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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure customers are falling for it - this is why voting with your wallet doesn’t work. People rage against games that launch in an unfinished state, particularly when they’re full price. Steam reviews often incorporate price point - statements like “don’t buy this at full price” or “this might have been worth it at $20, but this is not a $70 game” come up a lot

    Sales for AAA games are way down, we just saw the biggest failure in gaming history. Casual reading of steam reviews show people clearly have different expectations based on price, Twitter sometimes explodes with anger at specific moves (like Helldivers requiring PSN) and they back off (temporarily), but they always go back to the bullshit

    The feedback mechanism of “voting with your wallet” doesn’t communicate this message. Metrics show purchases, refunds, and active users… That’s what fits on a spreadsheet. They see a game failing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve understood why

    AAA studios don’t want to understand what makes a game succeed or fail - they just want a formula to min-max ROI. They want strong numbers at launch, but they also want to minimize production costs, and they treat costs (like developers) as line items - they learn the wrong lessons, because they aren’t concerned with the creative part of game design. They want to be the next Madden or assassin’s creed, they want to figure out how to get players to pay $70 + micro transactions (or better yet a subscription too), but they also want their employees to be interchangeable cogs they can push to burn out then replace

    AAA gaming is dying from this, but it’s an oligarchy at this point - large corporations are unable to understand nuance or truly innovate - these are things people do when they have autonomy. They don’t do team building or R&D anymore - that’s a gamble that sometimes pays off big, but not in a quarter or two. They aquire then kill off what made the team work in the first place - any individual can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, but by nature they keep the decision making far removed from the people actually doing the work






  • First, I’d argue this was doing business in bad faith - they took advantage of a crisis to jack up profit on staple foods. That’s extremely unethical

    Second, they effectively did collude. McKinley is a consultant hired by Kroger (which owns many different regional chains) as well as their largest competitors and suppliers. They coordinated the price gouging - it doesn’t matter if an algorithm does it or a third party does it, it’s still collusion. Adding a degree of separation doesn’t change the nature of the act





  • Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

    Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

    Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

    You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

    I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management


  • That doesn’t really match the master/slave relationship. The distributed instances aren’t slaved to the master. They’re each doing their own thing, but as part of that they have a hierarchical relationship when it comes to synchronization

    Distributed computing gets more into the concept of swarms. Each piece is autonomous, and the swarm self-organizes. We made up a bunch of paradigms around this that were basically obsolete by the time we needed them - I think the relationship here is leader/follower, but I’ve never heard that terminology outside the classroom

    They’re sharded. It’s like host/mirror, except each mirror is an equally correct part of the real picture

    One of them is the leader, but it doesn’t control the rest of them. It just coordinates them

    When you get into swarm concepts, like sharding or activitypub, it doesn’t make sense to describe the relationship between nodes anymore. The relationship between any two nodes is “part of the same swarm”. You describe the nature of the swarm as a whole, or the behavior of individual nodes



  • Primary/secondary means they’re all doing their thing, but one is preferred. There’s no instruction going on between them

    If you have a primary and secondary web servers, you’ll use the primary first, but the secondary or secondaries are a fallback

    If you have a primary and secondary drive, you have two drives, one of which is more important (probably because you booted from it). The secondary could be a copy or just another drive, either way the OS or a raid controller is managing it, one drive doesn’t manage another

    Similarly, we have dispatch/worker- the difference between that and master/slave is that they’re different things. A master should be able to work without a slave, and a slave should be capable of being promoted to master - a dispatcher can’t do the work and the worker can’t take over if the dispatch goes down

    The funny thing is we don’t use master/slave much anymore, the whole premise is that the slave doesn’t start to do what it does when it starts up. I can’t think of any examples of it in the past decade - other paradigms, with a different relationship and a different name, have replaced it


  • It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

    We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

    It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

    Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently


  • My problem with it isn’t so much their stance or how far they’ll go for it, it’s that they don’t act to achieve their stated goals.

    Factory farming is legitimately horrifying, it’s so deeply wrong that one day we’ll teach children about it in a somber tone. When you start digging into it, it’s almost cartoonishly evil… It just keeps getting worse the more you learn about it

    It also is extremely carbon intensive to produce so much meat, and not very healthy to eat so much

    But if your problem is essentially torturing animals, why is hunting wrong? The animals live free, the ecosystem requires apex predators (which we’ve mostly wiped out), and if it doesn’t instill a respect for the animals you eat, at least it makes you look them in the eye

    If your goal is reducing animal suffering, why are you sitting out there shaming people getting lunch? The problem is production, go after Purdue who forces these conditions as the supplier

    If your goal is to reduce consumption, why do you draw a hard line? People in general won’t accept cutting out meat, but I think most could be convinced to cut their consumption in half.

    You don’t have to have meat in every meal, or every day. You can even be mostly vegan, but have a steak occasionally.

    But too many people demanding everyone meet you where you are or labeling them murderers has led to a taint on the terms. People can eat a meal with no meat and never really think about it, but then feel attacked if you mention it’s actually vegan.

    The problem is vegan and vegetarian culture doesn’t seem to be about harm reduction or even cultural change - it seems to come from a place of moral superiority. The loudest voices screeching at random individuals is what most people hear. The message is “look at this horrible fact about factory farming, this is why you’re a terrible person so stop eating meat right now”

    They make the whole movement hardliner and therefore easily defeatable. I genuinely think it might be astroturfing by the meat lobby