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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

    However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

    You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.


  • It’s hard to buy candy for yourself as an adult because you know it’s nothing but love handles and tooth decay in shiny wrappers. But if it comes into your orbit once a year without buying it, it’s tempting.

    Of course, when my kid was small he basically didn’t bother eating it at all. He’d get like 100 pieces of candy and they’d linger around until Christmas. When I was a kid we’d get pillowcases full and it’d be gone in days. Not sure if that’s a generational thing or if my son was just not very motivated by sweets.









  • I’m not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is

    If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn’t have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.



  • So, the answer to the question “Can Linux directly host another Unix-like operating system’s binary interface?” at the moment is “partly, experimentally, and impressively.”

    As if there was any question on that? You can have Linux “handle” Windows PE binaries by telling it to invoke wine, dealing with a Unix-like scenario is a much lower bar.

    The question is who is this useful for? FreeBSD has the Linux compatibility layer because it’s playing catch up to Linux, but the Venn diagram of stuff FreeBSD can do but Linux can’t is tiny, especially if extra special kernel feature stuff is stubbed.

    Can anyone name a project that is BSD first, doesn’t rely on BSD kernel features, doesn’t have a native Linux port, and isn’t a distro tool?



  • Bari Weiss is a disgusting hack, and laughably unqualified, but being a news outlet editor is way more complicated than just rubber stamping factual reporting. Editors allocate resources - from writers and photographers/crews to even start a story, to how the front page is divvied up, how stories are promoted, how many column inches (or words, or minutes) a topic gets.

    Point being that there are definitely feelings involved. Even if it’s one story is more interesting than another, or we’ve covered this topic more than enough lately, or this story is factual but not adding anything new, etc. etc. etc. It’s a hard job, and more subjective than you’d think, so I don’t blame her for being defensive when she’s literally the worst editor to ever hold a national news desk down.





  • I do think no matter what reforms we do in schools, the subject being the most interesting / stimulating thing currently available must help a lot.

    We are getting to a point where we need to rethink how we teach to be more resistant to technological distractions. Students would be more stimulated by topics they are interested in and pursuing interests doesn’t stop when the school day ends. Instead, kids are bored all day and naturally looking to relieve that boredom by focusing on passive videos or social media.

    If we make the classroom reward being self-driven and passionate in an environment mirroring the real world (with guardrails provided by schools) we’d get driven, passionate students ready to operate in reality.

    … Of course, we’d probably have to have motivated teachers that give a damn, kill toxic social media, and abolish capitalism to keep kids from trying to make pragmatic, soul crushing decisions to make money over interests but, well, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.


  • I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

    Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

    I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.