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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.





  • You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

    The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlplease
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    2 months ago

    It does ask, but often the Yay, thanks for changing my setting that I didn’t ask you to change button is much more prominent than the Wtf I didn’t ask for this put it back how it was button, so people think they’re being told rather than asked and just confirm it without realising they had a choice. Also, a lot of people just click the Next/OK button without reading and are surprised by the consequences. It’s not a major difference than just changing the setting of people don’t realise they’re being asked to opt in and can therefore opt out, but it is a bit of a difference.


  • A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

    If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.




  • It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

    The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

    Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.



  • If past support questions showed up in searches, then more users would be able to help themselves and would never need to ask for support, so it wouldn’t matter as much what platform it happened on.

    Personally, I think it would be good if support discords were all bridged to matrix spaces (currently doable, but matrix needs locking down more than discord to stop spam as the tools to prevent and remove it are worse) and the matrix history was archived somewhere search engines could index it like mailing list archives are (currently not doable). That approach would let users use what they want without forcing anyone else to, and keeps self help as easy as it was in the days of forums.


  • I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

    Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

    If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlGame difficulty
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    4 months ago

    Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.







  • Fixing the script extender itself won’t take that long as it doesn’t need to hook that many functions (although depending on how much free time people have and whether there are any surprises, it could still take longer than most people expect). Fixing all the mods that depend on it will take much longer, as between them, they hook lots more functions than the script extender itself, and with this update, it’s not just a case of most functions being the same, but at a slightly different address (as was typical with creation club updates, which tools could help with), but instead lots of functions have changed slightly due to using an updated compiler, and lots of functions have been inlined differently (so instead of just existing once, they get copied into every function that uses them, and then optimised differently in each place based on the surrounding code).