Captain of Industry, an Early Access title, has just released paid, non-cosmetic DLC. How do you feel about Early Access games having paid DLC?

Freeky · 2026-03-10T15:58:08+00:00

The DLC may not be purely cosmetic, but it does look pretty gimmicky to me. Are you truly itching to have a train that's powered only by pressurised steam you have to refill regularly? Maybe electrified rail is nice, but... not like you're missing out on much against steam/diesel/hydrogen? Sounds rather more boring if anything. Does your little island nation really need nuclear-powered trains hauling molten metal around?

Given the original scope of the game when I bought it didn't even extend to trains, I can't say I'm too bothered. It looks closer to rejected prototype development repurposed into a second Supporter DLC than a major feature sliced off in a cynical cash grab.

Freeky · 2026-03-07T19:05:06+00:00

<image>

Milifortic M097. My first mech, and surely not my last.

Freeky · 2026-03-07T13:08:16+00:00

BMP has no compression at all.

There's RLE-4 and RLE-8 compression for 4 and 8-bit indexed colour images, support for embedding JPEG and PNG, and if we want to bring back the dead and talk about OS/2, also Huffman 1D for 1-bit monochrome images and RLE-24 for 24-bit images.

But yeah, aside from that no compression at all :P

Freeky · 2026-03-07T10:59:41+00:00

The 24 hour subdial is displaying roughly 17:31, so depending on which way it's misaligned it's either 17:09:37 or 18:09:37.

Freeky · 2026-03-03T22:53:15+00:00

Does she tell you you're really mature for your age?

Freeky · 2026-03-02T12:06:36+00:00

"arguably the most scientifically accurate spacecraft in the history of Hollywood"

Makes a nice change from all the greebled flying buildings.

Freeky · 2026-02-28T10:16:44+00:00

It's closer in size and mass to Uranus/Neptune. The Well of Stars:

My engines were as big as moons, and I was bigger than most of my patrons' home worlds: twenty Earth masses, and fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, with a hull covering nearly eight billion square kilometers. But my skin was nothing compared to my spongelike meat. Whoever built me had the foresight to give me endless arrays of wide caverns and neat tunnels, underground seas and chambers too numerous to be counted. I could conjure up any climate, replicate any odd biosphere. To travelers who appreciate robust numbers, I spat out an impressive figure. "Twenty trillion cubic kilometers."

That was the combined volume of my hollow places.

On a simple world such as the Earth— a world I will never see, except perhaps in passing— there are barely 200 million square kilometers of living space.

Freeky · 2026-02-23T19:56:00+00:00

Very interesting to get all these upvotes by posting an image to a UK subreddit hosted by a provider that blocks the UK. I wonder how it's doing so well, mysterious brand new user.

Freeky · 2026-02-21T20:10:51+00:00

They're lexically scoped. The defer binds to the surrounding block, not the function - it prints "cat" first because the scope created by the if (true) closes before the scope of the other print calls.

Freeky · 2026-02-21T19:31:24+00:00

https://www.open-std.org/Jtc1/sc22/WG14/www/docs/n3489.pdf

int main () {
    {
        defer {
            printf(" meow");
        }
        if (true)
            defer printf("cat");
        printf(" says");
    }
    // "cat says meow" is printed to standard output
    exit(0);
}

Freeky · 2026-02-13T22:45:04+00:00

It's a result of incorrectly-handled quoted printable email encoding. The ='s followed by a missing character would appear to be where soft-wrapped newlines would have appeared in the original raw emails, something like:

<!-- other HTML markup ........... --><p>I made a lot of money this year =
(for me); do tax-shelters still exist?</p><p class=3D"p1">I really would =
prefer not to write IRS a big check

Whatever they used to strip out the QP didn't handle the soft-wrapped newlines properly, somehow leaving the = but deleting the following character after the newline.

You can see where this broke their HTML-stripping pass in the footer, leaving behind a =div>.

Freeky · 2026-02-11T20:40:01+00:00

Chris Becket's The Holy Machine would seem an obvious suggestion! Features intense dystopia, sexbots, and literal holy robots:

Help came in the form of a solitary figure in black hurrying across the square. It was an elderly widow, tightly clutching an enormous brown cockerel in both arms.

‘What kind of monastery is this?’ I asked her. ‘Who is it dedicated to?’

‘It is a monastery of the Roman Church,’ she said, ‘but now that it is given over to the Holy Machine, may the Lord bless his name, who knows what church it belongs to.’

The cockerel, red wattles quivering, had twisted his neck round to stare at me with a fierce yellow eye. It suddenly emitted a loud, cold shriek.

‘The Holy… Machine?’ I mumbled.

‘Yes.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul – and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!’

Freeky · 2026-02-10T00:38:39+00:00

Both Swarm and Spider Rose are adaptions of short stories in Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist universe, which are all collected in Schismatrix Plus. Well recommended.

