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• Post #4305529

  If these so called geniuses at AI companies don’t know how to airgap a system then they’re even bigger asshats than I thought. More likely this is just marketing - oh OpenAI can break out of its jail, so can Claude they’re so smart you know. Oh piss off Any teen who did this would have the book thrown at them. Screw their “oh no our super smort AI accidentally did crimes haha aren’t we clever” - no, how about you get harassed by the feds for the rest of your lives you entitled assholes

• Post #3745787

  For me the question “do you want to write more code faster, but with less quality control and a more superficial understanding” is a ridiculous one - of course I wouldn’t want to make that trade. What has upset me most is realising how many developers are completely fine with that. But it’s nice to see that many aren’t. So I take comfort in the fact that I still have a dev community, it’s just much smaller than appearances would have suggested a couple of years ago

• Post #2463259

  “Software will be built by machines, directed by people” - fine, you guys do that, I’ll still be over here actually understanding wtf I’m doing

• Post #2463258

  Warhammer 40K: we will implore the machine to do our bidding by reciting the litanies, and will castigate those who would try to understand the underlying technology as vile heretics Tech 2026: hold my beer

• Post #2463257

  Yay, I have now implemented the "Precompiling shaders" loading bar in MinerMancers, thereby joining the ranks of every game that players swear at for having a "Precompiling shaders" loading bar. 🙃 Better than the first-play stutters though. Tip: do NOT leave Unreal Insights running in the background when you're testing this, for some reason it crashes it and it's not actually a problem in the real world https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE...

• Post #2463256

  Working on this shader precompilation thing which defaults to Dx12 / SM6, I decided to do some testing in DirectX 11 / SM5 instead. It's pretty easy in UE, provided you've kept the defaults you can just pass `-d3d11` on the command line. I expected problems, but everything seems to work fine, probably because I've got Nanite and Lumen disabled. Good to know for the small % of people with older cards

• Post #2463255

  Microsoft talks about the improvements they’re going to make to Windows 11, and then proceed to only talk about the Start Menu and File Explorer, the two things I’ve already wholly replaced and never use (with PowerToys Run and Directory Opus respectively) precisely because they’ve been shit for a decade

• Post #2441854

  Agree with this. I lived through the “great video game crash of 83” and never even noticed because I didn’t live in the US and for us games just carried on regardless. The US isn’t the centre of everything (and given recent events that’s likely to become more the case, not less) and neither is AAA. https://aftermath.site/video-game-industry-crash-26/

• Post #2324569

  When I first started dealing with US or US-centric companies, I was quite shocked how much they did not give a toss about crossing lines on personal data. You could say no, you're violating the GDPR if you do that, and the response was "meh, it's fine, everyone does it so no-one cares". Despite all the crap right now, I'm glad one outcome is finally more people/orgs realising that you really can't trust these guys with data. https://www.theregist...

• Post #2296825

  I think this is as luxurious as we can get with our beard shaders without getting into super expensive territory, or breaking the stylistic look. UE has hair shaders and grooms and multi-pass subsurface profile shaders but they're pretty overkill, and when you get past a certain level of realism it just looks wrong. We tried multi-layered parallax hair and it looked good in isolation, but put it on a silly wizard and it just doesn't really work. A cartoony waxed look works better

• Post #2079740

  I know I'm an old man, but I remember when you decided what to put in your software largely based on what people were asking for. Apparently what the "best" developers in the world who work for all the "best" companies do is the exact opposite of that

• Post #1993428

  What do people use for screenshots on Windows these days? I’ve been using the default snipping tool for ages which is fine except it lacks text annotation, which is always annoying (I often take screenshots and annotate them for bug reports etc). I started using ShareX (open source) which seems decent but I’m curious what other people use https://getsharex.com

• Post #1773239

  Lol @ Github hand-wringing about the rapidly scaling overhead of operations. My dudes, you actively promoted that shit. Some of us just wanna write code and only interact with you occasionally when we push/pull. You're part of the whole "software development has to be incredibly complicated and require 12 cloud services, 638 dependencies and 6 code transformation stages now because...reasons"

• Post #1744012

  I think what I've learned since being introduced to the idea of a cyberpunk dystopia in the 80's, is that it isn't dystopia just when big rich tech companies control everything, it's when most people start being fine with that.

