China doesn't care. They'll betray anyone in an instant, because they're fascists masquerading as the "party of the people".

The fact that there are so many pro-China supporters on Lemmy that want this shit makes me sad. Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad (same people), Hexbear...

So the problem is that white noise doesn't compress very easily.

Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that's extremely noisy it's really hard to compress because that's not what the algorithms were designed to do.

This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

A middle ground would be banning these "podcasts" and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn't cost any bandwidth at all.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you've been around these kinds of dogs before. It's not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You've seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I'm sure. It's why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don't have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That's not simply because of "a poor owner", although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It's because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They're too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can't rely on humans to keep them under control.

It's not the dogs' fault, mind - it's their instinct. But that doesn't mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo's market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft's market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn't an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That's a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would "only" cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn't necessarily the price; it's the regulators.

Ugh, CAD. I thought that webcomic died a decade ago.

I'm surprised you can write a 14-year-old's name on your crotch and send her a dick pic on your own forum, yet years later people still find your comics and share them.

Google does the same.

I don't use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn't take "no" for an answer; it's a constant nag.

Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn't even let you paste without formatting.

Unity is a game engine that is frequently used by mobile app developers and indie gamedevs. It's lightweight and easier to learn than its main competitor, the Unreal Engine.

Sometime within the last year, Unity adjusted their terms of service. It used to state that you were only governed by the TOS for the version of the Unity Editor you used. If you disagreed with a new TOS, you could use the older terms as long as you didn't update the Unity Editor. This clause was silently removed a while ago, without replacement. Nobody noticed.

This week, Unity announced they are changing how they charge for the use of their engine. It used to be you had to subscribe to Unity's developer accounts monthly if you were selling your games - this is how Unity made money. Unity has changed it so that you still have to do this, but they are getting rid of the cheapest plan (now the cheapest plan is $250/month) and Unity is now charging $0.20 every time your game gets installed. This is applied retroactively, to every game that has ever been made in Unity.

So if someone buys your game, installs it, then reformats their hard drive and installs your game a second time. You now need to pay Unity $0.40.

If you are selling your game for $1, then you effectively pay $0.30 in platform fees and $0.40 to Unity, meaning you only made $0.30 yourself. There were open questions about how this would work with GamePass, Humble Bundle, etc. - Unity has said they'll just charge Microsoft (or whoever is the distributor) instead, without giving any details as to how this works.

This also means if you sold your game in 2012, you are now paying Unity $0.20 any time someone decides to reinstall your old game - even though at the time you were bound by a different EULA, which Unity now says is invalid and they can retroactively change the terms of.

People are saying this isn't legal, but indie devs don't have the money to throw at lawyers. Bigger corpo places do, but they also likely have a special contract.

People are understandably upset by this, as they are now going to be on the hook for money they don't necessarily have. This is a threat to their livelihoods and many games are just going to remove their games from sale rather than risk losing being on the hook for a bunch of money. This means you won't be able to buy a lot of indie games in the future.

FWIW, CashApp Taxes (formerly Credit Karma Taxes) is free for state and federal.

EA is not a believer in the sunk cost fallacy.

I'm a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).

They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.

This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There's an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn't like movie tie-ins one day.

There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.

Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.

Revenue, not profit.

In other words - Twitter would lose even more money. And they'd lose it to people that can take it straight from their bank accounts. 6% of it, to start with.

So $0.48 of every blue checkmark would go straight to the EU.

I would have tried it if I could trust Google to maintain a commitment to something for longer than a couple years (at best).

2138, year of the Linux desktop.

I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.

I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.

I don't get paid once a month. I get paid every 2 weeks.

At a prior job, I got paid every week.

Yearly is a good baseline, and also helpful for taxes (which Americans have to do by hand because of tax preparers lobbying against the government doing it for us).

Decimal time exists, thanks to the French Revolution.

There are 100 decimal seconds in a decimal minute, 100 minutes in a decimal hour, and 10 hours in a decimal day. Each second is slightly shorter than a SI second.

EA's been doing layoffs all year. They announced back in May that they're cutting 6% of all positions across the company. This is likely part of that, since the layoffs will continue through September.

https://lemmy.world/instances

Replace it with your instance domain.

Benefits matter, too.

I'm in the AAA gaming industry. EA laid me off earlier this year, and so I wound up looking for work elsewhere.

I've learned that really - the pay doesn't matter if you hate your life every day. If I wanted good pay, I would learn COBOL and write software at a bank. What matters the most is the quality of the team you're working with (primary), and what benefits your employer has (secondary).

If Meta were to call me up and say "Hey, we want you to be on a team with the greatest coworkers you've ever had," then I'd at least hear them out. What is their culture? Do they believe in crunch? How do they handle sick days? Vacations?

