Spyke

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Gay men, what would you like to explain about the "gay best friend" stereotype to staight people?

As with all jokes it matters who the audience is. My friends can make off-colour jokes with me, I can reciprocate with off-jokes. But I would never do this with people not fully aware of my actual opinions. This also counts to clear misogynistic jokes.

My closest female friends they would be fine with it, they've known me for years, I've supported them in their lowest and they know I would never mean the a horrible thing I say. They'll happily reciprocate with some toxic male jokes, or some gay jokes. That said, even when I make them they are both clear intended to be jokes, but if they ever looked uncomfortable then it would be my guilt to bear, as at the end, as the audience they are meant to enjoy the joke, not be sad or hurt by it.

Making them to strangers is a big no-no, and if strangers are in the room with you at the time (like a party) you also have to "match the energy" of your friend. That means don't randomly do something misogynistic that they would understand to be a joke, but strangers would not. I think this is the hardest for most people as they don't consider that strangers witnessing could also be accidental audiences.

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For the europeans here

I don't agree with what this proposal is aiming to do (and goes against prior EU related privacy rulings), but unfettered free speech isn't as "free" as the average American thinks it is, besides that the EU already doesn't have free speech. Many regions ban Nazi related speech for obvious historical reasons.

I'd reconsider using America's "free speech" as a model as they barely practice what they preach. Sure they have free speech, but they lack privacy protection mechanisms that then allow their police to skirt the rules and obtain evidence using tools that completely breach the veil of privacy, something many EU countries (including my own) have voted can never be used. The scope of intel gathering their intelligence community is capable of already is at a level where privacy no longer exist and all you're left with is the illusion of it.

What I'm saying is, sure this proposal is bad, but what we need isn't free speech, but protected privacy. Something the EU is having some decent success with already (compare to the US where this is conveniently forgotten as technology improves, see the earlier police argument to see what that leads to). Speech isn't going to be the only problem, as cameras achieve the ability to do facial recognition and track you everywhere (something I know EU is/has banned, see the "AI act"), and more technology allows for other types of tracking

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Twitter/X new ID Verification - First Look

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Besides some countries in the EU already have electronic ID identifiers. They can just contact them to verify I'm claiming who I am without this weird "yeah we need a picture of you, and look through your webcam". Banks don't need to do this to verify who I am, so I don't see why "X" needs this weird privacy invading process

Thankfully I don't care about X (lol), and with more and more of my industry moving to mastodon I'm quite happy that I need it less and less to keep up with papers and articles

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this AI thing

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"we purposefully make it terrible, because we know it's actually better" is near to conspiracy theory level thinking.

The internal models they are working on might be better, but they are definitely not making their actual product that's publicly available right now shittier. It's exactly the thing they released, and this is its current limitations.

This has always been the type of output it would give you, we even gave it a term really early on, hallucinations. The only thing that has changed is that the novelty has worn off so you are now paying a bit more attention to it, it's not a shittier product, you're just not enthralled by it anymore.

games

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Video game makers aren’t catering for gamers with disabilities, study finds

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Because half-assing the implementation is the way to go

Let's deliver a broken version of accessibility in 10 minutes, that's much better.

No, simply adding "colour filters" isn't a fix either, and if that was the fix then a game wouldn't even need to do that, there are plenty of apps that can already do that, a game doesn't need to do anything for that (similar to how your screen warmth can change when it becomes night), reshade as an example of something that can do just that.

But thinking about the problem is ofcourse too hard, it's easier to whine about it and act like you know how simple it is. But when we implement accessibly we do think about it, because people with accessibility issues deserve to get something that actually helps rather than the "10 minute solution"

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this AI thing

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likely due to OpenAI trying to optimise energy efficiency and adding filters to what they can say.

Which is different than

No companies are only just now realizing how powerful it is and are throttling the shit out of its capabilities to sell it to you later :)

One is a natural thing that can happen in software engineering, the other is malicious intent without facts. That's why I said it's near to conspiracy level thinking. That paper does not attribute this to some deeper cabal of AI companies colluding together to make a shittier product, but enough so that they all are equally more shitty (so none outcompete eachother unfairly), so they can sell the better version later (apparently this doesn't hurt their brand or credibility somehow?).

but let’s not pretend the publicly available models aren’t purposefully getting restricted either.

