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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

    Or like this.

    So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

    To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird.






  • At to end of the day it comes down to this:

    Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity in a battery farm?

    Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?

    I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.

    EDIT: I guess there’s a third factor which is transmission. We could build transmission cables between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, is it cheaper to build and maintain enormous HVDC (or even superconducting) cables than it is to do either of the two things above? And how do governments feel about being made so dependent on each other?

    We can do a combination of all three of course, picking and choosing the optimal strategy for each situation, but like I said above I tend to think that one of those strategies will be disproportionately favorable over the others.


  • Why would any of this be about you personally?

    Uh, hello? Do you want to think about why I wrote that? Do you need me to explain to you the idea that other users of the extension are mostly self interested but it is in their best interest to cooperate and share information if the extension is bad? That the greater the number of people with access to the source code the less likely it is that some subset of them could cooperate against some other subset? And therefore the more people looking at the source code there are, the less you have to trust any single person? You know, the same reason you won’t follow a single person into a dark alleyway but are comfortable standing in a crowded street? Because the first subset being “everyone”’ and the second one being “only you” is an extreme case that is basically impossible to happen, just like the Ohio conspiracy? Do you understand what a negative example is or are you gonna comment back “wow I can’t believe you think Ohio doesn’t exist and everyone in the world is out to get you, you must be a paranoid schizophrenic”?

    I honestly can’t take you seriously when this is your view of security

    This is the view of the majority of people that work in netsec. There’s a general sentiment that we should be reviewing code more, relying less on single-developer projects, and getting reproducible builds for everything, but nobody serious thinks that access to source code is a bad thing and usually it’s regarded as a positive.

    So in that sense uBlock is kinda bad because Gorhill does the vast majority of the work, but it would be even worse if it was closed source on top of that.

    "we caught em once so the system works”.

    As opposed to your system where you throw your hands up and say “you’re screwed either way, nothing you do matters, just admit it and give up!”, which has famously done so much good in the world.


  • I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public

    There’s no ‘in theory’ about it.

    I’ve actually had an extension I was using be revealed as spyware (it was hoverzoom, I immediately switched to an alternative afterward).

    I don’t read every line of every piece of software I use because that would be impossible, but I do actually look at some of it and modify it to suit my needs. It was because there are many thousands of people like me that do this that the problem in hoverzoom was caught. It’s been ten years, so I don’t have the best memory of the event, but I think it only took a few days to catch it as well, despite the fact that the offending code was left out of the GitHub repo and was only in the compiled extension.

    The state of open source isn’t perfect (not everything has reproducible builds yet) but in general I ‘trust’ that every other programmer in existence isn’t in on a conspiracy to screw me over specifically.





  • Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise “How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah…”

    Here I’ll answer the the “why” right now:
    A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn’t the best country on earth at literally everything. They’re also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and “gay” to drive a smaller vehicle.

    So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?

    B) This is a population that’s addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.