My gender is a null-pointer.

Only if it’s performance sensitive. Otherwise you’re wasting programmer time both writing and reading the code, and you’ve made it less maintainable with more complexities where bugs can creep in.

The vast majority of the time you can afford a few wasted bits.

Honestly though I don’t quite understand why a compiler couldn’t optimise this process. Like it knows what a boolean is, surely it could reduce them down to bits.

I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.

If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.

It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.

It’s very open to how you want to play.

Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.

I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.

Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.

If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.

Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.

My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.

Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.

Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.

Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.

I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.

And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.

10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.

These people just want to talk about gadgets and none of the political implications, even though those implications are unavoidable. They are the classic centrist “apolitical” people who don’t realise they have politics, but they’re just default status quo acceptance and ignorance of oppression.

This is just an old man yelling at clouds. If the mods of this sub wanted to change the topics, they could, but it would probably tank the sub. The people complaining could start their own sub with their own rules, but I’ll bet it’s not nearly as popular. Plus it takes work, and people who think it’s a good use of their time to passive-aggressively whine about a sub they don’t maintain aren’t going to do that much work. They’re not cut out for it.

What if I told you that television shows were dangerous? It’s true. In the year 2000, four out of every five injuries occurred in a home that owned a VHS copy of Robocop III. Someone might say, “That’s compelling Robocorrelation, but that data alone does not suggest Robocausation.” Fine. But maybe your first instinct was to say, “Robocop III is a movie, not a TV show, you fucking dumbass.” If so, then congratulations, idiot, you’re a Technical Genius. You’re smart enough to spot a technicality, but too dumb to know everyone else did too and it was light years away from the point. You’re the kind of person who tells your doctor, “Um, it’s Chief Chirpa?” when he tells you that getting the Wicket doll out of your asshole will require surgery. “And, um,” you’ll add, “it’s an action figure? Maybe you should have gone to a non-stupid medical school.”

The nice thing about being a Technical Genius is that it feels like proof you’re smarter than everyone. They can say you don’t “get it” all day, but they’re the imbeciles who think Robocop III is a TV show. Look at it like this: You are the only one in the history of Koala Times Bus Tours to contract syphilis from a koala bite. You might be embarrassed, but at least you aren’t like those other fools screaming “Don’t touch the koala bears!” when they are in fact marsupials. I mean, if koalas were actual bears, your whole face would be missing, not still here and covered in pulsing chancres.

Technical Geniuses reach maximum annoying when they decide that pointing out technicalities is a sense of humor. For instance, if you announced, “My wife is pregnant and we’re having a boy,” a Technical Genius might quip, “Well, technically only women can have babies. Unless you count the Chief Chirpa action figure currently breaching my anus – um, which you should, since it is the dictionary definition. Heard of it? Hey, everyone! This idiot with no dictionary is watching me shit out a Chief Chirpa, and he doesn’t even know which gender gives birth!”

That is so good to play with my kids. Another in a similar vein is Spider Heck.

You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.

You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.

But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.

I’m a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I’m not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It’s just an idea though, anyone could run with it.

I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.

If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.

This would be a really good fit for federation I think.

I have been playing Cyberpunk all wrong it seems.

Okay, I see. I’d say they might be obligated to behave that way to maintain plausible deniability. Like, if they admit they were selling a piracy service and users are entitled to a refund when the piracy gets stopped, then they become more culpable. It was always based on a thinly veiled deniability. They had to comply with occasional takedown requests for this reason.

I don’t know what the laws are like in France but they may have been worried about jail time or extra fines, and the state would want them to not issue refunds because that would punish the pirates.

Plus if you tried to sue them for it… what are the courts going to say? “You’re all pirates, get lost” is the best outcome you could hope for. I hate to say it but the de jure reality is that you were purchasing a grey-market product and the law won’t protect you in that case, and you quite literally were not purchasing a piracy service. You were purchasing hosting of torrents of an unspecified nature. That’s the risk you take on when you engage in what you have admitted is piracy. It’s very naive to expect you’re getting any kind of consumer guarantee in that case.

I say that as someone who uses these services. I’m not saying this is right, I think copyright should be abolished, but we need to understand the reality of the system we’re under.

What’s the story with Real Debrid?

Many such cases.

I’m glad you appreciate it, it was as much an excuse for me to unload that rant as anything else :)

But we actually get into trouble when our models of reality are poor. Our nature isn’t self destructive at all, look at how many times we’ve been at the brink of nuclear annihilation and someone said, “actually don’t”, some of them in defiance of entrenched power structures that punished them for it.

We’ve had that world ending button for most of the last century, and we’ve never used it. If we really, on an instinctual level, were self-destructive we never would’ve evolved.

I think the real problem is the power structures that dominate us, and how we allow them to. They are aberrant, like tumours. They have an endless growth strategy, which just like in malignant tumours tend to kill the host. If they’re destroyed, the host can go on to live a complete life.

And things can change fast, these structures are tenacious but fragile. Look at the UHC assassination - claims immediately started getting approved. After decades of entrenched screwing over of people, they flipped on their back the moment they were threatened. How many other seemingly intractable problems could be cut out tomorrow if we applied the right kind of pressure?

I wouldn’t put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The “Fermi paradox” is not a paradox, it’s speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler’s fallacies and so on.

Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that’s a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there’s chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?

All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You’re about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.

I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster’s event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.

You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn’t.

It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It’s absurd to think we’d ever even consider the idea.

But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about “a million years”. Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we’re going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?

If we did it at 0.0001c, that’s an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it’s no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.

Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven’t met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn’t seem like a paradox at all. It doesn’t seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you’re drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that’s a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.

No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It’s about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn’t an exobiologist.

I’m sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?

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