Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

My gender is a null-pointer.

Only if it's performance sensitive. Otherwise you're wasting programmer time both writing and reading the code, and you've made it less maintainable with more complexities where bugs can creep in.

The vast majority of the time you can afford a few wasted bits.

Honestly though I don't quite understand why a compiler couldn't optimise this process. Like it knows what a boolean is, surely it could reduce them down to bits.

Honestly it's not that Gabe or Valve is a FOSS champion, it's just that FOSS is the only viable alternative to a potential Windows walled garden, so it's what they used.

If SteamOS plays a significant role in killing Windows, the credit will still belong to the FOSS movement. They are the ones that laid the ground for SteamOS to stand on, and they are the ones who ensured it couldn't be fenced in once more.

I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.

If your character dies in space, they're dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you're confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.

It's very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that's done you can retire them or keep them going.

It's very open to how you want to play.

Oh! Also, if you're trying to do your character's big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.

I mean, I don't know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It's a simulation game built very much on "Things are what they are," and they know this has deep implications.

Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn't "noita (sheep)", I was just "sheep". The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.

If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you're struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.

Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.

The existence of AfD proves that laws banning fascism simply don't work. The entire strategy is designed to undermine and overthrow representative liberal democracy, which is why it is so adept at worming its way around the legal system and coopting positions of power.

My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.

Beware though, it's quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.

Also the wand-building is complex, it's like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I've never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It's so easy to do, it's a rite of passage for any new player.

Some people don't like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.

I... stopped playing after that one, I'll be honest. But I will return.

And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that's kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can't die, you feel like you've soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.

10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.

Is the CEO trying to short the stock or are they just that out of touch?

I noticed that too, but they are coprime with one another and they aren't divisible by or into 10, so they would definitely create repeating digits. Could've used 1/3 for the same effect though.

I just tried and it's a pi approximation, which makes more sense.

These people just want to talk about gadgets and none of the political implications, even though those implications are unavoidable. They are the classic centrist "apolitical" people who don't realise they have politics, but they're just default status quo acceptance and ignorance of oppression.

This is just an old man yelling at clouds. If the mods of this sub wanted to change the topics, they could, but it would probably tank the sub. The people complaining could start their own sub with their own rules, but I'll bet it's not nearly as popular. Plus it takes work, and people who think it's a good use of their time to passive-aggressively whine about a sub they don't maintain aren't going to do that much work. They're not cut out for it.

The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead

If the gif hadn't already sold me on this then that would've pushed it over the line. I am seeing this.

Maybe it's a commentary on how any system of domination is going to coalesce into a centralised hierarchy of domination which will always be more fragile than a non-coercive system.

Or maybe it was lazy TV writers who needed to put a face on the threat so audiences "got" it.

But I can still apply my aggressive reading.

Yeah, the other two are so iconic I gotta know who else made the cut.

What if I told you that television shows were dangerous? It's true. In the year 2000, four out of every five injuries occurred in a home that owned a VHS copy of Robocop III. Someone might say, "That's compelling Robocorrelation, but that data alone does not suggest Robocausation." Fine. But maybe your first instinct was to say, "Robocop III is a movie, not a TV show, you fucking dumbass." If so, then congratulations, idiot, you're a Technical Genius. You're smart enough to spot a technicality, but too dumb to know everyone else did too and it was light years away from the point. You're the kind of person who tells your doctor, "Um, it's Chief Chirpa?" when he tells you that getting the Wicket doll out of your asshole will require surgery. "And, um," you'll add, "it's an action figure? Maybe you should have gone to a non-stupid medical school."

The nice thing about being a Technical Genius is that it feels like proof you're smarter than everyone. They can say you don't "get it" all day, but they're the imbeciles who think Robocop III is a TV show. Look at it like this: You are the only one in the history of Koala Times Bus Tours to contract syphilis from a koala bite. You might be embarrassed, but at least you aren't like those other fools screaming "Don't touch the koala bears!" when they are in fact marsupials. I mean, if koalas were actual bears, your whole face would be missing, not still here and covered in pulsing chancres.

Technical Geniuses reach maximum annoying when they decide that pointing out technicalities is a sense of humor. For instance, if you announced, "My wife is pregnant and we're having a boy," a Technical Genius might quip, "Well, technically only women can have babies. Unless you count the Chief Chirpa action figure currently breaching my anus -- um, which you should, since it is the dictionary definition. Heard of it? Hey, everyone! This idiot with no dictionary is watching me shit out a Chief Chirpa, and he doesn't even know which gender gives birth!"

That is so good to play with my kids. Another in a similar vein is Spider Heck.

You know why villagers cause so much lag if there's too many and they're allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just... recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.

You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you've got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.

But they don't do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.

Honestly the big mistake Starship Troopers made was making them win the fight. The only thing a fascist understands as a repudiation of their worldview is if it is shown to be weak, but beware, that will piss them off.

And funnily enough, most corporate movie studios aren't going to take a risk like that. Having a movie where we follow human protagonists to their defeat at the hands of aliens is not ever going to fly in most of the conservative US, so the studio will play it safe and pander to the fascists.

Almost like fascists' entire thing is just to worm their way into influence within a liberal capitalist democracy, and their actions are tuned very well to that end.

It looks like OP posted it because they think it's just straightforwardly funny, which is a little bleak.

I hate it, but as a person with a lot of technical requirements on my software and system, there are use cases that I simply cannot use linux for. I'm developing a mod for Satisfactory right now, and a conversation I saw in the community was about how nobody has ever gotten the dev environment running in linux. That and other use cases make it virtually impossible for me to switch.

And dual booting is a non-starter. I'm not going to reboot my entire system just to check my email because I don't trust windows with my login details. That's absurd. I need access to those things all the time and I'm not going to keep a second high-maintenance system on hand out of a sense of principle.

Virtualising is also a non-starter because I need every little bit of performance I can get out of my machine, and again, operating a second high maintenance system which the original system now sits atop an extra stack which itself requires maintenance... yeah, no, I have things that need to be done. If one day I can afford to have a second gaming machine set up to tinker with then maybe, but that's asking a lot.

The user unfriendliness of linux is not a selling point. If you want to make an actual difference to our technological ecosystem and break the windows monopoly then it should matter to you that most people aren't technically proficient enough to use linux without extra help, because that guarantees it's never going to succeed at that goal.