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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 7th, 2023






  • I’ve worked at a company where the entire billing system ran on a Windows Server 2003 machine, running in a Vmware Workstation Player 15 VM on a Windows 8 PC.

    The billing software wasn’t actually billing software, it was a kind of build your own software toolkit heavily customized. Like, a sort of simple scripting engine. The actual program was no longer available and would only run on older versions of Windows even if it was. There was no installer available for it. If any part of this setup failed they would be unable to process invoices. The data format was totally proprietary with no way to export it to any other platform.

    The whole setup was accessed by remote workers using an unprotected RDP connection. No VPN.




  • I’m sorry but I really don’t see how anyone working in that environment is going to “develop the skills” to do semi realistic 3D rendering at scale. That’s not just skill, it’s access to resources, manpower and time. It’s not the same thing as encouraging someone to learn to draw or write instead of using AI. These just stuff aren’t comparable situations. I wouldn’t tell someone to hand craft their own injection moulds instead of 3D printing.

    No arguments on Roblox being horrible and exploitative, I’m not encouraging anyone to use it, but that’s not really the point here, is it?



  • I’m gonna be honest, in this specific context, I don’t hate this.

    DLSS5 sucks because it takes all the hard work that goes into making games and flattens it out into this kind of uniform pastiche of an art style. It turns every game into the same bland, generic slop.

    But if we’re talking about kids building experiences for each other in Roblox… Yeah, why not? I don’t buy the idea that a group of twelve year olds should just suddenly develop the skills required to make photo-real graphics in between homework and bed time. Yes, this is the equivalent of slapping an Instagram filter on everything, but if that filter allows someone to realise an approximation of the idea that was rattling around in their head, I think that’s pretty cool. And if they really get into this stuff, I think they’ll start to notice the limitations of these tools and get interested in learning how to do it from scratch so that they can get a result that’s even closer to their vision.

    I’m aware that a lot of this stuff does get taken pretty seriously and actually sold as entire games, effectively, but even in that context, you’re not exactly going to stand out if you’re using the same glow-up filter everyone else is. And for the people who really are just making a cool dungeon crawl for their friends to play, being able to just kind of cheat code a baseline level of graphical fidelity seems pretty OK.

    I guess my point is, yes, this is a crutch. But it’s pretty damn silly to complain about crutches when you’re standing in a hospital.






  • This is the sort of thing that sounds like it wouldn’t work until you realize that it’s literally Microsoft Flight Simulator, but with cars instead of planes.

    Here’s a fun fact about Flight Simulator. Years back I used to work in a computer store, and we’d do custom builds. My best sales, by far, were always to the smartly dressed guys in their late forties who came in looking for a gaming PC. You’d ask what kind of games they play, and they’d tell you “Just Flight Simulator.” They really meant it. They were building a gaming rig for one game. And then they would drop the most heinous stack of cash to build a gaming rig that would make the gods weep in envy. Massive towers with double or triple GPU, maxed out RAM, best CPU on the market. Liquid cooled? Sure, fuck it, why not. Their parents built model trains. These guys had Flight Simulator.

    As a franchise, that game has 22 million sales. The Forza franchise has 16 million.

    All of which is to say that I do think there’s a missed opportunity here. I hate racing games, but I’d play an open world driving game and I know at least one friend who would play it with me. Cruise down a mountainside in Italy, navigating hairpin bends with the hammer down and a beautiful sunset in the distance? Yeah, fuck it, sign me up.




  • Yeah, the moment you start thinking that it’s only acceptable for people to be gay as long as they express themselves in ways you approve of is the moment you start thinking like a fascist.

    At that point you’re no different than the racist with the black friend who is “one of the good ones.”

    The solution to the problem the previous poster is describing is that we need simply need more representation. There need to be enough queer people in media that no one character or couple has to serve the role of being a proxy for all queer people and relationships. Give me fruity gays and bitchy queens, and give me boring normal gay people who live in their white picket fence houses and drive trucks. Give me Loid from Warframe and give me Bill from The Last of Us. Celebrate the wonderful spectrum of humanity. Let it all exist instead of fighting over which parts are worthy.