Reserving dinner and booking flights is like .01% of my time. Really just negligible, and they are easy enough. Groceries are more time, but I don't really want groceries delivered, I enjoy going to the store and seeing what is available and what looks good.
Maybe it could read HN for me and tell me if there is anything I'd find interesting. But then how would I slack off?
I don't think that's right. It's specifically about China, an adversary we are teetering on the brink of open conflict with. If ByteDance was a south Korean company, I don't think this would have happened.
I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.
I get this is Nintendo, so it'll never be fixed, but I honestly hate having to buy Nintendo hardware just to play the three or four big-name platform exclusives per generation. It would be so much better for consumers if they would just abandon the hardware and be a regular games company
To Nintendo's credit, their big exclusive titles tend to take advantage of the special hardware.
Zelda was weird and impractical outside of the standard controls, but still somewhat benefited from NFC.
Splatoon plays a lot better with the motion controls, NFC is actually a nice QOL improvement. A game like Arms is also nicer in split mode, even if core players tend to get back to the standard controller mode.
I see it along the lines of the Allan Kay "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" quote. Nintendo should stay serious IMHO.
In early footage of BoTW when it was a Wii U exclusive there was more usage of the Tablet for things like maps and inventory management, which was later cut for presumably parity with the Switch version.
For Splatoon it's used to quickly switch to preset weapons and gears as well, which is nice. You widly experiment with your gear and instantaneously get back to your "serious" setting at any time.
I think the same thing. Metroid is good, but is it $250+ good? Meh.
Microsoft more-or-less does the same thing with Windows in the personal consumer market. With Office being online these days, the primary motivation for a lot of people to buy a Windows license for a computer instead of using Linux or buying a Mac is gaming, along with pure inertia.
This will be a problem with everything until games are FLOSS.
I actually don't think there is a big obstacle to this. Most people don't care about FLOSS and don't even know what it is, so I think that shouldn't really affect sales. I think companies are just worried about people stealing their code to use it for more "undesirable" (to them) things like cheating and mods, and then having to go after them for it because you do actually have to try to defend your copyright/trademarks if you want to keep them.
People will know and care instantly when there's an easily accessible storefront like app with those games one click away and perfectly legal. Same reason excellent tools like Aseprite are no longer floss - it got packaged (legally) in Debian and others and why on earth would you go way out of your way to buy it, or even think that they might be trying to charge.
I don't think games companies are against mods generally, many have steam workshop support built in. Nintendo as the big exception here ofc.
Cheating is ofc a huge problem for multiplayer games and can absolutely tank some genres. Very mixed feelings about the kernel level rootkit type spyware but there's no denying that games companies are paying big money to put them there for the players benefit.
I don't think a majority of people will even go to alternative storefronts to get the software in big enough numbers to matter. I think it's more of a legal concern than a monetary (sales) one, but I could be wrong.
I think you're right, as it stands now, especially for platforms like Android with one canonical store that already has many free offerings. I use fdroid because i love the philosoply and am willing to put up with it but to be clear, the apps there are unprofessional and ugly and I get why most people don't.
But if this became a common practice I think people absolutely would. Tons of professional quality games instantly available for free is such an incredibly good value.
You could probably get away with a purely volunteer effort on... eh, how to describe this... like Super Mario 64 for Mac/Linux/PC.
And I do mean Super Mario 64 with respect to the technology/artwork level. Which is fine by me.
But the big AAA games and the multiplayer games that all of the hip young people with their poggers Twitch streaming and their deadass rock music play? Yeah, can't build those given the state of everything these days.
On the other hand, games are so hard to build and require so much vision that despite decades of gaming history, volunteers/hackers are mostly limited to modifying existing games rather than building a game from scratch.
You use Super Mario 64 as some sort of low/achievable bar for what volunteers might be able to build, as if SM64 is an easy game to build, yet nobody is building games like that on a volunteer basis.
Even look at the engineering that went into OpenMW: once again hackers were only able to recreate a game engine that runs existing game files (Morrowind) which is the easy part of building a game.
Most successful games, AAA or indie, are the result of years of full time work, most of which is making the content. I just don't see that being possible in general, without being independently wealthy.
Games also benefit from a single vision in general, which is hard to square with volunteer style development.
There are certainly exceptions of games that are built as a community: nethack, space station 13, idk probably a third one. But I just can't see this being commonly done until we figure out how free software devs can eat.
With that said: I love free software and hope this problem is solvable, but unless society changes dramatically we may need to learn to do without not just AAA scope games, but even Stardew Valley scope games
> This will be a problem with everything until games are FLOSS.
I mean there is nothing stopping that right now. You can give up your time and learn game programming and asset design and make a game and give it away for free.
But -2 seems like just a bad choice here. -1 and -2 are very "common" integers. Seems they could have just picked a quasi-random large integer to reduce the likelihood of collision. I expect hash functions to have collisions, but I expect it to be "unlikely" in a way that scales with the size of the hash.
I don't think that matters here, though. This specific hash function is literally used just for putting values in dict buckets. The docs say:
> Hash values are integers. They are used to quickly compare dictionary keys during a dictionary lookup.
