• 0 Posts
  • 155 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • That’s how taxes work, yes, and I consider them valuable. There’s a lot of work in actually deciding what work needs to be done, finding the people to do it, negotiating prices, things like that. So yes, I do think “the Lord” is adding a lot of value and making the whole operation possible in a way that probably wouldn’t work if you had everybody just trying to agree on how to spend the money and split the costs.

    I will also point out Valve provides not just the platforms, but also some libraries for game development, including a networking library with NAT punchthrough (which is why on steam you can right-click a friend and join them, even on small indie games, without the game devs hosting their own servers for that) and a library for input handling (though less mandatory, but if used it makes input remapping in steam better integrated).

    Another thing to note is that the value provided can be experienced more directly - if you want to try a great website/store that, to my understanding, doesn’t take any cut while providing hosting, try playing some games from itch. Depending on your gaming habits you might not notice much of a difference, and more of your money would go to the devs, but you might sorely miss some features like cloud saves, steam networking, steam input, proton, automatic delta/incremental updates.


  • I think most of the work is in the fact that there often isn’t an “equivalent call”, and it can be quite a lot of code to make it work. One funny thing is the whole esync-fsync-ntsync issue, where synchronization is done differently on Linux and on windows, and translating it was a big performance hit, and difficult to do accurately. If I understood correctly, esync, fsync and ntsync were a series of kernel patches implementing additional synchronization code in the kernel, with ntsync actually replicating the windows style.



  • Framework let you swap everything

    I think there’s still a pretty big asterisk on that, because laptop parts are generally not built to be swappable… So I don’t think you can swap the CPU without the rest of the mainboard, and some parts like the CPU cooler are probably tied to the specific variant of mainboard and need to be swapped together if you want to switch CPUs.

    They do let you swap out parts that are reasonably swappable, so it’s pretty much a guarantee you’ll be able to upgrade storage and memory, and even where you can’t swap to different parts they make sure you can replace broken parts more granularly, so it still seems like a good deal.






  • Now it seems every tutorial I see is really just clicking around in a gui. Very little actual typing of code, which is the part I actually find cool and interesting.

    Not sure where you’re seeing “just clicking around in a gui”, but if you like computer games, there’s some fun gameplay you can have while coding. Some of those very much contributed to my experience.

    BitBurner is a free idle incremental programming game, where you write scripts to hack things to make money to begin with, progressing onto both progressively more complex mechanics (how about automating a manufacturing corporation with a script?) and utility scripts to automate things you’ve been doing manually.

    If you like Minecraft, there’s fun to be had with ComputerCraft, scripting things in Lua. With some add-ons (Plethora IIRC) you can access chest inventories via cable and transfer items between them, and set up your own fully automated storage system with recursive autocrafting, as just one example.

    Or how about modding games - if there’s a Unity game you enjoy that doesn’t use IL2CPP, like Risk of Rain 2, it’s very moddable using C# and interacting with Unity APIs, and for advanced stuff modifying the underlying IL that C# compiles to. Quite a lot you can learn, and if you stick to pure code mods to begin with, not that hard to get started - though code mod means nothing like new items, new enemies, new characters, buildings etc. since adding models/textures/sounds tends to be more involved.



  • This is certainly an odd suggestion, and not what you’re really asking for, but makes me think of Space Station 13. It’s a janky round-based multiplayer roleplay/social intrigue game. It’s free, and the game is opensource (though not the engine), which also leads to there being many servers with unique variations. It’s cheating to suggest a multiplayer game when talking about single player natural language processing games, but using actual players is probably the easiest way to pull it off.

    The reason it reminds me is because on a roleplay server, you’ve got something like 20 people, each with their job to do, talking to each other, talking on common radio, etc. - and if you’re lucky, a player playing as the station AI, complete with a (modifiable) lawset they have to follow, Asimov’s laws style. And of course, a few antagonists that have objectives to do.

    If you’re curious, I personally recommend BeeStation, though there are a lot of fine choices for the server, just maybe stay away from the 18+ ones.









  • I believe they’ve made the point that it’s not chrome’s fault, but the site’s/user’s - images displayed on websites should be webp to benefit from optimizations for displaying images, but download links should be a different format. The error would be either the user downloading the images from the display instead of the download (including from sites that do not offer images for downloading purposes?), or the website not including separate versions for download where relevant.

    I’m not necessarily sure if that’s a good take, but that’s my interpretation of what’s being said.