@HarkMahlberg@kbin.social
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HarkMahlberg

@HarkMahlberg@kbin.social

Programmer and Airplane Enthusiast.

"You just don't know how AI works" earns you a block.

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HarkMahlberg,
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Underrated burn. Hot damn.

HarkMahlberg,
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The Apple filing criticized what it called an attempt by Epic to make Apple's "tools and technologies available to developers for free."

Wouldn't that be fucking great. Man, if only.

HarkMahlberg,
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I mean... they didn't specify it had to be random (or even uniform)? But yeah, it's a good showcase of how GPT acquired the same biases as people, from people..

HarkMahlberg,
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Not even remotely.

HarkMahlberg, (edited )
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I think you got the wrong takeaway from that story... The character of God rebukes the dead man for not accepting the practical help of other people. It's just framed as though God sent the rescuers to convince the "believes in miracles" crowd that no such things exist.

Consider a simple rewording: instead of "I sent you two boats and a helicopter" you read "Two boats and a helicopter came to save you." This solves your only hangup and doesn't even change the story. Your beef is with the aesthetic component, not the meaning of the story.

HarkMahlberg,
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Added toggle for 'Reduced Motion', removing the swirly background and gyrating card motion

Judging by other comments online people seem to love the aesthetic, but I IMMEDIATELY turned off the CRT, scanlines, and screen shaking settings. It was just too much for me. I'm so happy they're letting me take out the last thing that is fucking with my vision after a long play session.

Changed the first shop in every run to always include a normal Buffoon pack as one of the pack options

I think this is a good change too. Might still be a little RNG reliant, but this definitely helps when more often than not, I restart the run after taking a look at the first couple of shops.

Upcoming blinds/tags can now be seen in the shop immediately after defeating a boss blind/cashing out

Also a worthy change.

Changed Fibonacci - costs $8 instead of $7, because Fibonacci

lol

Changed Seance - Now uncommon and $6, was rare and $7

Awww, I'm disappointed that the Magic TCG reference is now a little less on the nose.

Overall there's a LOT of balance changes in here. I'm a little concerned that LocalThunk might have bitten off more than he could chew. Especially given that the blinds' base values have been reduced to make the game easier. Though, is it to make it "easier" or "less RNG heavy?" I guess we'll find out soon enough.

HarkMahlberg, (edited )
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Your other comments which are the same comment repeated to everyone. I also don't see any logic, just ragebait.

Blocked by OP, lol

HarkMahlberg,
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So they just have to make good enough games to avoid two complete flops in a row. Which is impossible

BG3 made a lot of committed repeat customers for Larian, I don't think it's impossible their next game will sell very well based on name recognition and good will alone. A guarantee? No. But a safe bet.

It’s the equivalent of the rich billionaires saying if you want a house just work hard and buy one. It’s not hard! Why are the poor people complaining?

If this is the source of your rage posting, that's a lot of misguided anger to point it toward Larian. Are we gonna complain about the one-man developer who quit his job to develop Balatro? Yes he was privileged enough to have savings to dig into, but neither him nor Larian are anywhere in the same ballpark as EA, Microsoft, Ubisoft, etc. They're just the wrong people to get mad at.

HarkMahlberg,
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Jakey's production value has skyrocketed, just by shooting the rodeo that is NYC. lmao

HarkMahlberg,
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Balatro also has a game speed setting that greatly shortens the animations. The game basically moves as fast as you can click.

Anyone else addicted to Balatro right now? (www.playbalatro.com)

I’m not usually a huge fan of rogue-likes, but I’ve enjoyed a few, like Hades. I bought Balatro last week and have been absolutely smashing it ever since then. I love the way the game works, each run being so different even within the same framework, and the feeling when your build starts to go off is so incredibly...

HarkMahlberg,
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The hype is real. There's no microtransactions, no multiplayer, it's just about building the best deck with as many synergies as possible and getting the highest score you can. If you played Magic or even Inscryption, you'll feel right at home.

HarkMahlberg,
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It might be a hot take but I think the bgm is actually the weakest part of the game. Feels too repetitive and too short, like Mementos in Persona 5. I legitimately play on mute and put something else on in the background.

HarkMahlberg, (edited )
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The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:

As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.

And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps" that "steals your attention from the content you actually want." Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn't fully gone away.

But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM's can kill that. I doubt <a href is going away any time soon.

HarkMahlberg,
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This is effectively how Kakao argued against Tachiyomi: they provided extensions to websites where pirated manga could be hosted, even if they weren't running the sites themselves. They facilitated piracy, even if they didn't host any pirated content.