• Post #1567773

  Nice, I’ve tested a full round trip of restoring our git server backups to a fresh install, cloning and building the game from that and all seems fine. Strictly speaking I should do this more often, but it’s better than not having done it at all 😜

• Post #1207142

  Finished moving all my websites across to Mythic Beasts ( @beasts) which will save me about £200 a year compared to my previous host, who suckered me in with a cheap intro offer. When the renewal came up and they turned the screws I was so busy/stressed with the game and my Mum’s illness I didn’t have time to shop around so got burned. I have super simple needs but don’t want to park my sites on some big faceless US corp like AWS/Cloudflare/GitHub. MB are extremely affordable and approachable

• Post #1188111

  I found this a relatable read, even though I’ve taken a very different exit ramp. https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_thing_i_loved_has_changed/ On the one hand, you could argue it’s karma. After all, we spent the last few decades in tech automating lots of things that changed other people’s jobs in the name of efficiency, and I’m sure that sometimes that made those jobs less enjoyable. Now, perhaps change has come for us. I still think long term maintenance is going to be untenable, but...

• Post #1106467

  I didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything earlier but Artemis II has been such a cleansing salve to my timeline. Humans collaborating to actually do interesting, difficult things just because they’re worth doing, not because there’s a quid to be made. Everyone involved rocks - I will happily see their faces filling my news feed for as long as possible 🚀 🌕

• Post #1106465

  Another busy #caturday for the boys

• Post #1106464

  I really wish I’d kept my MiniDisc player.

• Post #1106463

  I’m finding Cyberpunk 2077 a bit more enjoyable now that I’m leaning into the combat skills more. I’m still trying to play it *initially* stealthy but then when it inevitably goes titsup for annoying reasons beyond my control I just go full murderbot and it’s fine. As a result I’m about 5 levels higher than I was in my previous playthrough at the same point. Silverhand is still a bellend though. Also their tits per hour mechanic was unnecessary

• Post #1106462

  “Oh no Jeffrey, Bungle’s got his orbs out again”

• Post #1058296

  Starting to get some more appropriate object scatters into the Minermancers levels. 🧙‍♂️⛏️

• Post #959889

  I cannot stress enough to RPG designers in all media that the very worst design you can come up with is one in which the result of a character action is “nothing”. The saving throw that negates all effects, the hit result that completely missed, these whiffs are instant deflation of the momentum and mood in any RPG. This is why D&D sucks; it has a ton of these cases and they always feel bad for everyone. You don’t even need them in an RPG anymore, something we’ve learned since the 80s

• Post #899515

  The AI bros and their statistical copy/paste machines are ruining a whole bunch of things I hold dear, such as careful, thoughful, personal software development / art / writing, and now even personal computing hardware. I've decided they and all their boosters can all feck off. I'm done with the equivocations and explanations and "balanced" pros/cons; seriously, just feck off. Industry is souring the things I care about because they can't be arsed anymo...

• Post #869281

  I don’t understand the attraction of being able to talk to computers using breezy casual conversational language; I’ve been telling these little digital bastards what to do for decades using extremely precise formalised language and they still get it wrong

• Post #820775

  I like the post stats feature of @phanpy, makes it easy to see at a glance what kind of poster an account is

• Post #820005

  I don’t want to describe what I want to a computer in plain English. I want to express it in a formalised language more akin to mathematics than prose. Unambiguous. Logical. Deterministic. Even if describing it in English worked perfectly, and had no other downsides, I’d still hate it. Because I wouldn’t be making it, I’d be product managing it, & I *never* wanted to be a PM. The whole point was to directly make things. To feel the digital clay in my hands. Being a supervisor is not e...

• Post #820004

  I sometimes sound like I know what I’m doing on here, but today I borrowed a book from the library, and after bringing it home I realised that I already owned it 🤦‍♂️ I suppose at least I didn’t *buy* a second copy

• Post #752438

  Man, Sensible Soccer is still great. I think this was the last footy game I actually enjoyed ⚽️