i’m lizard 🦎

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

    Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.





  • Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They’ve kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it’s still there in the background and it’s still the main reward system for node operators.

    There’s some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they’ve made sure one node leaving doesn’t cause data loss, but I’d still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that’s not gonna get your data back.


  • I don’t think Factorio is suitable for a first-time gamer. The way the inventory, hotbar and the map work aren’t immediately obvious if you’ve never played a game. If you do try, at least turn biters off. The time pressure that’s added by having to set up defense would be difficult enough to handle, but offensive combat is quite the struggle if you’re still trying to learn basic gaming controls. You’d be dealing with things like swapping hotbars to one with grenades & stuff, control schemes changing the moment you get into a vehicle and weird targeting quirks. And by the time you get to trains or advanced oil cracking quite a lot of people tend to drop off the game in general.

    I’d start with something like Minecraft on peaceful difficulty, then give easy or normal a try after a couple of hours if that goes well. Peaceful leaves time to learn all the basic controls and is fun enough to run around in by itself, and you’re not going to get blasted by a creeper that fell behind you.



  • You can hardcode a specific version of nixpkgs, instead of a branch. With the new Nix CLI & flakes enabled you can do something like this:

    nix run "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/b4372c4924d9182034066c823df76d6eaf1f4ec4#cowsay" "moo mooooooo"
    
    

    That’s the commit I’m seeing for nixos-23.11 today, and it should still give you that exact version of cowsay years from now.

    Of course, the better option is to make a dev shell with flakes. Flakes come with a lockfile builtin that accomplishes the same effect, and there’s no problems having different projects on different lockfiles/versions. It’s a bit more work to learn, the Zero to Nix tutorials are pretty decent at teaching and come with examples though (ultimately most things are ~30 lines of boilerplate and a list of packages that you want).













  • If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.

    But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. “Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it” absolutely deserves to be on that list.