just reflect badly on our government; they somehow also make the Soviet Union, and therefore Russia as its successor state, the Good Guys of the last century of global geopolitics.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

When I read her thread, the first thing that came to mind was that in addition to whatever labor rights claims she could have, there’s a clear potential claim of promissory estoppel with regard to her move back to Canada and some of the statements made about how LMG would support her independent efforts.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

I’m fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.

Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England’s.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

In the AEC field we have Bluebeam as a de facto industry standard for PDFs, and it’s vastly superior to Acrobat in every way for our typical use cases. I imagine it’s a bit harder in other industries, though.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.

Thrashy, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I have no issue at all with utility bots (AutoMod-style assistants, summarizers, unit conversion aids, RemindMe!, etc.) and honestly, novelty comment bots don’t bother me much either as long as they’re not drowning out actual conversation. I’m less tolerant of bots posting links and content, though.

Thrashy, 10 months ago

Alternately, frog vent the bug hole?

Thrashy, 10 months ago

M1 gets most of its performance-per-watt efficiency by running much farther down the voltage curve than Intel or AMD usually tune their silicon for, and having a really wide core design to take advantage of the extra instruction-level parallelism that can be extracted from the ARM instruction set relative to x86. It’s a great design, but the relatively minor gains from M1 to M2 suggest that there’s not that much more in terms of optimization available in the architecture, and the x86 manufacturers have been able to close a big chunk of the gap in their own subsequent products by increasing their own IPC with things like extra cache and better branch prediction, while also ramping down power targets to put their competing thin-and-light laptop parts in better parts of the power curve, where they’re not hitting diminishing performance returns.

The really dismal truth of the matter is that semiconductor fabrication is reaching a point of maturity in its development, and there aren’t any more huge gains to be made in transistor density in silicon. ASML is pouring in Herculean effort to reduce feature sizes at a much lower rate than in years past, and each step forward increases cost and complexity by eyewatering amounts. We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon now, and if there’s going to be another big, sustained leap forward in performance, efficient, or density, it’s probably going to have to come in the form of a new semiconductor material with more advantageous quantum behavior.

Thrashy, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Granted that all we have to go on is hearsay and speculation… but the fact that in one hand Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, while one the other hand former Obama staffers who otherwise would have been broadly aligned with Snowden’s interests in disclosing domestic intelligence operations still speak about him with vehement disdain years after leaving government suggests to me that he sold the Russians something particularly damaging.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

As a corollary, should tweeting on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter be tested to exclusively as X-ing? Just to rub it in?

Thrashy, 11 months ago

the kid that was tracking his jet

The kid that was reposting public flight tracking data of his jet. He’s so fucking petty.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

I mean, who’s to say that the plot of STEINS;GATE isn’t real and SERN CERN isn’t about to unravel the fabric of reality with time travel paradoxes?

Thrashy, 11 months ago

Man, the Puppies’ anti-representation Hugo campaign backfiring into Internet fame for Chuck Tingle was one of the few highlights of 2016. I was at WorldCon that year and the number of people sporting " I Am Chuck Tingle" ribbons on their badges was amazing.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

Speculations indicate that Navi 3.5 might enable integrated graphics with performance comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3070.

Uh huh. Given that the Radeon 780M that represents the current state of the art in Zen4 iGPUs is still trailing a discrete 3050 (by no means a strong performer itself) by about 30% on average, this seems wildly optimistic. Don’t get me wrong, I would love a beastly iGPU, but this seems less like informed speculation and more like fanboy hype.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

The thing about EVE is that caveat emptor is the social contract, and as long as you don’t get your dander up about being pirates or scammed, the “bad guys” are more than willing to help you learn to avoid the next trap. I was once part of an “anti-piracy” roaming fleet that got bored with the quiet night, and ended up jumping a newbie who was hanging out where they shouldn’t have been, tackling his ship, and proceeding to ransom it back to him for the princely sum of 1 ISK while we laughed our heads off in Teamspeak. Then we sent him on his way with a few hundred thousand ISK extra, some pointers on highsec versus lowsec, and the valuable lesson that there were always sharks on the prowl for easy prey.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

I’ve only ever needed to use a tool like Wireshark a couple times, but when I needed it nothing else would do, and the convenience of being able to just download it and go instead of having to shepherd a purchase order through the organization was a lifesaver. It’s one of many reasons why I am a big proponent of open-source software.

Thrashy, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

The technique is not novel (a decade ago IBM even made a stop-motion film with carbon monoxide molecules to demonstrate it, and more than twenty years before that showed off “IBM In Atoms” as a proof of concept) but it’s an interesting application. The real question in terms of application is, can this technique open the door to higher temperature superconductors?