Sure, not all optimizations are without costs. Additionally you have to keep in mind that a lot of these companies are currently being kept afloat with VC funding. OpenAI isn't profitable right now (they lost 540 million last year), and if investments go in a downturn (like they have a little while ago in the tech industry), then they need to cut costs like any normal company. But it's magical thinking to make this malicious by default.

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The Human Shader

I participated in this, have to say it was fun and it's been a thing I've said for years could make (at least) linear algebra lessons more interesting to young people. Shaders are the epitome of "imagery through math", and if something like this was included in my linear algebra classes I would have paid much more interest in school.

Funny now that this is my day job. I'm definitely looking forward to the video by IQ that is being made about this event.

To explain some of the error pixels: the way you got a pixel on the board was by elaborately writing down all operations in details (yes this included even simply multiplications), the goal wasn't if the pixel was correct or not, and depending on the location of your pixel the calculation could be a bit more complex, as long as you had written down your steps to get the result as detailed as possible.

More than likely simple mistakes were made in some of these people's calculations that made them take a wrong branch when dealing with conditionals. Hopefully the postmortem video will shed some light on these.

piracy

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I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."

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I'm a game dev, so my perspective on this can be biased, but my honest opinion is if games are too expensive for you to buy, go pirate them. That's exactly the situation places like Argentina are in now. Let us westerners subsidize the cost of development until your country gets back on track and you are able to buy more than just staple goods (40% of Argentina is considered living in poverty or worse).

This goes for people in poverty anywhere in the world tbh even in the West. Piracy doesn't really move the needle much (but do try to support indie devs if you can)

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Cities Skylines 2 - Review Thread - (76/100 OpenCritic)

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It's using unity game engine. I'm a graphics programmer in the industry and at my current and last workplace I made tech for games studios (i.e. I dealt with performance of easily 100 games a year at one point). Unity by far was default the worst to deal with due to the limited tools to fix issues that were inherint to the engine. Note don't take this as me saying unity is a bad engine, it's just that it isn't a performant one. Its focus is elsewhere (accessibility and ease of development, things it excels at).

So yes, you can definitely assume that, in fact I'd assume one core for the simulation unless they wrote an entire new architecture to replace unity's functionality (you'd still be locked to single thread sync points, but that's manageable). It's a hassle most don't deal with as it's a lot of work to struggle against writing code like unity wants you to write it.

I worked in a studio that exactly did that a decade ago, and it was painful and frankly a huge upfront dev cost that takes a long time to pay off.

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The Unity Games That Could be Impacted Most by Controversial Fees, From Silksong to Cult of the Lamb - IGN

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Pretty standard really. You don't want contributions to the codebase come under questionable copyright concerns, or the original creator to revoke the code 4 years later causing huge headaches potentially.

You typically have to sign these types of CLA's whenever you need to contribute to any serious project. I've had to do it for Google and Microsoft recently, and I've done it for various other open source projects as well.

Still that shouldn't concern users/gamedevs as they don't contribute to the engine code typically. Only if they want to upstream changes back into the engine publicly they would need to sign it ofcourse

world

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Children found 'butchered' in Israeli kibbutz, as horror of Hamas' attack on border communities begins to emerge | CNN

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"well we're really just evening the dead baby numbers" with the implication that that even remotely makes this justifiable.

No, I'll never support anyone who murders babies, be it whatever side or reason. You coming in here and defending baby murdering screams "both sideing" baby murdering as something that's even remotely defendable. It isn't, do some self reflection, same to whoever felt the need to upvote such messed up worldview.

For years I've been arguing for the plight of Palestinians, but to hear such disgusting arguments from someone who holds the same goal (freedom of oppression for Palestinians) and spouting that without shame is on par with those who deny the apartheid policies of Israel (I'd argue it's worse, but at this point it's the shit Olympics of opinion, and they're all on the podium).

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What to learn next, Swift or Rust

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You raised an issue that the other bulletpoint has the solution for, I really don't see how these are "key differences".

In Rust there always only one owner while in C++ you can leak ownership if you are using shared_ptr.

That's what unique_ptr would be for. If you don't want to leak ownership, unique pointer is exactly what you are looking for.

In Rust you can borrow references you do not own safely and in C++ there is no gurantee a unique_ptr can be shared safely.

Well yeah, because that's what shared_ptr is for. If you need to borrow references, then it's a shared lifetime. If the code doesn't participate in lifetime, then ofcourse you can pass a reference safely even to whatever a unique_ptr points to.

