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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Same kind of people who lie all the time to look good to others. Some people want to be awesome but know they suck, or even more pathetic don’t suck but can’t stand not being the best, and cheating is their pathway to getting the social results of being awesome without needing to develop the skills.

    The way I’ve seen it for ages now, being a loser isn’t just about losing games, it’s how you handle losing games and how much you internalize that. I see it as short for “sore loser”. Cheaters are losers in that sense.

    Though it makes the idea of them still losing despite cheating even more hilarious, which is why I love the idea of games that detect cheaters but stick them in cheating queues instead of just banning them.


  • There’s another whole category that also doesn’t care about what the game is running on the kernel: seperate device cheats. They act as a man in the middle for the input and output signals, and can auto shoot when you’ll hit or adjust your aim if you’re close but not quite there. Or just play for you entirely if it’s that good at processing the output.

    And blocking that isn’t likely possible without killing streaming for the game or convincing all users to get input devices with encrypted connections or they can’t play your game.

    I’d respond to the original comment that anyone who doesn’t have server side cheat detection isn’t serious about stopping cheaters. In any case, I just removed that game from my wishlist. Not that I needed another survival builder game anyways, though they do tend to catch my eye.








  • I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.

    Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.

    Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.


  • KFC is the one that fills that spot for me. They use fresh ingredients but their volume on everything other than the buckets of chicken and salads is low enough that that fresh produce might start to go bad. I used to love their big crunches and chicken bowls, but it’s offputting when the potato in the chicken bowl tastes like it should have been used a few days ago or thrown out.

    It sucks because when they did use fresh fresh ingredients, they were stillpretty good, but when they used not so fresh fresh ingredients, they were bottom of the list. And most places can have bad moments, but I found KFC to be more consistently iffy rather than it being a blue moon thing.

    But busy locations are probably more consistently good because I’m guessing it’s due to managers/franchise owners trying to keep costs down at struggling locations.



  • Except that wouldn’t make a difference as far as the children data protection bit is concerned. It goes WAY beyond porn and governs the handling of any data that can be tied back to a child, including IP address, online aliases, and email addresses.

    And it’s not even just about selling it, but processing it and storing it at all. There’s technical necessity exemptions, like routers aren’t subject due to handling the IP address for routing, but stuff like logging the submitting IP address with an image to be able to handle abusive submitters would count. While it is a legitimate use, part of the UK law is requiring consent for doing anything with the data of someone under 13, and the current legal situation is “well, most sites probably break the law but you can trust us that we won’t go after you if you give it your best shot”.

    I’m surprised more sites aren’t pulling out of the UK with a law that seems designed for selective enforcement to get rid of sites the government deems “bad” while letting the ones it deems “good” or “harmless” serve as examples that they are trying to be reasonable with the law that basically makes websites illegal because 12 year olds can use browsers and might go there without parental consent.

    Also handing the ones that do check age even more information, but it’s OK because once you become an adult to do whatever with that information.



  • At one point I developed a habit of converting any recursive algorithm I was writing into a loop instead, since I knew function calls have overhead and all recursion really does is lets you use the calling stack and flow control as an invisible data structure.

    Then I got a question about parsing brackets properly during an interview and wrote a loop-based parser to solve it and the guy had to fish for a bit before I remembered recursion and realized that’s the answer he was looking for. My mind just wouldn’t consider using a whole calling stack when an integer would do the trick faster.


  • I have a convection toaster oven/air fryer, and even that is way better than my oven.

    Whatever the baking instructions are normally, I can cut 25% of the time off (actually have to or it will burn), plus I don’t have to bother preheating it, unless the cook time is very short.

    Plus it uses way less power than the fullsize oven. The one I have takes forever to preheat and has to be set 25 degrees higher, and the convection function doesn’t seem to make any difference because the fan blows. As in it sucks, and I don’t mean the air behind it.


  • Ok, first take a deep breath and calm down. Airspeed low is a good thing, you need to take this slowly! If the shaking of the steering wheel bugs you too much, they are adjustable, you just need to push it away from you.

    Now one of the biggest dangers to planes flown randomly around the sky is other planes, so you need to get on the radio with air traffic control and request permission to crash and they can give you a clear vector from your current position to a suitable crash site.

    If you’re lucky, there will be a nearby deserted island, in which case surviving the crash will make a much more interesting story than a plane crashing on a deserted island and everyone dying (or maybe the island will be purgatory or something and you really did die, or maybe purgatory will be a version where you didn’t crash… Be prepared to be very confused, especially since you won’t get to see any of the flashbacks that gives context to everyone who will lie about everything, even stupid shit like miraculously being able to walk again or other things that would be cool to talk about).

    Oh, that is unless you’re one of the few adults on a plane full of kids, in which case, sorry, you’re fucked.


  • I’d put it like this:

    Your mom and dad give you a credit card plus $600 in allowance each month and expect you to cover all expenses, including groceries, maintenance, plus the cost of hiring a cleaning service using those, which totals $800 per month. Oh, also a bunch of guns, so it’s more like $1100 per month.

    Anyways, every now and then, your credit card hits its limit and mom and dad need to agree to raise the credit limit. And if they don’t, then you refuse to pay for anything. Except the guns, but they are only like $300, so the $600 a month will cover them easily.

    Oh but the cleaning staff should still come, they just won’t get paid until the credit limit is raised.



  • Reminds me of the time I installed a 3d modelling program at work and decided I liked it and pirated it at home.

    The work one took weeks of troubleshooting on my own with the instructions followed by email back and forth with support. And the business I worked for had a partner license the whole time. Their DRM involved a dongle in the parallel port and a license server running on the local machine.

    At home, I decided one day to use it to make test files for a raytracer I was writing, found it, downloaded it, installed it, and was running it by the end of the night without any of the fancy shit they tried to add to prevent this.

    That was when I learned that that pain in the ass DRM was only a pain in the ass for legitimate users and lazy/naive piraters.


  • Yeah patient gamers check in!

    When you feel like it, that is, assuming checking in lives up to any of the hype or seems fun at all.

    For impatient gamers, pre-order checking in right now and I, uh… And my LLC pinky promises that checking in will be amazing, so you better give me money to reserve it now in case we run out of check ins by the time you get to the front of the line. You don’t want to miss out on something great, do you?