• 16 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2024

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  • This is a double-whammy PR nightmare.

    Are we going to do what happened with Jack in the Box in the naughts and start associating E Coli with McDonalds? I remember hearing that FUD so much back then and now that the shoe is on the other foot, I wonder what will happen. 🤔 Not to engage in the fast food wars or anything, but also fuck McDonalds for helping this fat ass at all.



  • Calling the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit “Manufactured Drama” is certainly a take. A bad one, that is.

    Just like the lifting of a famous actress voice, one has to wonder how much LLMs are siphoning the intellectual property of the little-people of the open source world and willfully tossing the license and attribution clauses down the toilet. If they were willing to do it to a multi-million dollar actress, what makes people think that the intellectual property theft doesn’t go much further?

    Anyway, I think for this reason it’s actually really important to note that Junior Devs are much less likely to cause this type of issue for large companies. The question is whether the lawsuits from improper licensing cost more to settle than it costs to hire Junior devs, which brings us roughly to where the international outsourcing phenomenon brought us. At least, IMO.


  • Would love for you to describe exactly how it’s more complicated.

    “More” is relative, ofc, so YMMV on whether you agree with me or not on this.

    But the problem with pass key is that it has all of the downsides of 2FA still – you need to use a mobile device such as a cell phone, that cell phone must be connected to the internet and you often can’t register a single account to multiple devices (as in, there’s only ever 1 device that has passkey authorization.)

    This isn’t an issue with ssh keys, which is a superior design despite it not being native to the web browsing experience. SSH keys can be added or removed to an account for any number of devices as long as you have some kind of login access. You can generally use SSH keys on any device regardless of network connection. There’s no security flaws to SSH keys because the public key is all that is held by 3rd parties, and it’s up to the user in question to ensure they keep good control over their keys.

    Keys can be assigned to a password and don’t require you to use biometrics as the only authentication system.

    I feel like there’s probably more here, but all of this adds up to a more complicated experience IMO. But again, it’s all relative. If you only ever use password + 2fa, I will give them that it’s simpler than this (even though, from the backend side of things, it’s MUCH more complicated from what I hear.)


  • Difficulty curves are exceptionally difficult in turn based RPG games.

    If the game is too easy, you have essentially designed a game that requires the use of very few mechanics and thus lacks depth or replay-ability. Fewer options to choose from essentially makes an easier game to balance the difficulty, but you remove player agency. A good example of this (and I mean good) is Final Fantasy X which has player agency in the form of the sphere grid, but the system is mostly linear until the late game and the mechanics basically force you to use the right character against the correct enemy for the first 10 hours or so of the game. This is good design because it forces the player to engage with the systems that exist in the game but gives them very few options to shoot themselves in the foot.

    Conversely, if you want a more open player-agency design, I would recommend looking at the balance difficulty of Final Fantasy V with some notable asterices. This game gives a lot of player agency in terms of team composition and stat allocation (in a round-about way) but this comes with the down side that most encounters have to be designed punishing to certain playstyles to encourage changing your party configuration. While grinding in most games feels like a chore, FFV actually adds achievable “goals” in either mastering jobs or unlocking more job abilities, which basically increases your character’s overall flexibility. The downside is that bosses can be brick walls so a pseudo-fail state (as in, keep progression but respawn in the last inn) would be a nice patch that would make the game easier for new players. Additionally, systems like the 4 job fiesta would be nice as a “hard mode”, if a game were ever to ape that design.

    Both of those designs work for me, personally, as long as the game is upfront about it’s design decision and that the difficulty scales appropriately to the number of choices I have (This means the game has to essentially become easier, because permutations dictate that my team composition might be radically different from someone else, or there need to be mechanics that help make “catching up” faster like FFV/Bravely Default)




  • I’m still very curious what consumer segment ends up picking this up. It’s $250, and I would assume you can just get an actually N64 for like $30, no?

    Sure, but you’re not factoring in all of the price factors that come associated with playing that on a new TV or complicated AV system. This comes with HDMI output built in, and will have scalers and other amenities for QoL usage in 2024. The sad truth is that it’s actually pretty expensive to have an AV setup that is designed to handle old consoles, especially with how TVs have not properly supported lower-res content for a long time.

    Fact of the matter is some of the best scalers with low latency that you can buy are nearly $2k US, and even the cheaper or more budget options are more expensive than the $250 price tag that this targets (the OSSC, for example). I wish this wasn’t the case, but the Analogue 3D and equivalent reimplementations are actually super important for people who are still interested on playing the closest to “real hardware” in 2024.