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Cake day: Apr 28, 2023

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Huh, interesting. I thought that the primary reason game devs use DRM these days is to specifically keep the first week’s sales as high as possible (since that’s the most easily available metric to judge a game’s success, and also the biggest moment of profit, as it’s usually only downhill from there). To see researchers actively suggest removing DRM after three months seems to confirm this idea further.


That’s not the actual GTA VI logo, but some fan creation. The logo in the actual trailer seems to consist of the standard GTA logo with a colorful “VI” in a bold sans-serif behind it.


Not necessarily – the story might have described a beta version of the OS, in which these interactions worked differently.


Cinny is the closest to Discord in terms of UI, it even has a feature where you can show subspaces within a space as if they’re categories of a Discord server.


To be more specific: most often a game would run its physics calculation at the framerate it’s designed for, like 30 or 60 fps, and in case it displays with a higher framerate, try and interpolate the graphical data based on the physics calculations. It’s possible to make the physics run faster as well, but carelessly adapting things may make things go wrong (a good example is Quake 3, where your jump height changes based on the com_maxfps value).

A racing game that runs its physics at 60 frames per second can, at best, calculate time in 0.016666... second intervals. To have a precise 3-decimal-points clock, a game would need to run its physics calculations at 1000 frames per second.

(It is also worth noting that a game developer can try to interpolate a more precise finish time by looking at the last pre-finish frame position of the vehicle and the first post-finish frame position and calculating at what point “between the frames” the finish line would be crossed, but I don’t know how difficult and/or buggy actually implementing that would be.)


These days there are mods, such as SkyGFX, that let the PC version of GTA:SA match the PS2’s graphical effects, but these obviously rely on GPU improvements that didn’t exist back in 2005.


For comparison, I wonder how vulnerable Flathub (flatpak’s primary repo) is to these kinds of manipulations… Seems like every app manifest there is publicly available and is compiled on their servers, presumably making it easier to spot shady apps and updates, and the submission process requires manual approval.


Okay, the responses here are kinda disappointing because folks here seem to be unaware that (1) Mozilla has already added “AI” info Firefox a few versions ago (to provide machine translations of pages), and (2) the way they did it is very responsible (the whole thing is 100% local, no info is sent to other servers).

I understand that we’re all tired of this whole trend of language models being put where they don’t belong, but from what I see, Mozilla is actually the company I’d trust the most to do it right. (AFAIK, one area where the FOSS world is severely lacking and where Mozilla works to solve it is speech recognition with the Common Voice project, and if they start working on an LLM-based program to do that, I’d welcome it.)


Sounds cool, though I’m a bit confused as to why that is such a big priority given that ReactOS currently aims to replicate Windows NT 5.2 (XP x64 / Server 2003), which did not provide graphical set-up*…

* Technically all Windows versions up until, IIRC, Vista had their install process in two stages: a text-based stage where you’d input the most basic info (what filesystem to install onto, what Windows directory to use, etc.) and a graphical stage once the basic files are installed (where you’d be asked what devices the computer has, whether it’s networked, date/time, etc.). From Vista to the present day, the first stage is graphical as well. ReactOS’ latest release uses the pre-Vista model, but the latest blog posts indicate a move to the more modern one.


If you’re using Linux (or macOS or MinGW or CygWin or MSYS), you can do something like this in the terminal:

xxd -r -ps | base64

The first command will read the standard input and decode hex strings back into raw data, and the second one will do base64 to the output.

If I pass the hex string mentioned in your original post through this command, I get:

Z3nFNDK4ut8Em7nYkkpXhd2IckM=

So, hexadecimal uses 16 characters. Each character stores 4 bits of data (2⁴ = 16).

If you use the 10 digits and 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the resulting encoding is called Base36.

It is a rather impractical format for storing data, though, because for purposes of simple conversion, the number of possibilities should be a power of 2 – that way a program can do (quick) bit shifts instead of (difficult, especially on big numbers) division to determine which character to use. That’s why it’s mostly used to encode numbers, and not large sequences of data.

Base32 is a slightly-smaller variant that can fit 5 bits of data into one character. (2⁵ = 32)

If you add up digits, uppercase and lowercase characters together (differentiating between upper and lower case), you get 62. This is also an impractical number for computer purposes. But add two extra characters and you get 64, which is another nice power of two (2⁶ = 64), letting one character store 6 bits. And Base64 is a common encoding scheme for data.


And when you know how many bits a character can fit, you can calculate how “efficient” the encoding will be and how many characters will be needed to store data. A Base32 encoding will need 20% fewer characters than hexadecimal, and Base64 needs 33.3% fewer.


