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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I dunno, maybe trying to revive your multi-player shooter franchise into one of the most monopolized, overexposed genres in gaming history is kind of a high-risk move with little potential for returns. Kind of like trying to make a WoW clone while WoW was at its peak, which dozens of companies did and then all went out of business.

    Damn, it’s almost like making a game that requires a million active players at all times, when you have no name presence or existing player base to draw upon, is kind of a stupid terrible business decision.

    I’m no business or gaming genius, but I feel like I would have done something a little safer and more sustainable. Maybe use your Starseige IP to make a single-player focused mecha game? Haven’t had one of those in a while. The last one was… Armored Core 6? One of the best selling and most critically well received games of last year. Yeah, who’d want to tap into that market with a brand new mecha game to ride on the still hungering appetites of AC6 players?

    No no, Better stick to making another fortnight clone, that certainly hasn’t burned anyone (including themselves!!!) before.



  • This kind of information is all suppressed now, but early on when Facebook only had likes, there was a lot of discussion on how downvotes weren’t really needed. It was believed that people engaged more with content they enjoyed, and ignored unfavorable content.

    This is wildly wrong. People obsessively engage with content they hate, to the extent that it probably makes more sense to only have a down vote button. Everyone knows that now, and the big sites uses psychological studies funded by casinos to gamify engagement, entirely in the pursuit of click-pennies.

    What do votes mean? On lemmy it seems nothing. On other sites they mean revenue for the owners.


  • How maximize productivity and get rich at work:

    1. Steal someone else’s labor
    2. That’s literally it!
    3. Dont worry, you can call it other things: hiring a PA to do 90% of your work for half your pay, laying off workers for AI/contractors, quietly pushing off team projects entirely onto the team, reading “productivity” books in your office all day while interns take calls, just get creative about not doing any work!


  • Fun but silly and reductionist. Daoism could be any of the four colors depending on how you think about it.

    The Way is just the way, soft-supernatural determinism, life is without inherent meaning.

    Or, The Way is the objectively correct way for things to be, and they suffer when they deviate from that, which they are allowed to do. Objective, probably supernatural too to make sense.

    Fully supernatural, one could view the Way as descriptive of the flow of the mystic energy, split into Yin and Yang, whose combined interplay forms the universe, and “flowing” with that energy is the Way, which is also the meaning of life.

    Or, The Way cannot be told because each being has it’s own Way which can only be found through experience. The Way is Subjective, but still True.


  • Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

    I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

    “Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.





  • I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

    Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.



  • I, like most of the millenial lemmings it seems, am not shocked about this. I remember what Dubya said as president, the daily evils. I would have never thought it could get worse and then we got Trump, and I think it all does echoes out from 9/11. If there are future historians, 9/11 is going to be the pivot that this entire century stumbles over, probably leading directly to WW3 any day now.

    But when I see articles like this, (in the Atlantic ofc, always this one or the NYT) my nostrils fill up with the smell of consent being manufactured. Has the shadow council decided that we shall war with the Saudis now? With Russia and China just flat-out taking land now, has the US decided to extend it’s “protection” more directly over a few strategic areas?



  • But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

    And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

    But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

    He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

    The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.




  • I’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

    We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

    I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.