And yes, WFH is part of that, too. But if they were willing to pay to relocate me, buy me a house near a metro station... yeah, I'd take it.

But if they were to offer me that exact same deal - except there's no guarantees about production schedules/timelines, there's the "bus problem" (where the project couldn't survive someone important being hit by a bus), there's a lot of crunch (or just bad experiences from friends who've worked there... Blizzard offered me a sweetheart deal and I said no because of that history)... I'm less likely to want to bite.

And everyone has different preferences. I've known some people who love the office. I don't mind it myself, with the right group. But everyone has to make their own call.

As long as there's a shared skeleton, you can make any model work with any animation that has the same skeleton.

So all that was needed to be done was to figure out what skeleton the animations were looking for and then set up an equivalent skeleton for the modded race. Then you can just reuse the same animations the game does.

Fuck tankies!

The article you link says the judge already knew how to code beforehand.

He’s been coding in BASIC for decades, actually, writing programs for the fun of it: a program to play Bridge, written as a gift for his wife; an automatic solution for the board game Mastermind, which he is immensely fond of; and most ambitiously, a sprawling multifunctional program with a graphical interface that helps him with yet another of his many hobbies, ham radio.

Google is shit nowadays, sadly - it used to be you could Google "Tim Buckley Jackie" and see the picture yourself. A girl's name written on his junk near his pubes.

It got out on his forum and he banned anyone who mentioned it. He wound up doing a complete purge of the CAD forums and got rid of half his mod staff. It's not just a 4chan thing; it was all over the internet like... 15 years ago. (Maybe longer?)

I've had the unfortunate displeasure of having seen it one time, so I can vouch that it exists. I can't find it nowadays, but I can find people referencing it:

• https://imgur.io/gallery/64U1u

• https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/liy37w/webcomics_from_rise_to_loss_the_story_of/gn7abwq/

Etc.

If you do the search now you can see that Google removed some results "for legal reasons", which is likely the EU "right to be forgotten" law being used to scrub it. But it used to exist and was well-known for anyone who was on the internet in the long long ago times...

If the good folks on Lemmygrad or Lemmy.ml could read they would be very upset at this comment.

The array of different disabilities is so vast - a controller which works for one player may not work for another.

This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.

The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.

So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.

Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.

I've been saying this for years now.

Within 20-30 years, most things as we know it will be automated.

• White Castle is buying 100 robots that can flip burgers and man fry stations.

• Amazon has shown off a cashierless grocery store.

• Wal-Mart is deploying tech to identify when stock on a shelf is low and was looking at robot stockers.

• Waymo, Uber, etc. are working good progress on self-driving taxis.

• Domino's has a pizza delivery robot they're working on.

• Amazon is deploying its automatic delivery drones.

• Russia is actively using self-driving semi trucks in Siberia, and there are multiple startups working on the problem elsewhere.

• Journalists are slowly being replaced by AI.

• Both WGA and SAG-AFTRA are striking because of the threat that AI will take their jobs in the near term.

• There was that dumb AI lawyer thing a little bit ago.

• Blizzard is replacing concept artists with AI image generation.

And so on.

The point isn't that the tech is good now - it isn't. Wal-Mart didn't keep their stocking robots. The AI lawyer got in a tremendous amount of legal trouble. AI journalism has been rolled back after quality issues.

But do you think the technology will stay this bad?

Like, remember what phones were like in 2003? People still had landlines. The closest thing to a smartphone was a Blackberry (which came out in 2002). 3G networks were brand-new (and spotty). None of it was very good, yet they got better and better and now here we are 20 years later where smartphones are an indispensable part of daily life for most people.

What will automation look like in 2043? 2053? That's within our lifetime. What kind of jobs will today's kindergartners have available to them when they reach their 20s and 30s?

There is nothing to indicate that automation will always be bad forever. There is money to be saved by cutting out the human element and replacing them with robots. It's looking more and more reasonable to invest in R&D that eliminates human jobs, in every industry - from Uber and DoorDash drivers to semi drivers to tutors to artists to cashiers. It's coming, and we have to think about how we're going to support all the people that won't have a job anymore.

Courts have been blocking them consistently. They've been a touch more aggressive, but Congress needs to pass more aggressive laws. Many of these companies are vertically integrated, not horizontally - and the laws aren't really equipped to deal with that.

I got one for saying we should destroy a bridge in Königsberg in the name of Euler.

This is a reference to a famous problem in graph theory. This problem has been ruined since they built an extra bridge. It was an obvious joke in context, to an audience that would understand the joke.