You can use notification settings to “Minimize” any unwanted permanent notifications – in that way they’ll not show an icon in the tray area. (You can also just disable any notification type, but Android is more likely to stop any background task that doesn’t display a notification.)


If you’re learning Japanese, then “10ten” is very good. It adds a little “puck” you can use to hover over words and phrases to see their dictionary definitions, readings, etc.

(On desktop, it instead works whenever yoy hover your mouse cursor over a word, but on mobile, that’s not a thing. Either way, it’s easy to turn on/off based on your need.)


I guess this is an interesting contrast to Windows, where not only certain characters (like ? or * or |) are banned, but also entire filenames that used to refer to device files in DOS (con, prn, lpt1, etc.)


Not really. . and .. are the only standard directory entries that are added by the system.

Some shells may extrapolate from that by adding ... to go two directories up, but ... can just as well be the name of an actual file or directory.



Seems like more of a human mistake – like one of the designers used a stock image of a clock spiral that was AI-generated…


Most Terms of Service don’t do that, instead asking you to provide a “perpetual” “irrevocable” “transferable” license for your content – and while some absolutely stretch the terms to allow them to use it for things like language model learning or shifty monetization practices, such a license is also legally necessary for the website to function at all.

For “open-source” websites like Wikipedia or OSM, the terms are usually even simpler - you agree to license your posts under the same license that they use to distribute it.

As for Fandom specifically, they seem to mostly operate on the latter model – though you still need an additional commercial use waiver if you want to submit to NC or ND-licensed wikis (which once again goes into the “legally necessary” box).

The same open-source license that lets people edit the wikis and fork them to independent websites without having to ask permission from every single contributor also lets Fandom admins reject attempts to delete or redirect pages.


Ooh, neat… I remember watching the show as a kid, and the remake seems very cool. Reminds me of “Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap” in the whole “seamlessly switch between original and new graphics” feature…


Development hasn’t stopped, it’s just that they haven’t made new releases. I would suggest you install one of the dev builds instead.


If you paste in the complete URL to a meeting (“https://example.org/FourRandomEnglishWords” instead of “FourRandomEnglishWords”) or use the “Open in App” link that a meeting’s web page shows, then there’s no need to.


Yes, the mobile app supports third-party servers, though I wouldn’t call it complicated.

If you want to join a room, all you do is type/paste the full URL to it instead of just the name. “Open in App” functionality will also work regardless of the server.

If you want to host one on a third-party server, you just go into the options and replace the “https://meet.jit.si” address with one of the third-party server. Then when you create a room, it will use that server.


Honestly, with so many departures of staff, including Dan Houser, Lezlie Benzies and Lazlow Jones (who in addition to playing himself in almost every game also writes a lot of what you hear/see/read on the in-game radio, TV and internet), I don’t have high hopes for the game.


IIRC these are the initial colors of the Nintendo Switch Lite. Previously 8bitdo’s controllers were built to look very much like (modernized versions of) Nintendo controllers - like the SN30 Pro and the SF30 Pro looked very much like the SNES/SFC controllers with extra shoulder buttons and analog sticks – but these days they are a bit more careful about potentially infringing on Nintendo’s intellectual property and instead just borrow color schemes.


I heard that in the late 2000s the western gaming press had a very strong dislike for JRPGs, which led to Japanese developers treating the term as derogatory. And while I still think that ideally we’d have better terminology that would try to capture the differences between the games rather than their place of origin (the most famous distinction being that “western RPGs” usually let you create your character and treat them as a blank slate in the story, whereas “JRPGs” usually put you in control of a predefined character with their own motivations and actions in the storyline), I think it’s nice that nowadays there are developers who are actually proud of the term “JRPG”.



Personally I wouldn’t get rid of my primary source of funding without having a ready replacement during a time of financial trouble, but they do them, I guess…


What are your opinions on Xonotic? It’s a FPS that borrows many things from Quake and UT games, features a lot of modes and has an active online community, so I think it could provide a similar feel?


Not to mentiom that Fandom rejects any attempts by the admins of their wikis to move offsite. If you put up links to the new wiki, they’ll erase them. If you start deleting your contributions, they’ll revert the edits.



Very yes. Not only are Steam and Proton usable on distros aside SteamOS, improvements from those regularly flow upstream into Wine, DXVK and also the Linux kernel itself.



For a moment I forgot that “lakh” is a number that means 10000 100000 and was thinking “who are the Lakh Indians”?