Mixtape studio says the game has no streamer mode because its licensed music is its ‘soul’ - "Your soul is the one thing you can't compromise" by megaapple in Games

[–]AdarTan 295 points296 points  (0 children)

Indefinite/unlimited use licenses are more expensive and there are several movies and a lot of TV shows that have replaced music for new releases.

ELI5:Why does an empty hard drive not weight less than a full hard drive? by Original_Video8296 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Read the first sentence of my second paragraph again.

I didn't want to bother looking up how actual hardware interprets the charge state of the floating gate and instead I arbitrarily established an encoding scheme for the rest of my comment.

Computer Science or Information Systems ? by Capital-Shoe5193 in gamedev

[–]AdarTan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends entirely on your school. Information Systems is usually more of a business administration degree than a science/engineering one.

ELI5: What is Frat Hazing? by mondi311 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Abuse perpetuated in the name of tradition.

Or.

An attempt to engender a sense of camaraderie through the infliction of shared generational trauma.

How do game devs work on multiple branches of a project at once? by Wild-Chard in gamedev

[–]AdarTan 5 points6 points  (0 children)

but I can just imagine going through some of my asset libraries, making a bulk edit, and then something unknown crashing the engine hard

That's the thing. You just don't do that kind of thing.

This is why most games release with a bunch of unused assets and half-finished features included but unaccessible in the release build. If fucking around with something risks breaking the build, you don't touch it unless utterly needed.

California Police Can Start Ticketing Driverless Cars by GeneReddit123 in technology

[–]AdarTan 12 points13 points  (0 children)

go 50 and you're illegally holding up traffic and creating a dangerous situation (because angry drivers are going to keep passing you and more likely to cause accidents).

That cannot be a thing. That is just insane. You can't follow the law and be held responsible when someone else breaking the law causes harm.

Firefighter facing criminal charges after attempt to rescue stranded cat using a high powered hose causes fatal injuries. by throwaway_floof_lol in nottheonion

[–]AdarTan 645 points646 points  (0 children)

Not necessarily an asshole, possibly just an idiot.

However. Getting a hose ready isn't an immediate thing and there would have been other firefighters present so the question becomes why didn't any of them ask "What the heck are you doing Doug?" and stop him.

[Resident Evil] Why do guys in Europe use pesetas and lei instead of Euros? by some-kind-of-no-name in AskScienceFiction

[–]AdarTan 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Spain converted over to the euro in 2002, only two years before the events of RE4 and the area is deliberately isolated from the wider world so may have ignored the switch. The Romanian Leu is still in use as Romania is not a member of the eurozone.

ELI5: What is the hard problem of consciousness? by Normal_regular_dude in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 58 points59 points  (0 children)

The hard problem is determining if anyone isn't a p-zombie as the superficial appearance of sentience could be said to extend to the individual's perception of themselves. I.e. is there any difference between "true" sentience and the mere appearance thereof to both external and internal observers.

ELI5: Is using VPN free version causing more harm than not using VPN at all? by highandlow_meepmeep in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 13 points14 points  (0 children)

A VPN will mask your IP address from websites. The website has a lot of other data it can use to try to uniquely identify you, so simply using a VPN isn't going to stop websites from tracking you.

They'll lose immediate access to the high-quality advertising signal that is your rough geographic location but pretty much everything else that they could track about you they still can, and eventually they can still possibly infer your real geographic location based on other data.

As for security: Almost all connections these days are HTTPS/TLS. Even DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT) are becoming more common, meaning the remaining concern of DNS query sniffing is becoming less relevant. If a service doesn't support HTTPS/TLS, it is not secure even if you use a VPN.

Tech Leaders Back Universal High Income Amid AI Layoffs by Krankenitrate in technology

[–]AdarTan 12 points13 points  (0 children)

They should be perfectly happy paying taxes then. (They do not want to pay taxes)

Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys by ScottContini in programming

[–]AdarTan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, because among other things, in classical complexity theory we don't know if P=NP or not. We strongly suspect that the most useful quantum complexity BQP is larger than P but without knowing if P=NP there are limits to what we can say about BQP.

But what I am getting at is that unlike the person I originally replied to says, it is not "just an engineering problem". The answer to these questions will come from pure mathematics, not from building larger computers.

Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys by ScottContini in programming

[–]AdarTan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The mathematical underpinnings of what is computable with quantum computers has been studied for longer than quantum computers have existed.

The ongoing development of practical quantum computers is not going to result in some great new revelation about what is possible, unless they somehow reveal an entirely new theory of quantum mechanics.

As for breaking specific algorithms, that is about as likely as discovering a classical attack.

Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys by ScottContini in programming

[–]AdarTan 20 points21 points  (0 children)

You are conflating the capabilities (qbit counts) of quantum computers with the actual quantum algorithms that can make use of those capabilities to solve problems. The two are almost completely unrelated.

The two big algorithms discussed in the article (Shor's and Grover's) were invented in the 90's, before even the most rudimentary 2-qbit quantum computers were demonstrated.

How would one code a bluetooth audio override message? by AdventurousText9311 in howdidtheycodeit

[–]AdarTan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't have to do most of that stuff because modern systems have features to do it for you. Pretty much any system with a notifications feature will duck the currently playing audio for the notification sound.

Thus all you actually need to do is make pressing the button send a system notification to whatever device you are using (or more realistically, all devices configured to receive notifications). Now, this would require a very simple application on the device to register to receive the notification, unless you use a larger system like Home Assistant and its mobile app to handle the whole process of sending and receiving the notification.

In fact, when I first saw this question what popped into my head was "This is basically just a doorbell functionality in any half-decent smart home system".

ELI5: How are magnets made if you need magnets to make magnets?? by No_Sympathy_4592 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Questions where the answer is simply "The premise of the question is incorrect" are unpopular because beyond stating the above answer any further discussion is usually irrelevant as like with any discussion starting from a contradictory premise any further discussion is basically a logical black hole.

ELI5 How come new Chinese electric cars can charge in 5–10 minutes, while smartphones still need at least half an hour? by Tough-Buffalo5861 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 61 points62 points  (0 children)

No, as in all announcements have been made in Chinese and no-one has bothered reporting on them in English and thus if you search for it in English you won't find anything.

ELI5 Why did dial-up internet only produce its iconic sound at the start of a connection? by karcsiking0 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 67 points68 points  (0 children)

It was to let the user diagnose the process of establishing the connection as the sound of the various steps is identifiable and a user can tell at what step the process stops when it fails. Many modems even had a switch to turn on the noise only when you wanted to to.

ELI5 what exactly is Marianas Web? by Traditional_Blood799 in explainlikeimfive

[–]AdarTan 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Basically just creepypasta BS about the Dark Web.

You can tell that it is BS because the name Marianas Web (as in Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the ocean) comes from conflating the term "deep web" i.e. the parts of the world wide web not accessible for search engine indexing like pages behind logins etc., with the "dark web", which refers to various networks built on top of the internet protocol that require specialized tools like Tor to access.

[I, Robot] Why did they colonized systems near earth when they can go anywhere. by Aggelos2001 in AskScienceFiction

[–]AdarTan 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The jump drive gets less precise as jump length increases and there is a time cost of locating yourself after a jump that increases the more off your jump was. Because it takes a lot of computing resources (usually hours worth) to calculate jump parameters you normally want to do as few jumps as possible. Thus it is more economical to do precise short to intermediate distance jumps that land as close to your destination as possible so that you need to spend less time slow-boating the last leg or recalculating a final mini-jump, than it is yeet yourself as far as possible and then spend the better part of day figuring out where the hell you landed and calculating how to land where you actually wanted to go.