robrtsql

They cover that in the FAQ: http://nethack4.org/faq.html

Basically, NetHack development stalled out, so the developer(s?) behind NetHack 4 decided to fork it. Unlike other forks whose main goal is to put cool stuff in the game without regard for taste or balance, they wanted to stay true to the original.

Not that I agree with the fork name. It's best to not call your fork something that could be confused with the original, were the original devs to ever reach a 4.0 release.

That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need). Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate because Facebook is such a hostile platform.

I’m not saying it could never happen, but SEGA appears to be much more tolerant of fangames than Nintendo. A cease and desist is a given for any Mario fangame of renown, but Sonic games appear to attract no attention from SEGA. Also, it’s been 25 years..

I searched "AMD EPYC 7532" and there are a ton of listings for $150-$200. Are you just regretful that it wasn't like this when you were shopping parts for your homelab?

I agree that it doesn't need to exist, but as far as I can tell, almost no one depends on it directly. The only person using it is the author, who uses it in some other small libraries, which are then used in a larger, nontrivial library.

I just created a Next.js app, saw that `is-arrayish` was in my node_modules, and tried to figure out how it got there and why. Here's the chain of dependencies:

next > sharp > color > color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish

`next` uses `sharp` for image optimization. Seems reasonable.

`sharp` uses `color` (https://www.npmjs.com/package/color) to convert and manipulate color strings. Again, that seems reasonable. This package is maintained by Qix-.

Everything else in the chain (color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish) is also maintained by Qix-. It's obnoxious to me that he feels it is necessary to have 80 different packages, but it would also be a substantial amount of effort for the other parties to stop relying on Qix-'s stuff entirely.

I apologize in advance because you'd probably prefer text, but this is a very high quality video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNca1L6CUk

The video is segmented into chapters--if you're not interested in the whole thing, the section about the Lincoln animatronic is chapter 4, about an hour into the video.

Linux is a great way to spend more time customizing your computer than using it. I'm sure there are lots of people in this community that just roll with whatever defaults KDE or Gnome has, but there's _also_ lots of people who consider installing and configuring a minimal tiling window manager to be a Friday night well spent. I think PewDiePie kind of proves my point in this video too.

Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).

It's kind of strange that this clip is making the rounds again. I highly doubt that Miyazaki would have anything nice to say about generative AI, but it's pretty clear to me that the "insult to life itself" comment is referring to the aesthetics of the AI that was presented to him, was it not?

> (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).

Respectable. The state of desktop Linux is pretty good but it's very much a 'your-mileage-may-vary' situation. Every 'exotic' thing you introduce into your setup (having a variable-refresh-rate monitor, having an HDR monitor, two monitors of different refresh rates, running Wayland over X11, having a brand new GPU, having an NVIDIA GPU) is another possible, sometimes likely, source of pain.

Some of the multiplayer games I play with my friends can be played on Linux, but I make a point of using my Windows partition for those because I don't want to waste their time on my troubleshooting.

My understanding was that EAC works in userspace mode on Linux, instead of at the kernel level. So, you can enable it, and it'll block the most easily detectable of cheats, but it's not very hard to bypass.

Then again, kernel-level anti-cheat is not that hard to bypass with special hardware, either. I guess someone ran the numbers and decided that blocking some percentage of cheaters at the cost of blocking 100% of Linux users was a worthwhile trade.

Perhaps you included this in your DRM comment, but I think the biggest issue is anti-cheat. Most online games with a sufficiently large 'competitive' element require a kernel-level anti-cheat which won't work on Linux.

It's like Hacktober (where a few YouTube assholes showed a bunch of non-developers how to waste maintainer's time with bogus PRs in order to get free stuff from DigitalOcean) except substantially worse because these issues take longer to dismiss. Horrible.

If you were thrown off by the 'nails' comment, it's a reference:

https://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-270.html

The way I've heard the joke always involves a duck going to a lemonade stand and asking for grapes, but this was the best Google result I found, so...

There are indeed formats which work this way (https://canadianhighlander.ca/points-list/), but unfortunately the most-played formats (Commander, Standard, Modern..) don't have any such restrictions which means the investment required for competitive play is prohibitively high.

On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.

The problems described here seem like they could be solved by email clients, rather than abandoning the whole protocol.

