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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Ferk@kbin.socialtoProgramming@programming.devApple Wants To Kill PWAs
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    9 months ago

    It’s also not that uncommon of an acronym in web tech, all the first results when searching “PWA” are consistent and it’s a very common way to refer to that technology. The term PWA has made the news in tech channels a few times before (like when Firefox discontinued support for PWA on desktop).

    Even if they said “Progressive Web Apps” it would not have been immediatelly clear what that means for anyone who is not familiar with what PWA is. It’s also not the only acronym they use in the article without explaining it (eg. “API”, or “iOS” which is also an acronym on itself), it just so happens that it’s likely not a well known one in this particular lemmy community where the article was posted. The author advertises himself as a writer dedicated to web technologies (PWA and Web Component in particular), so it would be silly if he has to explain what those are on every of his posts.


  • Were the earlier series not focused on shared values to more or less a similar extent too?
    Kirk has usually been given the reputation of being a rule-breaker, often ignoring Starfleet rules when they are in conflict with his values. Even off-camera (in DS9 I think) they attribute him 17 temporal violations, and I think he has been accused of violating the prime directive multiple times.




  • it’s even ISO standardized

    Not only are there other ones that are also ISO standards when it comes to software layouts, but funny enough, when it comes to physical layouts, US keyboards normally follow an ANSI standard (not an ISO one), whereas many non-US keyboards typically follow a physical key layout known as “ISO Keyboard”, so one could argue those are more of an “ISO” standard.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Physical_keyboard_layouts_comparison_ANSI_ISO_KS_ABNT_JIS.png

    right ctrl + left shift + 9 will do?

    No keyboard layout uses ctrl like that… in fact, I don’t think you ever really need to press more than one modifier in any standard non-US keyboard. Unless you have a very advanced custom layout with fancy extra glyphs… but definitelly not for the typical programming symbols.

    ISO keyboards actually have one more key and one more modifier (“AltGr”, which is different from “Alt”) than the ANSI keyboards.

    In fact, depending on the symbol it might be easier in some cases. No need to press “shift” or anything for a # or a + in a German QWERTZ keyboard, unlike in the US one. Though of course for some other ones (like = or \) you might need to press 1 modifier… but never more than 1, so it isn’t any harder than doing a ) or a _ in the US layout.




  • I’m not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I’m sure it’s much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped… but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I’m not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

    Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I’m convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing “yet another one” in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

    Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics… but I don’t believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I’d argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy…


  • Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you’ll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products… without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

    Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
    Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I’d argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
    Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.



  • Apparently, this article is talking about the “Legacy CS:GO Version” that was available (even after the CS2 launch) for devices that were unable to run CS2. It seems that was less than 1% of CS:GO players, so they are ending support for it, even though they claim it should still be available with reduced compatibility.

    I think anyone can switch to this version in the “Beta” tab of the properties window for CS2 by selecting “csgo_legacy”.

    What is the legacy version of CS:GO?

    The legacy version of CS:GO is a frozen build of CS:GO. It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking.

    What will happen after the end of support for the legacy version of CS:GO?

    After January 1, 2024 the game will still be available, but certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail.



  • coders revealed to 404 Media that “some of Kirsina’s Instagram posts are word-for-word copies of Sizovs’ LinkedIn posts, sometimes published more than a year later.” In addition, “some of the images [Kirsina] posted on Instagram show computer monitors with code that show her logged in under Sizovs’ name.” But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned “multiple times” by the Lobste.rs coding forum for “sockpuppeting”—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.

    Lol… for reference, this is the twitter account: https://nitter.net/UnicornCoding

    It’s full of advertisements about the DevTernity conference… as does the instagram, which has so many professional-looking photos that feel like she was an actual model, always with different backgrounds. Is the laptop wirelessly streaming to the ultrawide screen in her Twitter profile picture? because I see no cables, she’s not even connected to a charger, how long of a coding session can you have like that?


  • It’s also ironic that they say it offers a “compatibility” that didn’t exist before. Windows 98 with MS DOS under the hood was fully compatible with older games, and it was only with the Windows XP, 2000 & NT line when this compatibility was broken and those same old games no longer worked out of the box. The only way to get some level of compatibility back was to introduce workarounds and special “modes” that they had to add to XP which often didn’t really help if your DOS game was old enough.

    Imho, getting rid of the underlying “command prompt” might have been a good thing for the more casual gamers, or the ones who were new in the hobby… but most gamers coming from MS DOS at the time were not afraid of COMMAND.COM, many of us only moved from Windows 9x when we were forced to (due to newer software no longer working, or having to change PC). To me, the newer editions always felt more opaque… giving less control for the sake of security. It was getting harder and harder to try to understand what your OS was doing. With Windows XP you no longer had an AUTOEXEC.BAT or a CONFIG.SYS for power-users to customize.


  • It’s also kinda annoying to have a history full of “merge” commits polluting the commit messages and an entwined mix of parallel branches crossing each other at every merge all over the timeline. Rebasing makes things so much cleaner, keeping the branches separate until a proper merge is needed once the branch is ready.


  • Personally, while I appreciate when people add a "snippet of explanation", I do prefer that to be in the comments. Not as the main text of the submission.

    Making it part of the submission can feel like editorializing. If I want to read the artice, I read the article, if I want to read opinions / interpretations of the article, I read the comments.

    Using the "text snippet" for opinions or interpretations can cause bias… and it also might encourage people to repost the same content multiple times just so they can post with a different bias.

    I think the comment section is a more organized and suitable place for that. It also allows people to use their votes to decide whether the opinion/explanation deserves the upvote, separatelly from whether the link itself deserves promotion.


  • I think it's also safe to presume that in the ultra future tech advanced society of Star Trek, they can remove the bacteria that causes body odor in humans.

    A lot of odor-causing bacteria are actually beneficial for us though. And what causes Vulcans to experience that "odor" might not be coming from bacteria to begin with… for all we know it might be one of the thousand of compounds that leak into the air we exhale directly from our lungs.

    Virtually every gas or volatile liquid is susceptible to cause odor. The only reason we interpret pure water as odorless/tasteless is because water is everywhere so our senses evolved in a way that it doesn't trigger a response. There are many other compounds we don't really perceive because we are used to them at the concentrations that exist in our breath.

    If let's say an alien species is not used to having 78% Nitrogen in their atmosphere, and they happen to have receptors sensible enough, then being in a ship with breathable air similar to Earth might just make them puke in disgust after having a sniff of what we might consider "clean air".

    I'd argue it'd make more sense for everyone to wear the equivalent of a high tech mask (supressants?) rather than having to re-engineer the biology of the species every time they encounter an alien that might have a different set of compounds they might find unpleasant.



  • Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term "deathmatch" was coined by the Doom game mode.

    However, there was no frame interpolation in the original Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that "tic" (1/35 of a second), so the game might be laggy for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.

    But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn't even have an internet connection at that time, personally. In fact, even during the Quake age, I was only able to play on LAN… and I still liked coop better.

    Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.

    Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn't exist.

    If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say… in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it'd starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop… a game can be competitive and be PvE.

    Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating your friend's "score" or speed… almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.

    I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it's because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P


  • Yes… honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie… make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.

    Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.

    It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape… to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.