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Cake day: Jun 14, 2023

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I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?


That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.


Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

  • Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
  • Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
  • Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.


Well now. A few things, here:

  • there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × … possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there’s at most 9 × 8 × 7 × … = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.

  • we don’t care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there’s (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don’t need to store ‘the computer’s move’, just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let’s guess we need at most a quarter of that.

  • we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn’t have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the ‘lay it out with tables’ style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing ‘new’ things, though, so it’s in their interest to pass it off?


Yeah - pure functions and immutable data aren’t always the right answer, but appreciating that they’re damn good most of the time is a good first step. Writing obvious code that does exactly what it appears to do at first glance and not one thing more? Your colleagues will thank you when they have to work with your stuff.


Hey, just because 95% of them are worthless, doesn’t mean the other 5% aren’t too.


The side channel resistance includes such matters as ensuring that the cypher takes the same amount of time, regardless of the key, but also such super-sneaky insights as the amount of power used to run the cypher, which can be measured from the CPU temperature. Every bit of the cypher that you can be sure of makes it easier to guess the rest. And even if you coded this algorithm in assembly, the CPU will interpret it as microcode and run that, potentially leaving you vulnerable - this is not straightforward stuff.

Like vzq says, implementing this properly is for a cross-disciplinary team of experts in their fields.


I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.


Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you’ve no idea of the controls.



Am not the pirate that I used to be, but I’ve found that they pretty much work. Cracks seem fine, repacks make a couple of assumptions that tend not to be true on Wine:

  • how folders are arranged

  • leaving out all the additional installers for things like .net, because obviously everyone already has them

I’d usually make a new folder for ‘what you’re installing’, create a new launcher for it in Lutris selecting that folder as the base directory, and then use the ‘run different executable’ option in Lutris to start the installer. Once that completes, you should be able to adjust the config to what you’ve installed, see if it works. Be prepared to try lots of additional installations with WineTricks, particularly .net and directx.

(To be fair, a lot of legit older games need the same in order to work, if you’re installing from CD / DVD and things.)


I remember the days when laptops used to have infrared ports, so that you could connect to the infrared port on your mobile phone for tethered internet. And it was atrocious - always dropping out, even when you’d moved either item. Bluetooth tethering / USB cable tethering is just so much more robust.

I realise that our tech has moved on a lot in the last twenty-or-so years, but I’m struggling to see the use cases that this ‘new tech’ (as described by PC Gamer) would enable. Mobile data and wifi are both fast and reliable, and wired connections are very fast and much more reliable. A 224 GB/s link speed is absurdly faster than most consumer hardware can read or write to disk; if you were hoping to reduce ‘gaming latency’ by holding your phone or laptop at just the right angle, then the benefit would be overshadowed by other delays in the general internet. Providing a ‘secure link’ at this speed (‘quicker and safer than wifi’) would only make sense if you’ve two mainframes in the same room, but for some reason you don’t want to make your data centre look untidy by running fibre optic connections between them.


Well, has the fully Youtube Poop-compliant animations, I suppose. The actual ‘game’ part of the games, if they weren’t so absurdly sluggish to respond to inputs and take such a very long time to load each new screen, would have been indistinguishable from any other completely uninspired, middle of the road platformer of the early 90s. From the gameplay segments of that video, that looks like all they’re aspiring to here, as well.


I decided about three years ago to give “100% Linux” gaming a go for a few months, since I was fed up with Windows shitting itself on a dual-boot system, see how I got on. Never went back. It does help that I’m not in to MMOs or things which require anti-cheat, since that’s a stumbling block, but it’s rare that I even check protondb before purchases now, nearly everything just works and it keeps getting better.


Jerboa has a couple of weird UI issues, like losing your scroll position when you exit a comments thread, and I could do with it having a bit more contrast in the ‘threaded comments’ view, see who said what - it’s a bit pale for my eyes. But it makes some things much easier than the desktop view of Lemmy, like navigating all the federation.


Aye, long term subscriber myself, they do good work. Although I’d have probably linked the ‘everything, newest first’ page:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/latest