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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it’s within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we’re in today where Google saying they’ll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch

    -typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch


  • Partially agree. The series as a whole fully agree, game by game is iffy

    XC1 can absolutely stand alone and really needs you to go in blind

    XCFC doesn’t make sense without having played XC1

    XC2 again can stand alone but you’ll catch some story stuff sooner if you’d played XC1

    XCTTGC makes no sense without XC2

    XC3 is this bizzaro mess I’m still not sure what the fuck happened but I think it does need XC1 and 2 background knowledge

    XCFR retains XC3 heavy reliance on the previous games, but cranked up to levels that makes the Star Wars sequels seem almost reasonable






  • To me 16 is long haha.

    I usually end up running with 16 characters since a lot of services reject longer than 20 and as a programmer I just like it when things are a power of two. Back in the Dark Times of remembering passwords my longest was 13 characters so when I started using a password manager setting them that long felt wild to me.

    I do have my bank accounts under a 64 character password purely because monkey brain like seeing big security rating in keepass. Entropy go brrrrrrrrrrrr


  • I’ve used cloud based services for password managers for work and “self host” my personal stuff. I barely consider it self hosting since I use Keepass and on every machine it’s configured to keep a local cached copy of the database but primarily to pull from the database file on my in-home NAS.

    Two issues I’ve had:

    Logging into an account on a device currently not on my home network is brutal. I often resort to simply viewing the needed password and painstakingly type it in (and I run with loooooong passwords)

    If I add or change a password on a desktop and don’t sync my phone before I leave, I get locked out of accounts. Two years rocking this setup it’s happened three times, twice I just said meh I don’t really need to do this now, a third time I went through account recovery and set a new password from my phone.

    Minor complaint:

    Sometimes Keepass2Android gets stuck trying to open the remote database and I have to let it sit and timeout (5 minutes!!!) which gets really annoying but happens very infrequently which is why I say just minor complaint

    All in all, I find the inconvenience of doing the personal setup so low that to me even a $10 annual subscription is not worth it



  • Combination of anti large company sentiment + people feeling entitled to get things for free if I had to guess. It also usually feels wrong when a corporation threatens a lawsuit over a single person since the US court system heavily favors the person with more money and it’s probably a true statement to say that Nintendo has more resources than the lead dev.

    Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube had an interesting take in that by stifling emulator development now it will hurt the industry in the long run because Switch exclusives will become increasingly difficult to play once support ends (an argument I myself don’t find all that compelling)

    Nerrel on YouTube has a well put together and researched video on emulation where at least in the US it’s been tested in court several times that emulators are legal, but obtaining the code for the emulators to run is almost always not since you usually have to make a copy and that violates the publisher’s right to copy


  • For graphics, the problem to be solved is that the N64 compiled code is expecting that if it puts value X at memory address Y it will draw a particular pixel in a particular way.

    Emulators solve this problem by having a virtual CPU execute the game code (kinda difficult), and then emulator code reads the virtual memory space the game code is interacting with (easy), interprets those values (stupid crazy hard), and replicates the graphical effects using custom code/modern graphics API (kinda difficult).

    This program is decompiling the N64 code (easy), searches for known function calls that interact with the N64 GPU (easy), swaps them with known valid modern graphics API calls (easy), then compiles for local machine (easy). Knowing what function signatures to look for and what to replace them with in the general case is basically downright impossible, but because a lot of N64 games used common code, if you go through the laborious process for one game, you get a bunch extra for free or way less effort.

    As one of my favorite engineering phrases goes: the devil is in the details


  • Having grown up and still have the majority of my family live in rural areas, you’re correct in that there’s a mentality that animals are tools, a means to an end. But I don’t think many with that mentality will be forgiving of her for this.

    With that mentality there is also a general understanding that these are “dumb animals” who can and will fuck up and especially hunting dogs need a lot of training. A dog who fails the training isn’t usually put down, just either given some less strict job, kept as a pet or put up for adoption. Taking her at her word, it sounds like the dog had killed some chickens and had turned towards her and tried biting. But being the dog was only 14 months old, sounds like it had an excited temperament and hadn’t learned just how much bigger than other animals it truly is. Hardly a reason to kill an animal, even if it was just raised as a tool.


  • Whenever I replay OOT I never have a problem with Navi. She rarely hard interrupts, usually just a short tone and flashing C button that goes away after a few seconds. The voice lines only trigger if you press the button to call her, in most cases the hints she gives are genuinely helpful, and stays out of your way for the vast majority of the game.

    Fi from skyward sword though… Far worse because she does interrupt gameplay, often repeats what the last dialogue box just fucking told you, and takes several dialogue boxes to tell you what Navi would have taken one to do. I’m glad they significantly overhauled her interactions in the HD release but I’m still going to be hesitant to play that game again


  • I think part of the “what do I do with this” factor for the iPad was that Apple (and other companies still to this day) were so hell bent on making everything smaller and more compact that releasing a larger product was marketing whiplash. Not to mention that smartphones were being pitched as this “do everything device” so why would you need anything else?

    After you get over that marketing sugarcoating, it becomes pretty obvious what you’d use an iPad for. Internet and media consumption at a larger scale than your phone, easier on your eyes than a phone, but retains at least some of the lightweight smaller form factor that separates it from a regular laptop. Sure you didn’t have the stick it in your pocket advantage of a phone or the full keyboard and computational power of a laptop, but there was this in-between that for a modest fee, you could have the conveniences if you can live with/ignore the sacrifices.


  • I don’t think the MacBook Airs launch is a good comparison.

    Sure there was an early adopter tax on being one of the first “thin and light” laptops, but people already know what you can use a MacBook for, there was already a large value proposition in having a MacBook, the extra cost was entirely being more portable than it’s full size counterparts. Everything you can do on a Mac, just way easier to take on the go.

    I’ve read a few reviews on it, watched MKBHD’s initial review, and outside of a few demo apps they point to the vision pro having no real point to it. Which if true, then it falls in line with existing VR headsets that are a fraction of it’s cost and in a niche market, being three times the cost of your competitors is not a good position to be


  • It’s IEEE misinterpreting the guys original paper.

    https://liuyang12.github.io/proj/privacy_dual_imaging/ (can’t find the full paper, but here’s the abstract at least)

    The paper author straight up says the light sensor is impractical to use as an attack vector, but when you use it in conjunction with other sensors you might be able to gleam more information than most might think. It leaves me with question of what other sensors can you combine to start getting behavioral information that is a security threat?

    I’ll say it worked for me. I read the IEEE headline, called bullshit, dug into it and yeah you can only get a tiny bit of information that you have to stretch pretty far to get useful conclusions from… But it’s more than the zero I initially thought. So props to the paper author, he met his goal. IEEE wanted sensationalized clicks, which they too unfortunately got.



  • Even in P2P you’ll still need someone to go tell you what other IP addresses are in the group that you’re trying to join. And you have to know the IP address of that someone. You’re not going to scan the entire Internet to figure out who all else is attempting to play the exact same game as you, that would take literal days every time (assuming you rule out anyone IPv6, if you include them that suddenly becomes millions of years).

    Even in P2P you will need to hit a commonly known and trusted resource to tell you what other IP addresses you need to go talk to.