• 0 Posts
  • 249 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • As someone who’s been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I’ve always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I’m not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.

    Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.


  • Nope, it’s a terrible one. Everyone will be constantly looking for new jobs. And would do the bate minimum to not get fired, that’s the contract you’re signing, bare minimum pay for bare minimum work.

    Regardless of what you do, it’s likely that you’ll need multiple times the amount of employees to get shit done, because one dedicated employee is worth several doing bare minimum, depending on the job some works simply won’t happen because no one gets paid enough to do them.

    Besides that you’ll suffer brain drain, i.e. anyone good enough will leave you, and they won’t accept a raise to stay because if someone offered them double their salary and you tried to match it they would immediately see the bullshit you’d put them through and know that the only way to get a better pay again would be to get a new offer from someplace else.

    Anyone bad enough that other companies don’t want would be stuck with you, but there’s a reason other companies don’t want them.

    You wouldn’t be able to pull any new talent, you’d get stuck just getting people no one else wants because they’re the only ones willing to work for that low.


  • This will be almost impossible. The short answer is that those pictures might be 95% similar but their binary data might be 100% different.

    Long answer:

    Images are essentially a long list of pixels, each pixel is 3 numbers for Red, Green and Blue (and optionally Alpha if you’re dealing with a transparent image, but you’re talking pictures so I’ll ignore that). This is a simple but very stupid way to store the data of an image, because it’s very likely that the image will use the same color in multiple places, so you can instead list all of the colors a image uses, and then represent the pixels as the number in that list, this makes images occupy a LOT less space. Some formats add to that, because your eye can’t see the difference between two very close colors, they group all colors that are similar into one only color, making their list of colors used on the image WAY smaller, thus having the entire image be a LOT more compressed (but you might noticed we lost information in this step). Because of this it’s possible that one image choose color X in position Y, while the other choose Z in position W, the binaries are now completely different, but an image comparison tool can tell you that color X and Z are similar enough to be the same, and they account for a given percentage of the image depending on the amount minimum of the values Y and W. But outside of image software, nothing else knows that these two completely different binaries are the same. If you hadn’t loss data by compressing get images in the first place you could theoretically use data from different images to compress (but the results wouldn’t be great, since even uncompressed images won’t be as similar as you think), but images can be compressed a LOT more by losing unimportant data so the tradeoffs are not worth it, which is why JPEG is so ubiquitous nowadays.

    All of that being said, a compression algorithm specifically designed for images could take advantage of this, but no general purpose compression can, and it’s unlikely someone went to the trouble of building a compression for this specific case, when each image is already compressed there’s little to be gained by writing something that takes colors from multiple images in consideration, needing to decide if an image is similar enough to be bundled in together with that group or not, etc. This is an interesting question, and I wouldn’t br surprised to know that Google has one such algorithm to store all images you snap together that it can already know will be sequential. But for home NAS I think it’s unlikely you’ll find something.

    Besides all of this, storage is cheap, just buy an extra disk and move over some files there, that’s likely to be your best way forward anyways.



  • Why do you think backing up an installer is anything different from backing up a folder? What do you think an installer does that’s so special?

    You claim I’m emotionally attached to Steam and claim you use GoG because it’s DRM free, and yet I show you GoG is not DRM free and that Steam has DRM-free games and your answer is that “but that doesn’t count because the folder is not inside an installer”.

    It’s okay that you prefer GoG, but it’s not because of them being DRM free because they’re not. It might be because you prefer your hames backed up in installer format, or you might have developed an emotional bond over the DRM free claim. You’re the one making an argument from emotion, because you feel that different methods of backup are better or worse, and stick to GoG despite the reason you claimed being false.



  • I agree that most of those are non-issue, which is why I specifically pointed at the EAC one.

    It’s still nothing compared to Steam’s requirement of being online to at the very least install

    This is a requirement everywhere, you need to be online to download the installer from GoG. And before you say you can backup the installer you can also backup the installed game on steam so they’re equivalent.

    and first start of the game

    Nope you don’t. This is game dependent, and many games don’t require it. I have several games that I backed up the folder and run them, some of which I’ve even copied to computers without steam to play in multiplayer lan mode with the games on Steam.

    (so in 2 decades time when the Steam client doesn’t support any version of the OS supported by those games, they will be unplayable)

    As long as Steam still supports Linux, and because of the strong backwards compatibility there (especially on wine) you will still be able to play them. If Windows breaks backwards compatibility with current GoG installers you’ll lose your GoG collection just as much.

    and how due to Steam themselves having heavilly promoted amongst developers the tight integration of game features with Steam cloud, a dependency on Steam servers is very common even for Indie games, whilst almost all of the AAA stuff comes with their own additional (i.e. on top of Steam itself) sign-in to accounts on the maker’s own servers in order to play the game.

    Here’s the thing, they don’t need to promote it, those features are good enough that developers want to integrate them. But lazy developers rely on them which is bad. Some game developers don’t though, it’s not Valve’s fault that a game doesn’t launch without steam, if I submit a game that requires GoG galaxy for offline play It would also not be on GoG’s hands, if it weren’t for the fact that they claim 100% DRM free.




