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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzCalculatable
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    8 days ago

    I think people exaggerate how bad QWERTY is. Studies have not consistently found an advantage for one keyboard layout over another, and some studies even show that typists can reach equivalent speeds even with randomised layouts. This suggests that experience and practice with a particular layout is far more important to typing speed than the particular placement of letters. Which is a good argument for keeping qwerty around.

    (reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time),

    This story is quite common but there is little evidence that it’s actually true. The designer of qwerty actually made a late adjustment to move R next to E (swapping it with period), even though ER is the second most common letter combination in English.




  • The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).

    It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:

    similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time

    The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.

    On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.

    What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.


  • But the game is “finished”. there is no need for alterations.

    If only that was the case. But there is no chance a game built for windows 95 could run unaltered on an android phone. Things like the rendering systems, input handling, and sound output will need to be adapted to work on a new platform.


  • You could, but there isn’t much benefit. The purpose of all that extra information is generally to make the program easier to understand for a human. The computer doesn’t need any of it, that’s why it’s not preserved in compilation. So it is possible to automatically translate assembly to C++, but the resulting program would not be much (if any) easier for a human to understand and work with.

    To give a bad analogy, imagine some driving directions: turn left at 9th street, enter the highway at ramp 36, go right when you’re past the burger king, etc. These are translated into physical control inputs by the driver to actually take the car to its destination. Now we could look at the driver’s physical inputs and turn that back into a written list of instructions: turn the wheel left 70 degrees, turn it right 70 degrees, push the gas for 10 seconds, and so on.

    All the street name references are now gone. There are no abstracted instructions like “enter the highway” or even “take the second left.” It would be quite difficult for a person to look at these instructions and figure out the trip’s destination. Let alone make some alterations to it because there is roadwork along the way and a detour is needed.




  • Fun quote from an interview with Chris Sawyer:

    Latterly the machine code came back to haunt us when the decision was made to re-launch the original game on mobile platforms as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic a few years ago, and it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.




  • GOG is getting a nice little pr moment off of this but you’re getting basically the same license, no matter where you buy the game.

    The root of evil in digital distribution is the DMCA anti circumvention clause: it is illegal to circumvent a DRM protection to gain access to some copyrighted work, even if you in actuality possess a license to the work. This law gives big platforms far too much power to control how you interact with their products.

    It should be legal to modify a work to allow it to be played offline, to make copies for archival purposes, to fix the work to run on newer platforms, etc. As long as you have a license to the work you should be allowed to take steps to ensure your rightful access to it.

    By the way, the root beyond roots of evil in digital distribution is the insane length of copyrights themselves. Why are patents 20 years, but copyright extends to 120+? The answer is pure greed.


  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDemocrats Vote
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    1 month ago

    The thing is, I always thought that you steer politicians through your vote

    To some extent, yes. However the amount of steering you can do this way is rather limited, since a vote only indicates a preference of one candidate over the other.

    For example, if you decide to vote Republican out of protest, Democrats might conclude that you like republican policies, and to win your vote back, they need to move even further right. If you decide to stay home and not vote, you don’t really give any information to democrats what they actually need to do. They may decide that you are an unlikely voter in any case, and focus towards those folks most likely to turn out (that’s generally older white conservative folks).

    One option is to vote for some leftist third party. This sends a pretty clear message about what policies you like. The problem is that, apart from the messaging, your vote is almost certainly wasted. You are in effect helping your enemy win in the short term.

    The other option is to engage politically outside of just voting. Most people have been convinced by establishment politicians that your only influence is your vote. This is not true. Protests, activism, grassroots movements, local politics are all effective ways to steer your preferred party in your preferred direction. This does require substantially more effort.


  • Technically there is no Hi syllable in Japanese either. There is ひ, which phonologically is neither “Hi” nor “Fi”, but somewhere in between. The exact pronunciation varies depending on surrounding sounds, as well as the speaker’s regional accent.

    So I wouldn’t say they really use WiHi. They write WiFi and they say “ワイハイ” which is the closest you can get to WiFi using Japanese sounds. It will kinda sound like WiHi to an English speaker.


  • Microsoft and the European Commission agreed to an initial period of five years. That ended in 2014, and the measure was not extended mainly for two reasons:

    1. Data showed the selection screen had had essentially no effect on browser market share whatsoever.
    2. This period was basically the height of browser competition, with Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox all showing significant market share.

    With competition in the browser market seemingly healthy, and the browser ballot not doing much to affect it, it was seen as pointless to keep requiring Microsoft to display it.



  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't do it.
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    1 month ago

    Telling your tenants what they can and cannot do with their rented property should be some kind of violation of the right to quiet enjoyment of property.

    This and the HOA shit is really weird to me. America is all like “we highly value our personal freedom and private property” but then HOA’s and landlords come in and want to tell you exactly what you have to do with your yard. What the hell?