I have a profound respect for how RPCS3 has been able to stay above water. They police the community heavily, AND they have a list of games that are persona non grata to even talk about, let alone ask how to get them to work.

HarkMahlberg,
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There are far more important facets to truthfulness and semantics than yes/no questions. If this is the only way you evaluate LLM's, you will quickly fall for confirmation bias.

HarkMahlberg,
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No

HarkMahlberg,
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I think they have so much technical debt that if they tried to move away from their current stack, it would be the end of them, almost overnight. They don't have the manpower and know-how to move to Unreal or Unity or otherwise. If they did, they would have done so by now.

HarkMahlberg,
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This makes no sense. Zork and Asteroids are practically contemporaries. Last of Us and Dota 2, Persona 5 and PUBG, Street Fighter 6 and Baldur's Gate 3, each of these pairs released the same year. We can probably point to as many story-driven games as action-driven games, every single year, since 1977.

On the time scale you're talking about, there's almost no correlation between time and the quality of video game storytelling. If anything, it has been improving (insofar as bigger games with bigger budgets have more grandiose stories being written for them).

HarkMahlberg,
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Better yet. For the price of 2 portal recolors, you can get 1 Baldur's Gate 3.

HarkMahlberg, (edited )
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News to me, what's up with the hardware?

Edit: ITT: a dude so defiantly wrong he uses edits to imply he's the only person making any sense.

HarkMahlberg,
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I'm hardly a Sony Stan, but you can call me one if it makes you feel better when I say... I have no idea what you're talking about.

hardware component shortages that were notably specific

What was specific to the PS5 that wasn't shared by the XSX? The specs of are almost identical. Same AMD processor, same generation and architecture, same amount and type of memory. Any supply chain woes that affected one almost certainly affected the other.

Except for that insane proprietary memory expansion card that Xbox uses that cost $200 per TB. It took them 3 years to come up with cheaper options. Meanwhile Sony just uses off the shelf NVME drives whose price has been slowly decreasing ever since the pandemic.

The PS3 was underpowered

It is well documented that the PS3's weakness was the complexity of it's design not necessarily how powerful it was.

the PS5 enabled and enriched scalpers

This is such a confusing statement, it's Not Even Wrong. You make it sound like Sony built scalpability into the PS5. You're angry at the inanimate object? Not what the awful people did with it? People scalped the PS5 because it was in higher demand, not because it was made of gold.

HarkMahlberg,
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For what it's worth, I have a machine with less than the recommended specs, and as long as you don't mind spending a little time downgrading settings to Medium/Low, I have a fairly playable framerate, usually between 30 and 50. I've only built a couple cities up to 25,000 population, but it's still been fun.

You won't be disappointed by the road tools, they are everything they promised and more. In 15 minutes I can make interchanges that look like I pulled them out of a mod pack. It's obscene. Traffic control is decent for vanilla, but if you were a power user of TMPE in CS1, you might be a bit underwhelmed.

Overall though, there is a desperate shortage of maps and unique assets. As for the game's systems - economy, education, land value, industry - I can see how they were intended to work, but it seems like a lot of boilerplate was added to make the game playable at release. With time - and mod support, Dear Lord - I think it will greatly improve.

Edit: Infrastructurist is a great showing of how the game still has legs.

HarkMahlberg,
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shoutout to swamp yankees

HarkMahlberg,
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Epic chose to spend it's money buying exclusivity deals for games and pissing off consumers, rather than using it to build an actual competitor to Steam as a storefront/game launcher/mod manager/chat application.

HarkMahlberg,
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Sorry, didn't realize we were in agreement haha. I wonder if network effects would kill any real steam competitor before it has a chance, and maybe that's why Epic tried to capture that userbase first.

HarkMahlberg,
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Your point about pokemon disobeying your orders is given more structure in the games, where if you don't have the required gym badges, your higher-leveled pokemon don't see you as a person worth obeying. Then when you get that badge, they fall in line. The point being... might makes right? You command authority only through fighting and defeating enough trainers and their pokemon? That's a pretty problematic conclusion you could draw from that game mechanic.

Krebs on Security: "Using Google Search to Find Software Can Be Risky" (krebsonsecurity.com)

Google continues to struggle with cybercriminals running malicious ads on its search platform to trick people into downloading booby-trapped copies of popular free software applications. The malicious ads, which appear above organic search results and often precede links to legitimate sources of the same software, can make...

HarkMahlberg,
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Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.

Wish granted: that person is now the CEO of AdSense and has a dozen EA's to handle their computer for them.

