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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The main reasons why it’s Doom specifically are also because:

    • The game is open-source: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr This makes it much more doable to port it to other platforms (and to strip out anything not absolutely required to get the first level to run when you run into technological limitations) than when you have to rely on unofficial modding tools.

    • It’s nearly 30 years old and designed for computers with only a few megabytes of memory and for processors of well under 100MHz, which are specs which the majority of modern systems have, even embedded systems. It also renders fully on the CPU and doesn’t require specific hardware like a GPU or a specific graphics chip.

    • Being a first person shooter with 3D-ish visuals it looks a lot more impressive than if you show off a simple game like Pong orTetris or something like that. It has the right balance between performance requirements and impressiveness, and it’s also a game that was very popular in its time and it’s instantly recognisable to a lot of people.




  • It’s not just because of gearing. It’s because an internal combustion engine generally gets more efficient when it runs with a high torque.

    An ICE car still requires more energy to go faster, but going faster allows you to use a higher gear without stalling the engine, which increases the torque and makes the engine more efficient. Combustion engines aren’t very efficient to begin with because the thermodynamic processes they rely on just aren’t very efficient, reaching generally only a bit above 20% in realistic scenarios, so any decent chance in the engine’s efficiency generally overcompensates for the additional energy the car required to travel at higher speed. Though eventually drag does take the upper hand and with speeds above 100km/h the fuel efficiency of an ICE car usually starts to decrease again.

    Electric motors have a much flatter efficiency curve (especially with modern, advanced driving circuitry), so the extra drag at higher speed just directly translates to higher battery consumption.

    The relatively flat efficiency curve of electric motors is also part of the reason why most electric cars don’t have any gears, combined with the very high RPM limit of electric motors. There simply isn’t a need for them.


  • I actually kinda dislike the “do anything in any order” approach of the recent games. I get the desire for freedom, but on the flip side it means that the majority of the content has to be designed to not be too overwhelming for a beginning player as a player could potentially do it first. IMO the puzzle design suffers a lot from this as there are rarely opportunities for puzzles to iterate and expand upon mechanics introduced by prior puzzles. The shrines are especially guilty of this, and even though they all have different puzzles, the loop of introducing the puzzle element and then one or two tests on it still ends up feeling repetitive.

    The story also has to make sense regardless of in which order some of the main quests are played and IMO the storytelling really suffers from this. It feels like you’re just uncovering someone else’s story and doesn’t feel like you actually play an important part in it.

    I’d love a return to the classic style because I like it when the puzzles get more complex and more elaborate over time. I’d love a game that makes me feel like I’m a part of the story rather than letting me unlock movie fragments of someone else’s story. I loved regularly unlocking new tools that suddenly open up new paths or make you able to unlock new secrets in the overworld. It’s that sense of character growth and progression that I feel like I’m missing in the newer games.

    I still enjoyed the recent games though, and they certainly do also introduce a lot of good things.

    The physics interaction, or the “chemistry engine” as they call it, is just awesome and the freedom it allows in puzzle solving is amazing. It turns puzzle solving from having to find the solution to having to find a solution. It removes a lot of common frustrations with puzzles because now when something looks like it should work, it almost always does. It also allows you to think outside the box and let’s you come up with ways to skip some puzzles if you understand the mechanics well enough, or to come up with intentionally wacky or overly elaborate solutions that somehow still work. I do hope that if they ever make a new Zelda game in the “old style”, they do incorporate at least some of this freedom in puzzle solving in it.

    I also love how much more there is to be found in BOTW and TOTK and there is so much more background information given about important side characters and about the various areas of the world, if you’re willing to look for it. Side quests and content are also much more plentiful and more elaborate than in the previous games.

    So I don’t think this new direction is bad, but it has both advantages and disadvantages and there are parts from the “old” style I really miss. Ideally I’d like to see both types of games coexist in the future, similar to how the 3D style of Zelda has coexisted with the 2D style (which too are quite different from eachother gameplay-wise, both also with their own advantages and disadvantages).


  • Sponsored sections are basically ads injected in the main stream. The SponsorBlock extension can already get around those, so that’s already a good proof that it’s technically possible.

    SponsorBlock works with user-generated data: anyone using the extension can mark sections of a video as sponsored segments, and once several users have reported the same then the extension will automatically skip that part of the video for other users.


  • It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.

    I’ve seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn’t actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don’t remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.

    Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.


  • There are several those keys can be obtained, and most of them don’t involve fraud:

    • Purchasing keys in a region where they’re cheaper, and reselling them in regions where the game is more expensive

    • Purchasing keys during a sale, and reselling them after the sale

    • Claiming keys from giveaways and selling those when the giveaway is over

    • Buying a bundle (such as Humble Bundle) and selling the keys you aren’t interested in or you already have

    • Buying games with stolen credit card and reselling those keys

    Only the last one is illegal and costs the developers money. Digital storefronts have made it harder to obtain raw, transferrable keys and have introduced region locks to try to combat those top 3 methods, but they all were very common in the past.

    Key resellers like G2A are pretty much just an eBay for keys. It’s not an illegal organisation, they just provide platforms on which people can sell their game keys, but they don’t know (and probably don’t care) how those keys are actually obtained. The majority of keys on those platforms are actually legit (iirc by far the biggest category is games purchased out of region).

    HOWEVER,

    The legally obtained keys sold on the platform are all obtained in such a way that the developers get little to no money from it, so chargeback fees from a few fraudulent purchases easily outweighs the small amount of money they get from the legit keys there. So even though the majority of keys sold on such platforms are not illegal, the few illegal keys that do exist are enough to make the developers still lose money on average with keys sold there.



  • An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.

    It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn’t do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.

    I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.