  • You can still launch the executable from the folder where it’s installed without using steam at all like you would do with DRM-dree games (assuming the game is DRM-free)

    And you can also put steam in offline mode afterwards and keep using it, many times my internet went off and steam offered me to go to offline mode, so it doesn’t need to be prior to the PC disconnecting. So even if you were to consider this DRM it’s a DRM with a button to bypass it, which doesn’t sound like DRM at all.

    But in fact going into offline mode is not even needed, for example on my Steam Deck when I wanted to play a game without people knowing I would just turn off the wireless in the configs since that was faster than putting it into offline mode and just play the game, doing exactly what you’re claiming is impossible.

    Edit: Just to confirm I tried exactly that just now, installed a game, when it finished installing I unplugged the network cable and clicked play, steam said “Couldn’t sync cloud saves” I clicked in “Play anyways” and the game launched. No fuss, no needing to switch to offline mode, nothing of what you claim happened. How about you try it before asking others to do it?


  • Steam does have a record of when players actually got around to download the game and even when and for how long they ran it, so the refund clock should start when people actually tried the game or at least when they downloaded it. That refunds rules don’t actually follow logic but instead something else, probably means that such refunds don’t actually exist driven by genuine will for good customer experience but, more likely, because in some countries there is legislation for online purchases that forces refund windows linked to purchasing time.

    You need to consider that Steam needs to pay the publishers at some point, if they followed that rule that you suggested they would need to sometimes wait years to pay a publisher, which makes it bad for publishers. I believe that 14 days is way too short, and they could easily do 30 days, but at some point they need to send that money to the publisher and at that point refunds are dangerous things. For example, imagine they allowed this and one company released a game which was very cheap with lots of promises, so lots of people buy it, eventually they abandon development so lots of people refund it, and no new sales will come for it, so any refund is a loss for Valve. Also credit cards also have some similar rules and problems, what if the card you bought the game is no longer valid?. This is why Valve needs some rules on time limit to protect themselves from those situations.

    All of that being said, the time should be longer, and if it’s an active game that will give them more sells in the future that they can take the money from they should (and usually do) allow refunds over that time limit. It’s strange that yours was denied, I’ve refunded games over a month after purchasing for similar reasons, they did let me know of the policy but proceeded with the refund regardless.


  • First of all there’s one huge misunderstanding I see lots of people making, Steam does not enforce DRM, some games on Steam are also DRM free and you can just copy the installed folder to another computer without steam and play them, in fact games that have DRM announce it in their page.

    But also some games on GoG have DRM. So long story short, both Steam and GoG sell games with and without DRM, but only one of them tries to bullshit you about it.

    I buy from Steam 100% of the time (except for games I get f on Humble Bundles or stuff like that), my reasoning is that the money I give to Valve is being invested in making games run better on Linux, and since I use Linux I have a vested interest in seeing Valve improve that. That being said, if I was in your shoes and games were half the price on GoG I might buy them from GoG, but the lack of an official Linux launcher and no cloud saves is still annoying so some games I might still get from Steam.






  • Lots of what you’re saying smells like bullshit, but I would like to point one specific thing:

    The center right still believes in representation and voting, where the far right is an authoritarian movement. This is an important distinction.

    That’s not how it works, left/right and libertarian/authoritarian are different axis, because left/right are economic terms, they can be replaced by collectivism/individualism, just like how the other axis can be replaced by Anarchism/Totalitarism. You can have an extreme libertarian-right (e.g. anarcho-capitalist) or an extreme totalitarian-right (e.g. fascism), just like you can have an extreme libertarian-left (e.g. Kibutz) or extreme totalitarian-left (e.g. communism as implemented in the USSR).

    Also there’s a third axis of conservative/progressive. Just because you live in a country where conservatives and right wings are the same doesn’t mean everyone else does. For example in the two right wing examples I gave, one (anarcho-capitalist) is extremely progressive while the other (fascism) is extremely conservative.

    In the end you can think on the 3 axis according to different questions:

    • How should money be split? This is left/right or collectivism/individualism
    • Who should rule? This is libertarian/totalitarian or anarchism/totalitarism
    • How to deal with new ideas? This is conservative/progressive

    For example, taxes and where to use them are (in general ) a left/right debate, whereas security is (usually) a libertarian/totalitarian debate, and abortion, drugs and most things related to new ideas are (again, usually) conservative/progressive.




  • Current one I soldered myself, but the cheap iron I got from Amazon does not get hot enough on the smallest tip to allow me to solder the lights, so for now it’s not backlit. Also one of the keys fails every once in a while even though everything is soldered correctly, I think it’s the controller, LPT if you have a split keyboard with an TRRS cable, don’t unplug the TRRS while the keyboard is plugged, apparently that can cause power surges, which I only read after doing that, and starting getting that error with that key… Luckily I planned ahead and have the chip built on a plug, so all I have to do is buy a replacement and solder the pins, but since most of the time it works I keep forgetting about it.