Thorry, thorry@feddit.org

To estimate when to blast out the CME to wipe us out as revenge

Mario64 is a very cool example, because it was actually bloated and unoptimized AF.

Now this isn’t really the fault of anyone, as it was a brand new architecture and the devs were still figuring out how all the 3D stuff worked. The N64 was also designed with some very cool features that could do so much, but were very hard for developers to understand. This made it so the features were often not used or used incorrectly, leading to sub-par results. With Mario64 being tied to the launch of the N64, the deadlines were also tight, so I think the team did a good job with all of those circumstances.

However these days we have this genius of a person called Kaze, who has pulled the whole game apart and documented all of the weird stuff in there. They have fixed bugs, optimized stuff and added a bunch of new features and systems. These days they pretty much have their own game engine, which runs at high framerates on original hardware with visuals that would have blown people away back in the day. They have also demonstrated that with a couple of fixes, the original release of Mario64 could have ran at framerates approaching 60fps in most circumstances. This is very far from the, at times, terrible framerates it actually ran at. Not that it would have mattered much, our minds were blown by the 3D visuals at the time, framerates didn’t matter that much. But it’s still very cool to think about what could have been.

If you are interested in stuff like this, they have a very good YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@kazen64

They are next level in their programming skills and knowledge of both N64 hardware and software and use these powers to tell other people about it and create awesome games themselves.

Oof, that comma physically hurts me

Is that Star Rupture you are playing? Really cool game, except it’s rather incomplete at the moment. I haven’t checked out the new update tho, they added a lot. Only worry I have is if they forget to put actual gameplay in their game.

I’ve seen early access titles like Star Rupture have so much potential early on, only for it to never materialize into a fun game. Especially when a small group of dedicated fans is really engaging with the dev. That might sound like a good thing, but is often a trap. The dev and the community spiral together into a rabbit hole, leaving a game that’s only fun for that select group with hundreds of hours already in the game. New people are often left overwhelmed, with too many systems and details to figure out and not engaging enough gameplay. This means the sales figures are often poor once a game releases, if it isn’t stuck in early access forever. It’s very hard to strike a good balance between listening to a small group of loyal fans and still maintain an overview and unbiased look on the project.

I really hope Star Rupture becomes a full game and a big hit, it’s super cool.

The ol’ heckeroonies

The thing about a games store like Steam or Epic isn’t the software itself. Steam has shown having a good client is a large part of it, but it isn’t the most important part. The most important part is the negotiations with the publishers and game developers to have them publish the games on that store. There is a whole lot of legal and pricing stuff involved. Another important part is a large CDN around the world to deliver the data to customers at speed.

Many large companies have tried pouring millions into this and haven’t had a lot of success. There is so much involved and large market forces to contend with.

As for just having something to manage the games on your system there is Lutris. It allows you to easily manage different game libraries and individual games. Plus tools like emulators and such to run older games for example. It’s fully open source and an initiative well worth sponsering.

Counterpoint, and hear me out on this, we could force them to give up most of their family wealth (mostly gotten over the backs of the people and slavery) and make anything remotely like monarchy illegal. Have them earn their living like the rest of us plebs.

Putting these kinds of people on a pedestal is pathetic.

This meme is brought to you by math nerds! “I swear we have a sense of humor”

For those of you driving stick: Don’t rest your hand on the stick, it wears out the synchro rings. Also when standing still, don’t keep it in gear with the clutch pushed down, that wears out parts of the clutch assembly. Just put it in neutral and release the clutch.

I don’t know if this is actually true, but my mechanic friends keep banging on about it. In my experience other parts of the car wear out much faster. And most people don’t keep cars around more than 5 years. My own car is 11 years old and we have done SO many repairs on that thing. My girlfriend’s car is over 30 years old tho, we’ve kept that thing in tip top condition. It’s much simpler than my car so repairs are fast and cheap. It’s a Toyota so it should be good for 20 years to come.

It’s a boomer world, you are just living in it. And as you know the boomers are the main characters, you are just an NPC

This is one of my favorite beers, absolutely love it. It’s a bit on the heavy side, but drinks like a lighter beer, very refreshing. It’s made in Belgium, near the French border, but it’s available in a lot of countries. And it isn’t even that expensive.

Wait what do I do with my hands? No idea, I just let them hang awkwardly and lean forward like this.

My dragons can have big naturals, as a treat.

The interesting thing about this is that it could be a double whammy. The collision that formed the Moon not only made Earth smaller, it also ejected a lot of material away from the orbit. This made Earth even smaller than it would otherwise have been, had the two bodies merged. And the Moon also formed in the process. The Moon causes the tides which are theorized to have a significant beneficial effect on evolving more complex forms of life.

So just being small might not be enough and having a big moon might also not be enough, but Earth was lucky enough to have both. And that’s just some of the things in a long list of things that have to go right to get complex life on a planet.

My feeling is that life is pretty rare, but given there are so many star systems in our galaxy there might be a lot of it still. But most of it is probably very simple stuff. Getting to where Earth is, might be a once every couple of millions of years event within our entire galaxy. So there really might be nothing intelligent out there at this moment in time, there might have been earlier and there might be in the future, but for right now we are it.

Not this thing again. Nuclear batteries have been around for decades, it’s nothing new although it makes the rounds in the media for some reason every now and again. Yes they last a long time in theory, in practice there isn’t really an environment they can live for that long in. It just means the lifetime isn’t limited by the amount of energy the battery can provide and the failure mode will be something else. The thing that always gets buried in the media is the kicker: These devices produce at maximum a couple of nanowatts. That’s just about enough to lift an ants dick if you are lucky. These devices do have their own very niche and specific uses, however for the general public there are zero uses. And don’t go shouting but what if they scale it up or they are going to make it much more powerful. They won’t, that’s not possible and they are frankly very shitty batteries in terms of just about any metric you can throw at them. Their only real upside is the extremely long lifespan.

Read all about these specific devices here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device Or atomic batteries in general here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Yes these things are pretty neat and very interesting technology. No they do not serve any real purpose for the general public, so I have no idea why the media always wants to run with stories like these. It isn’t really helpful tech startups like Betavolt for example shout out nonsense to get funding and the media just takes their word at face value, even when what they claim is physically impossible and not backed up by even their own numbers in any way. This article is about an US based startup that uses the exact same tech and tries to make the exact same sort of noise.

It’s funny they still refer to this kind of shit as a bombshell. Must be a real small bomb for the zero reaction or consequences we’ve seen thus far.

Bruh I feel like shit when I get up at 7 AM after I’ve been doom scrolling till 4 in the morning, it must be the blue light man, must be

But they can still whip right? Right???

On the other hand, you’re doing the first ever Moon landing, trying to manually find a good landing spot, running out of fuel and trying not to die. And all of a sudden your navigation computer starts throwing 1202 errors. That has to be one of the most butt clenched moments of all time.

Computer issues are basically tradition at this point.