They're not to be used as a crypto digest. The downside here, then is that if -1 and -2 are used as dict keys, they'll end up bucketed together. Apparently that hasn't been enough of an issue over the years to bother changing it. One advantage is that those values are common enough that it might break code that incorrectly expects hash() to have predictable outputs. If it used 0xffffffff as the value, lots of busted tests may never stumble across it.
Not only bucketed together, which means they could still be disambiguated in C by the full hash, but they'll actually share the full hash, which means they'd have to jump back into Python code to check `__eq__` to disambiguate IIUC. That seems like a huge perf issue, is it not?
Without looking it up, I think that's right, but... that's just kind of inevitable with hash tables. Unless you have a small number of keys and get very lucky, it's exceedingly likely that you'll have multiple keys in the same bucket, and you'll have to use whatever language's `__eq__` equivalent mechanism.
A mitigating factor is that dict keys have to be hashable, which implies immutability, which generally implies a small number of native, fast types like str, numbers, or simple data structures like tuples. You could have some frozendict monstrosity as keys, but 1) that's not something you see often, and 2) don't do that. It you must, define a fast __eq__. For example, an object mapping to a database row might look like:
def __eq__(self, other):
if self.pk != other.pk:
return False # Fail quickly
# If that's true, only then do a deep comparison
return self.tuple_of_values == other.tuple_of_values
But again, that's just not really something that's done.
Hash *keys* are 8 bytes (assume 64-bit machine). But the Set *buckets*[1] are a masked subset of that, starting at 3 bits and growing with the size of the set. Meaning if you store 16, 8, 32, 24, 0 all in the same set, they'll be in the same bucket (0b000)*. But, they'll still have different hash *keys*, which are stored in the hash table along with the object id. Then if you look up whether 40 is in that set, the C code will look in 0b000 bucket, see the other five values there, but note that each has a different hash *key*, since those are also stored in the table. So it'll know that 40 is not in the set without having to jump up into `__eq__`**.
* Note that the actual implementation will place bucket conflicts in the next available bucket, not the typical "overflow" linked list from CS 102, and does lookups in the same fashion. This approach makes better use of CPU caches.
** For `int` specifically, it's a C class and has no `__eq__` method. But the idea is the same if you have a class with member `i:int` and `__hash__(self): self.i`.
Are they? At least as keys for most dictionaries. Zero and positive integers sure, but negative ones would be somewhat rare. I could maybe see something like error handling, but then do you need performance there?
I agree that the visual style was not for me. I had a much better time with satisfactory, which is quite pretty. It also spares you the threat of factory destruction.
Agreed. I started playing Satisfactory a few years ago, before I ever picked up Factorio. And I played A LOT of Satisfactory. Into the thousands of hours.
I'm currently at a couple hundred hours into Factorio and I can safely say I like it better. It is way more polished and way more in-depth. It has definitely had much more time to mature and respond to user feedback. Also the threat level keeps it more interesting. But I do find Satisfactory much more beautiful, and I think the idea of having belts go directly into/out of buildings, etc, without the need for inserters, a much better style than inserters.
Factorio has "loaders" but they're not enabled in the default game, but easy enough to add with a mod (some do as part of the mod, some enable just them, some even try to make them balanced).
Satisfactory's scale is so massive for building that it was a shock coming from Factorio. I started a project over the holidays and I'm pretty sure it's going to end up at nearly 200x50. I am not sure it'll fit in a screenshot, hah.
The scale is both the best and worst thing about Satisfactory. On the one hand, once you finish a build it's really fun to admire everything you built. On the other hand, it's an exercise in utter tedium to actually build those things.
This is not helped by the fact that Coffee Stain has been aggressively anti-QoL as they developed the game. They absolutely refused to put any sort of blueprint feature or tool to speed up placing foundation for the longest time. Then when they finally added those things, the features sucked compared to what players had done with mods because they were so crippled. Then in 1.0 they finally grudgingly added slightly bigger blueprints, which are inexplicably locked behind high tier tech, and they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck. It's just baffling how hostile the developers have been to making the building part of the game (which is by far the biggest part) user-friendly.
> they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck
In their defense, Coffee Stain/Satisfactory makes fun of the player for absolutely everything. They always have. It's just the culture of their studio.
Lol, it's funny I played both and like factorio much more for precisely those reasons. It's post-apocalyptic and gritty, and has enemies. Satisfactory is great but I need a threat to stay focused. To each their own :)
Turning off biters is one of the options during game creation. There are several options in fact, you can keep biters but reduce aggression or just eliminate them entirely.
Mine is surprisingly still serviceable at 60fps 2560x1600 on older games, but I feel like it'd choke hard on this one too. The laptop performs much much better but obvs can't run it.
First I implemented it, and then learned that it is called Layout vs Schematic (LVS). For now automatic conversion is limited to stateless cells, but I'm planning to rewrite the circuit extractor to support all flipflops and latches.
Not only are delivery vehicles levied an additional toll of up to $32.40 under congestion pricing, but every employee, service provider and vendor who travels by car is also assessed the fee.
I don't even understand the scenario you're talking about now -- are you referring to a delivery driver that would be driving their personal vehicle to work in the congestion zone? And then getting on a delivery truck, which would then need to exit the congestion zone and re-enter in order to itself be charged a fee?
How many people do you think the scenario above applies to, in the real world?
