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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

    The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

    Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.




  • It’s not a good tool if one party is likely, but not guaranteed, to win without your vote, but is much worse than the other. You should only spoil your ballot if your constituency is has a large enough majority that your vote won’t matter at all, or none of the parties are less bad than the others.

    If you’re voting on the single issue of Palestine in the US presidential elections (not the primaries), then no state has a large enough majority to justify as spoiled ballots, and one party wants to support a genocide while the other wants to discourage it (even if they’re doing a crap job of it), so there is a least bad option to vote for.



  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    5 months ago

    It’s not that clear-cut as cis women with abnormally high testosterone levels are overrepresented in top level sports, to the point where competitions that tried to define the men’s and women’s groups based on testosterone levels end up with cis people on the wrong side of the line. Also, hrt for trans people is usually stronger than the natural hormone levels of a cis person of the same gender as it’s meant to change their body rather than just maintain it, so the attributes that are more dependent on hormones typically overshoot.


  • Shared components work brilliantly in a fantasy world where nothing uses new features of a library or depends on bug fixes in new versions of a library, and no library ever has releases with regressions or updates that change the API. That’s not the case, though, so often there’ll exist no single version of a dependency that makes all the software on your machine actually compile and be minimally buggy. If you’re lucky, downstream packagers will make different packages for different versions of things they know cause this kind of problem so they can be installed side by side, or maintain a collection of patches to create a version that makes everything work even though no actual release would, but sometimes they do things like remove version range checks from CMake so things build, but don’t even end up running.



  • To paraphrase one of the comments from the last time this was posted, being mean it’s wilfully making the lives of those around you worse, and being cringe is negligently making the lives of those around you worse. One you start being cringe on purpose, it’s just a high-effort way to be mean.


  • You can’t tell me what to do! (You can, however, tell me how I’d go about disobeying you as I’m very interested in overclocked underwear, and know it’s not got an unlocked multiplier, but have never gone about FSB overclocking and don’t know what I’m doing with it.)


  • The way I like to think of it is that non-copyleft licences are like giving everyone freedom by saying there are no laws - suddenly, you can do anything, and the government can’t stop you! However, other people can also do anything and the government can’t stop them, either, and that includes using a big net to catch other people and make them their slaves. The people caught in the nets aren’t going to feel very free anymore, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a lot of people will end up caught in nets.

    Copyleft licences are like saying there are no laws except you’re not allowed to do anything that would restrict someone else’s freedom. In theory, that’s only going to inconvenience you if you were going to do something bad, and leaves most people much freer.

    The idea is basically that you shouldn’t be able to restrict anyone else’s freedom to modify the software they use, and if you’re going to, you don’t get to base your software on things made by people who didn’t.



  • Modern computers are set up so that they can use the SSD/hard drive as extra, much slower RAM. Typically, when normal RAM is full, and you need more, a page of data in RAM will be swapped for a page of data on disk. On Unix, they end up in something called the swap file or swap partition, and on Windows, the equivalent is called the page file. In the screenshot, someone’s mounted their Google Drive as a filesystem, and told their computer to use it as the swap partition, so instead of swapping to disk, it swaps to the cloud. This is obviously way slower, but they’re effectively now using the cloud as RAM.


  • Plenty of people call North Korea the DPRK as that’s it’s official name, despite being well aware that it’s undemocratic, not a republic not for the people, and only of half of Korea, even in the same sentence as condemning it for not being the things it claims to be. What you’re saying is effectively equivalent to saying anyone in favour of democracy is evil on the grounds that North Korea labels itself as democratic, and is a bad place.


  • I’ve read that part of why GIMP is the way it is is because it’s meant to be a testbed for the GTK UI library, so features are added to use new UI elements as much as they are to aid photo manipulation, and in some cases it’s considered preferable to use a weird widget so it’s got a test case rather than whichever widget leads to the best UX. I don’t think I’ve ever looked for a more definitive source than a Lemmy/Reddit comment, but it’s at least consistent with my experience of using GIMP.