Thrashy, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I’m about 99% certain that the image in the article is some AI-generated nightmare fuel. There’s a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article, and it has this figure showing a few example organoids, which are ~10mm across and look a bit like white mushrooms.

The ethical dilemma posed by a brain in a petri dish is an interesting hypothetical, but probably not one worth worrying about at this point. There’s less brain tissue here than in the average lab mouse, with no sensory inputs and little differentiation relative to a real human brain. The neurons in the organoids are probably able to do as neurons do individually, but they lack the structure or infrastructure required for them to have basic awareness, let alone consciousness.

Organoids like these can be useful for in-vivo study of brain tissue without the ethical troubles of rooting around in somebody’s head now, but that’s about it. We’re a very long way from growing a brain-in-a-jar and hooking it up to The Matrix.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

Not just territory, but social stratification and ingroup-outgroup dynamics are present in nearly every social species of animal. Some are more strict and/or violent about it, but everything from fish to birds to other primate species have social hierarchies, a concept of territory, and a willingness to fight over both. Great apes have been documented conducting violent wars with other troupes over territory and resources.

I have to say that I’ve always found the argument that “X is an tool of control by the rich!” to be reductive. The implicit (or sometimes explicit) corollary is that “X” is therefore arbitrary, artificial, and bad, whereas I tend to think that usually inverts cause and effect. “X,” whether it’s social hierarchies, the concept of property ownership, or in this case territorial boundaries, are more often than not rooted in some innate social instinct that can often be found not just in people but throughout the animal kingdom. The powers-that-be may well be manipulating those behaviors to their benefit, but that doesn’t mean that the solution is to deny that they are innate and claim that we can make a better society if we could only ignore them hard enough. You have to make changes keeping in mind the limitations of the human mind and behavior if you want to create a viable real-world solution.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

Good on 'em. I’m not looking forward to coming flood of terrible reality television, but hopefully between this and the writer’s strike, the people doing the work in the industry can get a more equitable stake.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

I only want it if it comes with a college-level entomology textbook about bees packed in the box with it, like SimAnt had.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

Because a significant chunk of what gets passed off as journalism on such sites is just writing copy – for example, regurgitating press releases, or repackaging the work of another outlet that actually did do the legwork of investigative journalism. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to speed up the task of summarizing some other text for republishing, but I do question the value of such work in the first place.

It’s going to be a long, long time until artificial intelligence can do the work of a true investigative journalist.

Thrashy, 11 months ago

I don’t know if there’s many major outlets that are primarily investigative in the era of the 24/7 news cycle and the accompanying need to always have something fresh on the front page, but at least in the English-speaking world the various newspapers of record (think places like the New York Times or the The Guardian) still have a decent newsroom and publish original investigative pieces. In audio formats, NPR and the various constellations of associated organizations like the Center for Investigative Reporting do excellent work as well. There’s also organizations like Bellingcat that specialize in deep-dive investigations using open-source intelligence, presented in a “just-the-facts” format without editorialization.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

Not necessarily a smoking gun, since it would have been set up to resist pressure from the exterior but suddenly subjected to high pressure from the interior side.

I'm more intrigued by the image I've seen elsewhere of what looks like the titanium mating surface that the from hemisphere bolted to, which would have been bonded to the carbon fiber cylinder section. The photo didn't show a single shred of carbon fiber still attached to the titanium, which suggests bond failure at the interface between metal and composite components. Whether that was the initial point of failure or just the result of the strains experienced by the fragments of the cylinder as it fractured and imploded peeling everything away, I don't know.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

On the contrary, I've long been of the opinion that anyone can claim their slice of the American Dream, just as long as they aren't too picky about who they carve it out of. There doesn't even need to be risk, per se, just some ambition, enough intelligence to know the limits of you can get away with, and a complete lack of shame.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

But that's my point. The only real risk is that somebody with an overgrown sense of morality might think badly of you. As long as you don't cross the line of hurting someone who matters (in the sense of being rich or powerful) you can just reenact that meme of Jason Statham wiping his tears with wads of cash, and get on with the exploitation.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

In the distant future of 2030, social networking between the scattered bands of surviving humans will be facilitated by ham operators bouncing packet radio off the few remaining satellite repeaters, and importing the responses they receive into their clan’s scavenged network via FidoNet.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

the unit conversion bot was a nice QoL feature on the technical subs I tended to hang out on.

Shitty Unit Conversion Bot was good for a laugh too.

Thrashy, 1 year ago

I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it's just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.