@addie@feddit.uk
member since 14 Jun 2023 09:14
comments
- on it's time in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 1d ago
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on Raspberry Pi is intentionally blocking RAM capacity upgrades in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago
Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.
Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.
A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.
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on Hellblade developer Ninja Theory heading towards closure in new wave of Xbox cuts, as two separate agreements collapse in c/games@lemmy.world · 2d ago
A shame. I liked Enslaved, loved DmC, and really liked Hellblade. They made quite a big thing at the time they were making Hellblade about wanting to be ‘double A’ publishers - making highly polished indie games on a sensible budget, basically. And then they sold out to Microsoft, which has screwed them over - all those publishers needing to make a non-stop stream of big budget megahits or they’ll be hung out to dry.
Consolations to all affected. It has been an absolute bloodbath in games development recently.
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on DSP clears Wolverine's motorcycle section without player input in c/games@lemmy.world · 4d ago
There’s hard mode, and then there’s hard mode.
Does hard mode uncap the enemy AI so that it can use all of its moves, and allow it to attack from offscreen so that you need to be more aware of positioning, like Ninja Gaiden? Does hard mode add additional objectives so that you need to interact with the levels more, like the Thief series? Does hard mode increase certain kinds of damage, so that you have to engage with the systems more, like alchemy in the Witcher series? These are ‘good’ hard modes, that make the game much more interesting.
Does hard mode simply make all the enemies spongier, so that everything just takes longer? Well, that’s a lot less interesting. Might as well play those games on ‘normal’.
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on The new Apple Watch will use microphone and other sensors to generate AI recaps of your day - 9to5Mac in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 13 Sep 2026
Hey! Mine not only tells the time, but also the day of the week and month, and has an integrated alarm clock and stopwatch. Battery lasts for seven years, keeps time to within a few minutes per year, is cheap enough so that I don’t mind wearing it when I’m cycling as I can just replace it if I break it, and it has a celebrity endorsement. Of sorts, anyway.

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on Microsoft announces Project Zenith, a clutter-free Windows experience meant to entice developers - Engadget in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.
My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.
Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026
Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so’s that I wouldn’t have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.
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on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement in c/games@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026
I think that “more fps” is important when there’s things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there’s a lot of “sparky” particle effects; in general, there’s a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can’t really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.
Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.
Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.
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on The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, which is currently a Steam bestseller, has reportedly furloughed the majority of its staff in c/games@lemmy.world · 1 Sep 2026
Can’t remember any particular performance problems with ET - it’s no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I’m prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.
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on Microsoft's latest AI rebrand beats its own history of terrible rebrands, renaming Microsoft 365 Roadmap to "AI at Work" in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.
Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.
Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.
Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.
Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.
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on Cool... I guess. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.
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on Cool... I guess. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026
Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:
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lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments
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lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them
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lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon
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keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …
Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
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on uptime in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 10 Aug 2026
Yeah. I’ve got my home server set to install all security updates and restart Monday at 3 am; my first thought when seeing a two-month uptime on any of my machines is ‘whoops’, not ‘wow’.
Amazing uptimes are strictly for machines that aren’t connected to a network, and I’d start to be concerned whether they’d restart on eg. power failure if I started seeing really big numbers.
Likewise, but the code is pretty far from perfect. “Future maintenance hazard”, but half my colleagues can’t even see what’s wrong with it, and the bot tells them it’s all fine so they don’t think about it any further.
Can’t wait for that bubble to burst. Burn the whole lot down.