• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 21st, 2023
  • Nils@lemmy.catoPC Gaming@lemmy.ca•Steam’s Invite-Only Shooter Deadlock Is Quietly Becoming An Absolute Monster - With its latest update, Valve's secretive MOBA is really starting to define itselfEnglish
    144·
    6 days ago

    Kotaku is going to Kotaku. Don’t feel FOMO, the game is not all of that.

    The game has a little boost in players every time they release some bigger package, but then drops significantly. I imagine their numbers will soar when they add lootboxes and market access. And the number of bots will increase significantly.

    Despite a bunch of technical problems, like being rerouted to a server in Amsterdam with a jump first in Buenos Aires. The game design is a massive time waste, and all decisions from past year made matches way longer (if it was not hard enough to find a team that want to end the game when we are at advantage). My last matches before ditching it were taking ~40min, that is too much for a team shooter.

    I guess they are going for the “MOBA” time length, what is bad. I also ditched MOBAs when match length went from 12~15min to 30~40min.

    Now imagine playing two +40min matches in a row with the same salty players (common in MOBAs) with no away to avoid them on your team in the queue. At least you can mute and report.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoPC Gaming@lemmy.ca•GOG plan to look a bit closer at Linux through 2026 ["I don't want to commit to any specifics, [...] Linux is close to the hearts of our users [...] something we'll be looking at"]English
    3·
    22 days ago

    One day, Heroic stopped working for me, it was flagged and blocked by my network. They injected affiliated links that redirected to weird domains, with no warning on changelogs. I was worried of a man in the middle attack and I investigated the PRs. They did not even document it properly on the commits, but it was intentional, you could see the line changing in the code made by one of the main devs.

    Nothing against them making some money, I would have opened a rule for them. But doing this kind of thing without notifying people is shady at least. Later I found a message from the devs in one social network(mastodon maybe?) about adding it, but that is hardly notifying your user base. Subsequently, more people reported the client not working and they addressed it. It was not only about network rule that blocked most users, Heroic could not reach some GOG services without https and for some reason the weird redirects were forcing the route through http.

    With some wording, they made some users believe they had “team up with GOG”. But they just signed for the affiliated program that anyone can sign for, GOG had no idea who they were and were not officially endorsing them. Quite often you see on lemmy people arguing like GOG is behind Heroic, or that Heroic is an official GOG store.

    Since then (early 2024), I stopped recommending Heroic to people and moved to other options (wine, lutris, bottles). I am sure it was an honest mistake. But it will take a while to recover the trust.

    All problems aside, I still prefer an open-source solution that I can investigate this type of thing easily over a closed blob that I have to reverse engineer and sniff packages.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platformEnglish
    13·
    23 days ago

    This is the best answer! Thank you for sharing your methods. I was going to reply about the daily editorial, but yours is more complete.

    I would also like to add that I type the name of things I like and often find them on bandcamp. Including big artists.

    Peter Gabriel, Evanescence, Run the Jewels, Flight of Conchords, Ghost…

    What I don’t find there, I get from a thrift store (easy to find famous artists there) or quobuz.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•About doing a university at Canada (Financial stuff related)
    2·
    23 days ago

    Brazil (R$ right?) used to have a lot of programs to send students to foreign countries, but around 10 years ago the numbers dwindled.

    I don’t see many Brazilian undergrads anymore, some grads, but mostly post-docs.

    If you shared your field and education level, I could point you to a more precise direction.

    But for education, your best bets are:

    • Check the exchange programs with your current university, they have partnership with other universities around the world and you probably can pay cheaper with local currency.
    • The higher your degree, it is easier to come. Despite what we see on the news about people denying science, and we are losing a bunch of researches to the EU, it is still better to find high education positions here than undergrad or lower. Also, you might be able to get paid, either as TA, researcher or just apply for a coop. That might offset your costs a bit.

    Payment here is different, you pay by period X number of curses (Fall term, Winter Term, Spring/Summer) - some places in Europe it would be called semester) not by year, so that 20.000 CAD a year would be split in at least 2 periods. The university puts that so it is easier for you to plan your life. There is no monthly instalments payment like in some countries, but students can apply for awards, support, loans, etc… Check your university of choice for this information.

    As others said, you need to take in account other costs too, from the visa process (a student visa will take longer and be pricier than a visitors visa), to housing and food. Some universities offer housing and food at a smaller cost than doing it all by yourself.