The last bulletpoint, sure that's a key difference, but it's partially incorrect. I deal with performance (as well as write Rust code professionally), this set of optimizations isn't so impactful in an average large codebase. There's no magical optimization that can be done to improve how fast objects get destroyed, but what you can optimize is aliasing issues, which languages like C++ and C have issues with (which is why vendor specific keywords like __restrict exists). This can have profound impact in very small segments of your codebase, though the average programmer is rarely ever going to run into that case.

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Highlights from git 2.42

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It's perhaps better that patch notes are written by programmers and not linguists. Incorrectly using a (harmless) phrase is perfectly okay. It doesn't detract from the important bits of the announcement at all.

edit: damn, that's a big reaction for an accidental mistake someone wrote in a patch notes highlight article.

gamedev

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Godot on laptop using external GPU? Good idea? Bad idea?

Hey, game dev here (well currently working for a company that works with many dev studios), graphics programmer in particular. It depends on what you want to do, is your primary usage going to be programming? You can get away with integrated graphics cards, as long as you stick to programmer-art quality level of environment details (which you would normally do anyway to test code).

You can get pretty far into the dev process with minimal need for a detailed 3D env.

There will be a perf hit for an external GPU just because of the physics involved (proximity and type of connection matters a lot in computers, this is why your CPU has L-caches on the cores).

I actually have a crap GPU always laying around because it's also the best to test out performance issues. Nothing drives you to improve perf than a choppy framerate ;)

Most of my colleagues in my previous company were rocking 960's or worse till last year, myself included. And we were a team of graphics programmers working on GPU driver-like software.

I'd say, try it out, download Godot and an example project, run it and see how well it performs. If the perf looks fine, congrats, it's a good idea. If the performance is bad, look at the quality of the example project and think "will I make anything visually more complex?" if not, congrats everything is good. Otherwise, well consider an external GPU if you think that's best.

I'd suggest getting a desktop though if you ever decide to keep going down the game dev line, just to keep upgrade costs low. I operate on a +-5 years cadence to modify parts, alternating between my CPU and GPU mainly. So I don't replace the entire thing, but in 2 years I'll be updating my CPU and in 4 it'll be my GPU. I also have a crap laptop for when I'm on the road, and use the desktop for my actual work. I can always remote desktop into my desktop if I need something with more power to compile or render.

To put your hardware in perspective, it would have beaten my desktop of 15 years ago and I was already doing game dev back then just fine. So you could definitely do game dev with it, the big question is "what type of game dev".

(sorry for the chaotic nature of this response, hope you got something helpful out of it)

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The Human Shader

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He's making a video as a post mortem to this experiment, so it might still be released. But I can see why it would be better not to share them (aside from privacy/legal concerns as there was no such release agreement), some of the contributors used their real names, I may be one of them. It could be a bit shameful to see this attached to your real name. They might have submitted their initial draft and then, due to circumstances, could not update the results in the several hour window that was afforded to you.

Luckily my pixels look correct though.

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It's time to take advantage of Reddit's decline

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In general, you should have enough tolerance to host discussions and debates for people you disagree with

You weren't looking for a discussion, you were looking to make a statement. You weren't there to listen, just to preach. If my opinion was "slavery was good, so I don't see why you're complaining about it" I'd be shown the door in plenty of good communities due to the inflammatory nature of my discourse. It would also be clear I'm not there to discuss anything.

I've also shown you it's not an opinion rooted in science as they do classify more sexes, so in the end it's a social opinion you hold, and tbh that's not worth a lot (and definitely not worthy of the discussion you crave).

I therefore believe that the whole idea of non-binary is pushed primarily as a grift by the medical industry to sell “treatments” for gender dysphoria

You know Pakistan & India also recognizes a third gender? The Hijra. I guess the medical community has a long history of this grift all the way into antiquity such as Ancient Egypt (they wrote and described their notion of a third gender) or even somewhat recently the Mughal Empire (15th century). But yes it's totally a grift.

Your lack of knowledge isn't mine to fix though. You've set your opinion to be something malicious because you want it to be, but even a quick glance at a wiki page would tell you the much longer history.

The rest of your comment veers off into randomness mentioning religion and how you talk about human nature as if you're an expert, and I think we've spoken enough already. I'm not going down a long windy irrelevant discussion on the matter.

You're free to have the last word, I will be going further with my day, my best to you.