Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!

I’d love to see a Linux distro attempt to implement a migration wizard for Windows users. Do all the heavy lifting for them, including walking them through what personal data and accounts they want to migrate across, creating a bootable USB installer, then running said installer and copying across their data for them. Maybe even detect and install any apps they’re using, or suggest FOSS alternatives. In practice I imagine this would be a nightmare to try and implement effectively, but it’d be pretty cool to see.

Wait, are you saying Elon Musk isn’t the smartest man alive? /s

The preceding message is really quite an undefined input, as the user copy/pasted some questions from their assignment without phrasing it as a question or cleaning up the formatting.

I wonder what kind of outputs you would get from LLMs if you’d been talking sensibly on certain subjects then started to feed it garbage input. It feels like this might be what happened here.

The “complicated” Fediverse signup process is actually the perfect filter. If someone isn’t willing to learn such a trivial process to gain access to an open decentralized discussion platform, then they really only have themselves to blame when they keep ending up in enshittified algorithmically-manipulated echo chambers.

It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.

The official Python tutorial is very well written and is suitable for total beginners:

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

I think it’s a step in the right direction, though it will be interesting to see where the boundaries are drawn. Does YouTube count? What about gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite?

Edit: On further reading about this, I’m changing my mind. I can’t see how this would be implemented effectively without some kind of age verification. Unless it’s a meaningless Steam-style “What’s your birthday?” question, that makes it far more troublesome for everyone’s privacy. I can’t see how it would get off the ground after so many Australians have had their data stolen already.

I agree his economic policies were garbage, but Howard deserves some pretty serious street cred for gun law reform in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. It was a pivotal moment for the nation, and looking at the USA, I’m very grateful for his influence.

Piracy is a service problem.

Late-stage capitalism (specifically public companies) are rather incompatible with singleplayer or “one-off” games that don’t have a long revenue tail of a live season or multiple DLCs/expansions. That really sucks for the whole games industry, players and developers alike.

The way I implemented this strategy was to make sure I had a single cigarette and lighter on me at all times. I named the cigarette, which psychologically helped prevent me from smoking it. I stuck that out for a few months until a friend smoked it in desperation. At that point I felt confident I’d quit because I wanted to, not because of random circumstance.

I enjoyed his character in The Voices. Admittedly still a comedy, but a good performance from him that was something a little different.

It’ll be interesting to see how this looks. The same technology was used in Alien: Romulus to revive a younger Ian Holm’s likeness for Rook, and while it was a cool tech demo, it still felt quite uncanny valley and distracting to watch. Casting another actor might have been a better choice. At least for this project the tech sounds more relevant, in that they’re deaging and aging characters within the same film.

I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).

I’ve already installed Arch on a spare laptop to assess the difficulty of switching over. So far I’m very impressed!

arch-install made the setup pretty easy, and KDE Plasma feels very natural for someone migrating from Windows. Flatpaks make installing/updating apps a breeze, and there’s way more apps available than I expected, including commercial ones like Spotify.

Most of the “muscle memory” habits translate across too, for example pressing Meta and typing “notepad” shows KWrite in the start menu. That was a nice surprise.

I can already tell it’s going to be viable for 90% of my needs, and the fact that there’s good free software to do everything from video editing to office tasks is really amazing. Linux desktop has come a LONG way.

It was an un-Brie-lievably stupid risk.

Couples costume: Mothman and a lightbulb.

Janitor.

Tech bros reinventing things poorly… a tale as old as time.