    From your other comment in the thread, it sounds like you just want to leave the country for a while to experience life somewhere else.

    Commonwealth countries and some places in Europe offer an easy to get work visa for under 30 years old. Check if you qualify for those. Usually, those visas lasts for a year, and you can renew if you meet some criteria.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.dev•I wrote a 573-page physics book, but I suspect it's actually a Game Engine specification. Here is why.
    4·
    1 month ago

    While writing the book, I realized that the core constraints of the universe described in the text

    Did you write the text? Why are you talking about the text like you are reading it for the first time? It might be when you “write” +200 pages in 2 weeks.

    I suspect it’s actually a Game Engine specification.

    No, it is not. Your text is a manifesto, even if you eventually figure out physics, it is still not what you need to build a physics simulation engine or the physics abstraction for a game engine. Your text helps to achieve neither.

    Please stop preying on kids for free labour and to spread whatever your goals are.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.dev•I wrote a 573-page physics book, but I suspect it's actually a Game Engine specification. Here is why.
    7·
    1 month ago

    Just literacy would be enough.

    Without even counting the red flags of the account date, both here and GitHub, that you cannot find the author anywhere, that OP managed to write +200 pages of “physics” in 2 weeks (check changelogs, it went from 211 pages to whatever op is claiming now). The whole thing reads like LLM assisted manifesto.

    I am not joking, people do not need to read the entire thing to see that is just dropping real names (physics, tech) without any support to their claims. And it is just claims as an absolute, there is no proof, logic, nothing.

    I guess they would get a lot more goodwill if they were upfront about writing fiction, or some TempleOS kind of thing.

    They are using this “game engine” excuse just to prey on kids.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoTelevision@piefed.social•TV recommendations?
    2·
    2 months ago

    A while ago, I was looking to buy a “dumb tv”. In the end I narrowed it down to professional display, computer monitors, and projectors. And sadly, the prices are usually higher than a TV of the same size.

    Professional Displays are those you find in fast food with the menu, or in offices with info, doctors etc… One of the reasons they are expensive is because they are made to be on 24x7.

    Projectors are cool, but they work better in darker rooms. The cheaper ones also need more space from the wall.

    I ended up going with a computer monitor, LG ultragear 48 inches, it is great. And it was cheaper than anything else, and I was lucky there was a price drop from the MSRP because they were restocking to a newer model. Usually they are a bit more expensive than the equivalent LG C model TV.

    With a monitor, you will have to plug anything that you want to watch, there is no wifi and apps. Another constrain is size, the largest I could find were 48 inches. Anything bigger would fall into the professional display category and get expensive fast.

    Sadly, I just checked online and neither Amazon or Best Buy are offering those here in Canada https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lg-ultragear-48-uhd-138hz-0-1ms-gtg-oled-lcd-freesync-gaming-monitor-48gq900-b-black/16310839. LG was usually around 1k CAD, and BenQ was not that far off.

    I hope it is just shortage rather than discontinuing those line of products.

  • Nils@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Mark Carney’s first budget projects $78B deficit, program and civil service cuts
    1·
    3 months ago

    I understand better your points now, thanks for sharing your thoughts and optimism, I needed some optimism.

    When I first read the report on budge.canada the “greener path” shows that pretty much everything ended in 2024. Moving forward they mention carbon capture without details what kind of investment they are putting money in (best I could find is funding this https://www.alberta.ca/carbon-capture-and-storage that is also a bit vague), investing in mining (justifying that mining specific minerals helps the environment, but no mention on how to make mining less damaging to the environment and hold companies accountable) and removing the carbon cap saying that investments in several sectors would reduce the emissions anyway. A lot of wishful thinking on the budget text, or on the worst case mental gymnastics malice.

    Like, there is this promising

    To finance government spending that helps industrial and agricultural sectors get cleaner and more competitive, …

    I would love to see the government working with farmers to keep production high and with low footprint. Despite the text being vague on how/who will get the money, farmers are already very thin on their footprint, usually limited to the access of resources to maintain their farms (heat, fertilizers, etc…). A farmer that only has access to gas for heat would not be able to reduce their footprint unless other options are made available.

    I also felt like there is no handling “american shitstorm” either, there are plenty of brags on how they capitulate and are one of the least impacted by tariffs because of that.

    Also, good thing you bought up the taxes. One thing I found interesting while reading the PDF version earlier, they pretty much teach us on many ways to avoid paying them, I wish that was easily available at the CRA website. =P