HarkMahlberg,
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I've seen the headline "Denuvo removed from Game" so many times that I can only imagine that the publisher just doesn't see the point of paying for it after sales drop below a certain point.

You know what, hot take? Shout out to Denuvo, they made a DRM scheme so easy to remove that every publisher inevitably does it at some point or another.

HarkMahlberg,
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I think more likely than Valve going under is Valve getting bought or going public. Both would result in the new owner (a megacorp in their own right, or greedy shareholders, respectively) turning the system into shit to squeeze more money out of it. And new DRM would be foisted onto the system regardless.

HarkMahlberg,
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Thank you for your thoroughly analytical take on the subject. Solid points all around.

HarkMahlberg,
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Demand for zoning means many things in Skylines 2. If someone builds a house in your city, someone needs to occupy that house. If nobody lives there after a certain amount of time, the house will be marked as Abandoned and it will eventually collapse, and it will need to be demolished. Demand is driven by how many people live in your city, how many jobs there are, how many workers there are, what their education level is, how many amenities there are, etc. These factors are presented to you in the zoning view. It isn't a calculation you can shortcut: if you force demand to the maximum values, houses will be built and there won't even be enough citizens to occupy them. You need to fill out your city with other zoning types, service buildings, transportation options, and so on.

Infinite Demand for zoning isn't a bug fix, it's a cheat code. The problem may be that how demand is calculated in the game needs adjustment, but maxing out that calculation at all times is not a long-term solution.

HarkMahlberg,
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Legitimately good updates to the shopping cart but holy shit are they overdue.

HarkMahlberg,
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Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers?

Big "Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly" energy.

HarkMahlberg,
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Slap this right into Urban Dictionary. Great explainer.

HarkMahlberg,
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It was disabled for me.

Stranger still, the other screenshot you posted did have the "Allow contacts to add me" checkbox checked, but it only appears when you tap "Add Friends." When you leave that screen and return, the checkbox is always checked. It makes me think it's a setting solely applicable to that screen, like just for the "Find Friends" button, and not to your profile as a whole. IDK if that even makes sense.

HarkMahlberg,
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Did Discord hire Google's laid off UX designers or something? Jesus Christ.

HarkMahlberg,
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So yes: I can possibly know and I have literally read the source code.

Discord, to my knowledge, is closed source, and has not had a source code leak. So taking your word for it, if you've seen Discord's source code, then you work for Discord?

HarkMahlberg,
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Presumably this comment. OP has some back and forth which I can't see for myself because it was deleted.

HarkMahlberg,
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Oh man those animations, I'm glad I wasn't the only one to notice how slow they were. Turning them off helped increase the speed of navigation, but there's still some delay when tapping the DM's bottom bar item specifically. App settings are also in a super unintuitive place now.

HarkMahlberg,
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Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't have thought they meant Android source code but that makes sense lol. Also this is the kind of reply I think OP would have appreciated more than just someone saying "you're wrong, you must have done something wrong."

HarkMahlberg,
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Case in point, Ernest had to take a month off kbin development to handle things in his personal life. I, too, have abandoned open source projects due to lack of interest. I think people incorrectly assume that the internet offers a level of permanence unmatched by real life, when in fact it only highlights the ethereal nature of anything people build.

HarkMahlberg,
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"Whatever you do, don't let Sean go on Colbert again!"

HarkMahlberg,
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The developer is closely linked to Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive, which tests, markets, sells, distributes, and owns the intellectual property of all games by Colossal Order.

You do realize it was very likely not CO's decision to release the game in this state, right? Paradox owns the IP, they're publishing the game, they decide when it gets to ship, or else they won't pay CO. Game companies have absolutely died by going against the publisher and going bankrupt from withheld funding, e.g. Free Radical Design and Lucasarts.

Like have you ever worked as a software engineer before? Clients always set the deadline, and they're almost always unrealistically short time-frames. CD Projekt Red self-published, they had no excuse to release Cyberpunk the way they did. But we're not talking about a developer in charge of their own destiny here. We're talking about a developer with a client: Paradox. You've got the actual antagonist staring you in the face, but you're going to blame the developers?

HarkMahlberg,
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is it still impossible to withdraw staked coins?

Wait back up.

still

Hahahahaha holy shit.

HarkMahlberg,
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It was a major component in playing Death Stranding optimally.

HarkMahlberg, (edited )
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Suck is forever.

Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.

In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.

HarkMahlberg,
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Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I'm digging deep on that one), etc.

HarkMahlberg,
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I thought it might have to do with this but I could be wrong.

https://kbin.social/m/news/t/616338/Man-vs-Musk-A-Whistleblower-Creates-Headaches-for-Tesla

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