Unfortunately, Reddit's so-called "Anti-Evil Operations" team doesn't look at context and said I was inciting terrorism.

More specifically - see the credits by any means necessary.

You do not need to fight any bosses or even play the actual game, necessarily.

The Pokemon Yellow Any% never has you leave your house.

The Baldur's Gate 3 Any% likewise doesn't have you fight anyone important and is over in less than 5 minutes. (There are Act 2 spoilers. Yes, you can reach Act 2 in under 5 minutes.)

Shego from Kim Possible and Sam from Danny Phantom.

Bookwyrm is a Fediverse alternative to Goodreads. :)

One thing I found especially dumb is this:

Jobs that require driving skills, like truck and taxi drivers, as well as jobs in the sanitation and beauty industries, are least likely to be exposed to AI, the Indeed research said.

Let's ignore the dumb shit Tesla is doing. We already see self-driving taxis on the streets. California allows self-driving trucks already, and truck drivers are worried enough to petition California to stop it.

Both of those involve AI - just not generative AI. What kind of so-called "research" has declared 2 jobs "safe" that definitely aren't?

Why is it called Palestine? What happened to the Second Temple?

This channel used to be great, but ever since she changed her format it's not been nearly as good. She spends so much time now on irrelevant details and pads things out to double the length of what they used to be.

I unsubbed when she stopped in the middle of one of her videos to make a dumb joke about being a weatherperson on TV. Like, the video stopped and it showed her presenting a weather forecast and she tapped the screen like she was stuck inside. I dunno; it just felt like bad taste to make a joke in videos like this, and with half the videos now being padding and fluff I just wasn't feeling it anymore.

It sucks because I used to really like her content in the older format.

All these people forgetting about the Wiggles.

The Wiggles at one point were the highest-grossing Australian band of all time, beating out AC/DC. (I don't think that's true anymore though.)

Football-brains gonna football.

I use KDE Neon as my daily driver (LTS Ubuntu + latest KDE, which is the desktop environment the Steam Deck uses).

I haven't had many issues. For context:

• I have to remote in to my work computer from home. I do that with Parsec, which I have via a Flatpak. Parsec has no issues and works identically to Windows.

• I also have to use a specific VPN. This VPN requires a separate program on Windows, but in KDE it's baked into the OS.

• Zoom is also a Flatpak. It has a few bugs that don't exist on Windows - namely Zoom likes to steal window focus whenever the host joins or someone shares their screen.

• I also installed Flatpak Steam. I had to use Flatseal to give it more access than it had by default, but that was easy enough. You can go through your OS package manager but since KDE Neon is built on Ubuntu LTS those packages don't get updated frequently.

• Most games run fine. Performance is usually a little worse than Windows, but I can still generally hit 60 - just with more dips than Windows has. Satisfactory and Jedi Survivor are the only games where I have seen noticeable issues compared to Windows. Baldur's Gate runs fine.

• Some games are borked. These are usually games that rely on anti-cheat or intrusive DRM.

• Running Windows programs can be tricky. Wine isn't intuitive to use. I usually use Bottles, but sometimes Bottles doesn't get the job done and I have to fall back to Lutris. Lutris is hard to use but generally pulls through. These are all Flatpaks.

I maintain a Windows installation on an old 2 TB NTFS hard drive. Linux gets my 4 TB SSD, but I've symlinked my documents folders to the NTFS drive so I can share things on Windows and Linux.

Sometimes I need to boot into Windows. Generally this is if I'm having issues connecting to my work computer on Parsec (these issues happened on Windows as well), in which case I need to fall back to RDP to go check on my work computer. My employer blocks me doing that from Linux, so I do it from Windows instead.

Otherwise, I usually boot into Windows to play Satisfactory, because it doesn't run well on Proton. Satisfactory's Vulkan renderer seems to implode on Proton as well for some reason; it causes flickering on X and crashes Wayland entirely. The DX12 renderer works but it just isn't as fast as it is on native Windows.

That said, I rarely boot into Windows. Maybe once every 2-3 months? But not beyond that.

Unreal licensing is explicitly tied to the version you use. So if you use Unreal 5.3, you are bound to the license attached to the code for Unreal 5.3.

If that license changes in Unreal 5.4 and you disagree with the new license, you don't need to follow the terms as long as you never move from Unreal 5.3.

What are they going to do? Ban them?

Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I'd do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don't inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it's not like they're going to check without being prompted).

I'd make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.

A bit harder to ship on console, though.

At least Unreal is source-available and you only need to use the license for the version of Unreal you use. If Epic changes their license, you don't need to agree to it and can still ship under the older license.

Godot is a great engine but it isn't a silver bullet. It can get there, though.