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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Oh, grapefruit. I didn’t think gfuckfruit was very likely.

    Don’t suppose it has the same work-around as Dark Souls? In a game with a serious medieval theme, it does of course censor all knight-themed characters to eg. K***ht Solaire or whatever. Unless you change the system language during character creation. Then you can play with any swear in your name you like.




  • Most of the laptops I’ve had open lately have had about the top third be the motherboard and the bottom two-thirds be battery, with maybe some ports and speakers tucked down the side. So I’d expect that last of replacements to include the battery, too.

    I might check whether the hard drive survived - a decent M.2 is small, expensive and reusable - and maybe the RAM if it’s not soldered in.



  • I’d imagine that they’re unproductive because of the long hours that they spend in the office. It’s been a source of mystery to me (European) how our offices in America manage to put in 60 hour weeks every week, often with a crazy commute before and after, and yet never seem to make fuck all progress on anything. Better to concentrate on how to be as productive as possible for time that you are there, than to fetishise the total amount of time?





  • If that bag is about the same size as her head, which for girls averages ~50 cm circumference, then there’s about 2 litres of uranium there. Uranium’s density is 19g / cm3, so that’s about a 40 kg bag she’s lifting in one hand. Strong girl!

    We can also determine that that’s a bag of U-235, because the critical mass of U-233 is only 15 kg, and she’d be in the middle of a mushroom cloud otherwise.


  • Having had one of the old Windows phones with a keyboard dumped on me at an old workplace, can confirm it’s completely possible for a phone to have a keyboard and be a complete piece of shit.

    A good phone with a good keyboard may have some use cases. If you do a lot of writing but not any more computing power or screen space than a phone has, plus you want to be doing that on the move, then yeah. For me, can shitpost on forums using my phone in my spare time, and dealing with on-call work issues - having multiple tabs of Jira and Slack open, for instance - just isn’t really practical on a small screen.

    If your job is very email-centric, then yeah, sure. Blackberry were very good for just having the stuff you need - email, vpn, ‘corporate’ office documents - in a form that worked.




  • Mona Lisa is, alas, a terrible example. It’s a (small) painting famous for its very finely blended brush strokes, and yet it’s behind two layers of protective glass, a barrier about five metres away, and there’s generally about ten thousand tourists queuing up to see it. It’s something you go to have seen, rather than to see.

    Unless you wanted an example of a retro game that you play to have said you’ve played it, not too actually play, in which case it’s a superb example. Plenty of games that were legendary at the time but who’s gameplay doesn’t hold up any more.

    The Louvre has some massive rooms full of Raphael masterpieces and Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” just down from the Lisa - those are well worth seeing in the flesh, big pictures that reproduction doesn’t do justice to.



  • But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?

    Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.

    Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn’t need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it’s just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost