Oh, grapefruit. I didn’t think gfuckfruit was very likely.
Don’t suppose it has the same work-around as Dark Souls? In a game with a serious medieval theme, it does of course censor all knight-themed characters to eg. K***ht Solaire or whatever. Unless you change the system language during character creation. Then you can play with any swear in your name you like.
Most of the laptops I’ve had open lately have had about the top third be the motherboard and the bottom two-thirds be battery, with maybe some ports and speakers tucked down the side. So I’d expect that last of replacements to include the battery, too.
I might check whether the hard drive survived - a decent M.2 is small, expensive and reusable - and maybe the RAM if it’s not soldered in.
But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?
Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.
Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn’t need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it’s just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost
Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
Ironic, since 2B doesn’t have ass on any platform. My anaconda don’t want none of that.
“Register bit twiddling.” Setting all the modes that all their various cards can operate in, with the associated code for sending the bit updates over the connection bus. Tedious stuff that’s very prone to copy-paste errors if written by hand.
At some point you have to take AMDs word for it that these codes = this functionality, but if the right graphics come out then it can’t be so wrong.
Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…
A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.
Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.
“One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:
We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.
It’s a simple alphabet for computing because most of the early developers of computing developed using it and therefore it’s supported everywhere. If the Vikings had developed early computers then we could use the 24 futhark runes, wouldn’t have upper and lower case to worry about, and you wouldn’t need to render curves in fonts because it’s all straight lines.
But yeah, agreed. Very widely spoken. But don’t translate programming languages automatically; VBA does that for keywords and it’s an utter nightmare.
If you move past the ‘brute force’ method of solving into the ‘constraints’ level, it’s fairly easy to check whether there are multiple possible valid solutions. Using a programming language with a good sets implementation (Python!) makes this easy - for each cell, generate a set of all the values that could possibly go there. If there’s only one, fill it in and remove that value from all the sets in the same row/column/block. If there’s no cells left that only take a unique value, choose the cell with the fewest possibilities and evaluate all of them, recursively. Even a fairly dumb implementation will do the whole problem space in milliseconds. This is a very easy problem to parallelize, too, but it’s hardly worth it for 9x9 sodokus - maybe if you’re generating 16x16 or 25x25 ‘alphabet’ puzzles, but you’ll quickly generate problems beyond the ability of humans to solve.
The method in the article for generating ‘difficult’ puzzles seems mighty inefficient to me - generate a valid solution, and then randomly remove numbers until the puzzle is no longer ‘unique’. That’s a very calculation-heavy way of doing it, need to evaluate the whole puzzle at every step. It must be the case that a ‘unique’ sodoku has at least 8 unique numbers in the starting puzzle, because otherwise there will be at least two solutions, with the missing numbers swapped over. Preferring to remove numbers equal to values that you’ve already removed ought to get you to a hard puzzle faster?
As an example of a language that many people are familiar with, which is likely to be in long-term use where maintainability is most important, and which can almost read like pseudocode anyway, sure - probably the best ‘real language’ choice.
You can write an unmaintainable fucking mess in any language. Rust won’t save you from cryptic variable naming, copy-paste code, a complete absence of design patterns, dreadful algorithms, large classes of security issues, unfathomable UX, or a hundred other things. “Clean code” is (mostly) a separate issue from choice of language.
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like this book. It manages to be both long-winded and facile at the same time. A lot of people seem to read it and take the exact wrong lessons about maintainability from it. I think that it would mostly benefit from being written in pseudocode - concentrating on any particular language might distract from the message. But having a few examples of what a shitfest looks like in a few specific languages might help
That is a good read, thank you. Didn’t have procedures, had two different brokersge systems running at once because they’d no procedures to follow, lost a fortune.
I’m thinking it’s the "most expensive bug in history so far - haven’t seen an accurate total for CrowdStrike’s little faux pas, yet.
My old job had a lot of embedded programming - hard real-time Z80 programming, for processors like Z800s and eZ80s to control industrial devices. Actually quite pleasant languages to do bit-twiddling in, and it’s great to be able to step through the debugger and see that what the CPU is running is literally your source code, opcode by opcode.
Back when a computers were very simple things - I’m thinking a ZX Spectrum, where you can read directly from the input ports and write directly into the framebuffer, no OS in your way just code, then assembly made a lot of sense, was even fun. On modem computers, it is not so fun:
x64 is just a fucking mess
you cannot just read and write what you want, the kernel won’t let you. So you’re going to be spending a lot of your time calling system routines.
99% of your code will just be arranging data to suit the calling convention of your OS, and doing pointless busywork like stack pointer alignment. Writing some macros to do it for you makes your code look like C. Might as well just use C, in that case.
Writing assembly makes some sense sometimes - required for embedded, you might be writing something very security conscious where timing is essential, or you might be lining up some data for vectorisation where higher-level languages don’t have the constructs to get it right - but these are very small bits of code. You would be mad to consider “making the whole apple pie” in assembly.
Man alive, I thought that Mozilla had been doing their own Personal Package Archives so that we didn’t have to deal with Ubuntu packaging it as a Snap anymore. And this is doubly disappointing.
I know you jest, but I’m going to guess it’s for the same reason that the RPCS3 developers didn’t just concentrate on the ‘popular’ games. If they know that all the janky broken games work properly, then they’ll have confidence that there’s no subtle issues hiding in the nearly-perfect ones. A rising tide lifts all boats.
They didn’t pull DMC2 just out of principle? Foolishness, Dante, foolishness.
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