It's definitely sobering. I don't necessarily want to make money (gamedev is what I would do if I _didn't_ need to eat) but it would be really cool to get some recognition, or even just have a community of 100 people who _really_ liked and care about my game. Given the sheer amount of indie games out there (and the number of games that I see advertised yet give no thought to), it seems less and less likely to achieve that as time goes on. The best time to release your indie game is probably 15 or 20 years ago, when the barrier to entry was a little higher (thank goodness for all of the free tools we have today, but geez has it allowed a lot of competition to appear!).

How so? Can it produce a sprite sheet with a believable 'walk cycle' for a 2D character? Can it produce a rigged 3D model?

As usual, it seems like we're maybe _almost_ there (if you can generate video, like with OpenAI's Sora, you could probably get a walking animation for a character, and I've seen proof-of-concepts which produce not-rigged 3D models), but it seems like AI can't do a lot of things that you would want for game development.

The one thing it _is_ really "good" (emphasis on the quotes) at is generating static 2D assets like character portraits, HUDs, item/skill icons, etc. Unity's asset store is now full of gen-AI stuff like this (lots of packs of 1,000 spell icons, which are all basically variations of a 'fireball', except maybe this time it's green, etc).

I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic' first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.

My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.

The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.

I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.

I don't mean to advocate for Discord (they sure don't need it!) but if the requirement is to host an exclusive space for a dozen people, Discord does that.. you just make a "server"/guild and only invite trusted friends.

This doesn't solve any of the other problems (what happens when Discord enshittifies? Is it acceptable that Discord updates basically every single day? Is it OK that they constantly advertise video games in the form of little notifications saying "stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!"?) but it does seem to solve the 'how do I have a platform for my friends and I to talk" one.

> What’s the gender ratio on Duolicious?

> Right now the ratio of active men to women is 7.32:1. The ratio can change a lot, depending on which online communities have been talking about Duolicious lately; The ratio’s previously been as high as about 20:1.

Admitting this was brave.

It's totally reasonable, and is also the exact sort of guidelines I would want to establish if I were the maintainer of an open-source project.

However, I think it's amusing that the website lists all of these cool reasons why someone should use Web Origami, and then the repo more-or-less says "here's all of these rules you should abide by if you want to even CONSIDER using this project". One page is meant to draw users in, the other to fend them off.

She addresses that, actually...

https://www.ntietz.com/blog/decaf-is-good-actually/

That's basically true. One recent 'exception' that happened to me is that, shortly after Baldur's Gate 3 was released, the offline installer would give you a different, older version than what you would get if you installed the game through GOG Galaxy, which led to some difficulty and confusion when trying to play with friends.

That's the author commenting on something that they found.

Deep within the settings, there's a "Don't show me things like this" button in TikTok. Maybe someone should make a TikTok competitor where you swipe left or right on a video to indicate your approval.

A lot of people on Reddit's /r/SteamDeck report that this notice popped up while they were mid-game on Steam Deck. Often leading to (in-game) death.

Last night, I was playing Elden Ring, when suddenly the game screen froze, and then went black. The game's music was still playing in the background. I assumed that it was some sort of crash (notably, the first crash I have EVER experienced while playing that game on Steam Deck). After rebooting the Steam Deck, and finishing my play session, I noticed there was some sort of critical notification on my account, which turned out to be the update to the subscriber agreement. I assume that my game 'crash' was actually Steam attempting to show the agreement update over the game. Thanks, guys!

I assume FrustratedMonky's comment was satirical, given that it appears to have been written like an LLM and starts with a "but, but, but" which is how you might represent someone you disagree with presenting their argument.

I respect the idea, but in practice I find that Apple Music sometimes plays tracks from the same album at noticeably different volumes. It's possible (even probable, I guess) that whoever is sending Apple the digital masters messed up, but frankly when I'm listening to an album front-to-back that's one situation where I basically need the perceived volume level to not be messed with.

Weirdly enough, I've noticed this happens with and without the sound normalization feature enabled.

The current status, IIRC, is that recycling in New York accepts Nespresso pods, and in the rest of the US, Nespresso offers free pre-paid shipping bags which you can fill with used pods and drop off at UPS, who will then return them to Nespresso for recycling. They also accept pods at their store locations.

Not sure what the deal is in other parts of the world, if Nespresso is sold there.