Indeed. Don’t comment “what”, only comment “why”. If you’ve written code that looks like a mistake but is there for a reason - poor algorithm, not idiomatic, etc. - then the proper “comment” is a unit test that exercises the business logic behind it, but a one-liner to stop someone from “fixing” it is maybe polite too. Don’t write an essay for private functions; rename them so they’re obvious.
That’s especially valuable information. 3600 rubes who you know are an easy target for scams, and 15 journalists who wanted to see how bad it was and should be easy to filter out.
You might ask how “lesbian vampires in the deep forest of Austria, creepy things happen” could possibly go wrong:
Carmilla has cool vampire powers - unusual ones, since it’s an early vampire book. Her main ability is that she’s a charming liar. The other ones are not foreshadowed, appear once, and then are never seen again. Zero drama.
does some amazing “show, don’t tell” storytelling, but then tells you anyway in case you missed it
massive info dump right at the end where it turns out that the creepy things that happened were the same as what happened to the other girls in the village, ruining the pacing. Should have doled that out throughout the story so that we’d be excited to find out when Laura (Carmilla’s victim) finally realised, you dolt.
Carmilla has gone to great lengths to hide her true grave, so how will we resolve the race-against-time at the end? Well, fortunately we’ve brought a guy with a map that there’s no particular reason he should have it, and we thought to bring the minister as well so there’s no threat, phew.
‘tell you a story that happened to me ten years ago’ should just have been struck out as pointless unless it was the set-up for a twist or something
Not that Dracula is exactly the finest literary work in all history, but:
creepy things happen
old dude with great knowledge turns up about a quarter of the way in, listing all of the vampire’s strengths and weaknesses, which are then adhered to at all times
the enemy is a cunning and dangerous foe, and there are scenes in the book demonstrating this
heroes desperately gather clues while suffering great setbacks, and have a race-against-time to prevent terrible thing, the outcome of which is uncertain and not spoiled in advance. You know, drama.
It’s a shame. You wouldn’t need to change much about Carmilla to make it a truly great book - delete some stuff, reorder the rest, couple of extra scenes. Sheridan La Fanu has a lot of writing talent. But it fumbles a few of the basics.
Hey! Native speaker here. If we:
reformed the spelling
stopped the locals from coming out with any deranged shite that they liked the sound of and made them follow some rules instead
…then it would be a perfectly usable language, thank you.
If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
It doesn’t even weigh a kilogram. It masses one kilogram. It’s weight will be something like 9.8 Newtons.
Got two letter 'e’s in it, and they’re both pronounced differently. To be fair, it’s far from the most divergent spelling-to-saying word in English. Some wrong-looking abomination like ‘meetir’ would be even better.
PS5 has ‘unified’ memory - the CPU and the GPU both read from the same location. Normal desktop PCs have separate memory for the CPU and GPU. That’s incredibly problematic for emulation - you have to keep track of the CPU preparing drawlists and be sure to transfer them to the GPU before issuing draw calls, and conversely, you may have to copy frame buffer data back to main memory if the CPU is used for calculating tone mapping. That’s incredibly slow if you do it naively, and likely to cause crashes and corruption if you don’t have the timing right.
The reason that RPCS3 and ShadPS4 run faster than a couple of frames per second is that they’ve put huge effort into optimising this, and you still have to disable tone mapping on eg. Demon’s Souls, as it brings a game you could otherwise run at 4K/120 to a standstill.
Yes, you wouldn’t have to translate the x64 bytecode into the platform-native equivalent, although dynamic recompilers are pretty good at that. Lots of high-end emulators will include something like Clang’s LLVM and call it a day. But you still have to emulate the platform, and that’s pretty painful.
Conversely, the reason why a lot of console conversions suck, even on powerful PCs, is because they were optimised around GPU memory updates being cheap. Something like the new Doom engine, that has separate paths and doesn’t make those assumptions, runs amazingly on all platforms.
The “rug with concentric patterns” was his Achilles heel for a long time - one of his book collections has a gallery where he’s fouled them up - and I see he’s bust one out in this cartoon. Probably decided to quit with large area of solid colour while he’s ahead.
Hire Big Balls, see great falls.
Well now. Oil refineries tend to be made out of thick steel pipework and vessels, to contain unpleasant chemicals at high temperatures, and they’re designed with blast panels and pressure release systems as they’re somewhat likely to go boom without external assistance. But the whole site isn’t like that
The control room tends to be just a plain old brick building somewhat removed from the main site - you don’t want to incinerate your ops team if there’s a fire.
The Motor Control Centres (MCCs) tend to get warm due to all the switchgear that they contain, which means they’re kept aside, generally in quite thin-walled structures.
Hit either of those, the plant is going to be down for a long time.
If you’re looking to render the refinery unusable, you either need enough boom to wreck inch-thick steel to the extent you can’t just weld it up again, or enough precision to hit something irreplaceable.
That’s the reason that consumables and money don’t carry over between levels in Thief: The Dark Project. No point in hoarding stuff, you might as well use it. Except of course that if you’re good, you don’t need to use any items at all - not even the blackjack.
Need to stop and stare at this image for twenty minutes and listen to chiptunes before I continue scrolling Lemmy, be an old-school gamer again.
Electric cars just move the power generation elsewhere - often a gas- or coal- powered plant. Yes, large power plants can have better treatment of waste gases, for lower particulates and sulphur dioxides. Still produce the CO2, tho. We need robust public transport options, low-carbon power sources like renewables and nuclear, and reduce the number of unnecessary journeys by shopping locally, car sharing, and working from home wherever possible.
Completely agree - let’s stop BBQ’ing the planet. Just need to make lots of little changes, but we need to start.
I know that tuxedo cat look. It’s “I’m going to sit somewhere unbelievably inconvenient until you feed me.” If you’re needing a third one, this one will be your new best friend in exchange for a handful of biscuits, and in fact you will never be rid of the little freeloader ever again.
I think that Unreal’s real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there’s a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you’ll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.
Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can’t blame him there, really. Am not sure he’s the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he’s more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.
It is. Oldest part of my computing setup by decades, and still working perfectly. Also robust enough to withstand ‘cat typing’ - the ThinkPad next to it that I use for work is missing a couple of keycaps
Your standard-issue cat may be able to work a mouse, but mine can do a keyboard…
In fact, I don’t think you could even get tired of punching it.
Which messed-up Scrabble board has two Z’s in it so that you can spell ‘quizzed’ or ‘jazzily’? You don’t get the points if you use a blank…