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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There’s no committee that approves words being added to the English language. Anything that’s understood by the group that uses it is a real word. We make up new words and change the definition of old ones all the time; dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.

    That doesn’t stop the concept of ‘agentic AI’ being a pile of bullshit being peddled by snake-oil salesmen, of course, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be permitted to make up new words.


  • I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.

    That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.

    Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.


  • From the article, sounds like the company founder is a complete bell-end, had no clear vision and kept changing his mind on everything. Half the games developers in Edinburgh probably used to work for Rockstar and will know all the ins-and-outs of developing a GTA clone, but if you keep fucking them around then you’ll end up with a mess.

    From the reviews, sounds like even when it’s not being a buggy mess, it’s boring and the plot is completely stupid. You can hotfix the bugs and performance issues away, but if the underlying concept is shite then you can’t really polish that into something good.


  • Isn’t the default installation of Ubuntu to BTRFS? In which case, you should have an @ subvolume with Ubuntu that’s mounted to /, and an @home subvolume that’s mounted to /home.

    Make a new subvolume, install a new operating system into it, and choose that subvolume in the bootloader, should be able to have Ubuntu and ‘your favourite OS’ (I use Arch btw) living side-by-side with the same home directory.



  • Yeah, that’s UK. We’ve a million streets like that, those trees in the park-looking bit opposite. I’d imagine the house with the bins is a hotel or a B&B, something like that, because otherwise it would be odd to have so many the same colour - green is compostable and black is ‘bottles and cans’ where I live, and you normally just get one of each.

    Don’t know what the green stripe on the road is. Our cycle lanes don’t look like that, aren’t that colour. I’m guessing it’s some “who’s allowed to park where in London” thing, residents-only or something like that. They’re a strange bunch, Londoners.


  • Well, there are some ‘poorly optimised’ games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I’m struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that’s the joy of Unity, though.

    I think a lot of the problem is that we’re long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There’s games that cost ten times as much and which don’t really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as ‘badly optimised’ since they’re chasing the very latest graphical shinies.

    I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I’m not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from ‘charmingly simple’ to ‘functionally realistic’, but I’d not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.


  • As well as being able to ‘rent’ disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.

    In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.


  • Yeah. Being able to ‘rent’ games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don’t need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.



  • addie@feddit.uktolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldMinimum specs
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    23 days ago

    I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The ‘fix’ was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.

    Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.


  • Reads like Intel will be using Nvidia’s stuff for integrated systems, and doesn’t say anything at all about discrete graphics cards.

    If you’re integrating a GPU, then it’s going to be either for a laptop, in which case performance-per-watt and total die size are very important, or it’s for a generic business PC, in which case ‘as cheap as they can get away with’ takes over. A B580 might be the best mid-range graphics card, but those aren’t the areas where it shines. Using someone else’s tech makes sense.


  • I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.

    As such, it’s completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D’n’D notes, maps for games that I’ve been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you’re meeting someone - they can see you’re just making notes and writing to-dos.






  • addie@feddit.uktocats@lemmy.worldSpeed, I am speed
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, but that one doesn’t have the right gear on. Section 4 of the laws of the game say:

    3(a) For ease of identification, players’ clothing must have the numbers 1 to 13 with additional numbers for the substitutes.

    4(b) A player’s normal gear shall consist of a numbered jersey of distinctive colour and/or pattern, a pair of shorts, socks of a distinctive colour and/or pattern and studded boots or shoes.

    4(f) Studs on boots or shoes shall not have sharp edges or pose a risk of injury to other players.

    If there’s one thing I know about cats, it’s that their booties have sharp edges that pose a risk of injury. That cat is going to get a red card as soon as it enters the playing field. Only language some players understand.