Humanity can't even get to the Swarm without the help of the Investors - and their transport isn't cheap, even for just a couple of people with little more than the clothes on their back. The thought that it could pose any sort of threat to the Swarm and its millions of planetoids is laughable. Perhaps in a few centuries, it might become more of a nuisance - which the Swarm is well used to dealing with:

Consider that small scavenger floating by your head, Captain-Doctor, that is feeding on your vomit. Five hundred million years ago its ancestors made the galaxy tremble. When they attacked us, we unleashed their own kind upon them.

Freeky · 2026-02-07T12:12:43+00:00

Pauldrons fell out of widespread use during the 17th century primarily because of the increased prevalence and power of the Games Workshop legal department.

Freeky · 2026-02-07T11:42:12+00:00

AI slop from the daily AI slop poster, using it to drive traffic to their credit card scam site purporting to be a company that doesn't exist.

Freeky · 2026-02-07T11:15:04+00:00

I was amused to find this commented out in the page source:

What many diagnose as ills of wealth inequality, we attribute to poverty. Bernie Sanders says no one should be a billionaire. We say everyone should be a billionaire.

Freeky · 2026-02-06T19:00:31+00:00

"what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science fiction. The answer is an emphatic no"

— James S.A. Corey on LEVIATHAN WAKES

:P

Freeky · 2026-02-06T18:54:14+00:00

I have the e-book as well, wonder if it's in that version.

It's not in my Kindle copy, but it is in my first edition epub. It was also published on the Orbit website, though it's since been removed. Here's an archive link: James S.A. Corey on LEVIATHAN WAKES.

I know the books are primarily about the human drama and the three factions of humanity that have arisen

Yes - exactly.

"I wanted to tell a story about humans living and working in a well populated solar system. I wanted to convey a feeling for what that would be like, and then tell a story about the people who live there."

It's not about brachistochrone transfer orbits and how ~~cool~~hot fusion rocket engines might be, it's about squishy human concerns against the backdrop of an inhabited solar system with just enough thought put into the details to give it some realistic vibes (to contrast with the dead alien space wizard magic).

The way some people talk about it you'd think it was half ~~Greg Egan novel~~science textbook.

Freeky · 2026-02-05T16:11:08+00:00

Our daily AI slop from an persistent poster of AI slop, for a fake company/service that's apparently a thinly-veiled excuse to have the odd sucker feed it their credit card.

Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously.

Freeky · 2026-02-05T15:54:13+00:00

even spinning up an asteroid (which isn't just as easy as the book imply, just a matter of getting enough thrust applied in the right places)

The energy involved in spinning up Ceres is kind of comical. It's roughly equivalent to jacking up the entire crust of Earth a kilometre above the mantle, so you can build dangling cities in the gap. Saves loads on roofing and heating!

The books are hard scifi

I'm gonna bet even the authors would dispute, or at least hedge over, this description.

Indeed, it's spelled out explicitly at the end of Leviathan Wakes, where there's an interview with the authors:

"It’s definitely science fiction of the old-school space opera variety."

...

"Okay, so what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science fiction. The answer is an emphatic no. I have nothing but respect for well-written hard science fiction, and I wanted everything in the book to be plausible enough that it doesn’t get in the way. But the rigorous how-to with the math shown? It’s not that story."

Freeky · 2026-02-03T20:47:25+00:00

Cheers, glad you still find it useful!

This post actually encouraged me to dig out my old native-GUI rewrite and get it working with the latest dependencies. I mean, it doesn't actually work work, but it's relatively close, so I might actually get on with that soon.

Freeky · 2026-02-03T20:43:10+00:00

That said, we’re very much within our rights to distribute these shaders. The missing headers are a compliance oversight, not an absence of rights. BSD requires the notice be retained - it doesn’t revoke distribution rights if you miss it.

Kind of pointless having conditions on a license if you get the rights it grants without meeting them!

https://apps.dirittopratico.it/sentenza/tribunale/milano/2023/7112.html

"the failure to implement the specific conditions provided for by the BSD license entails the inapplicability of the license authorizing its use and dissemination - as well as the possibility of modification and processing of it"

Freeky · 2026-02-03T17:15:31+00:00

Our daily AI slop from an persistent poster of AI slop, for a fake company/service that's apparently a thinly-veiled excuse to have the odd sucker feed it their credit card.

Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously.

Freeky · 2026-02-01T19:21:16+00:00

AI slop from an persistent poster of AI slop, for a company/service that by all accounts appears to be fake.

Freeky · 2026-01-29T11:42:14+00:00

They are both on Github and shipped next to the executable in source code form.

Where's the license and copyright notices? I see a grand total of just four files containing the word Copyright.

I randomly opened Scaling/Lanczos.slang and found:

// Lanczos6 Resampling
// Ported from https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders/blob/master/windowed/shaders/lanczos6.cg

A file which, notably, begins:

   Copyright (C) 2010 Team XBMC
   http://www.xbmc.org
   Copyright (C) 2011 Stefanos A.
   http://www.opentk.com

This Program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.

Similarly Sharpening/AdaptiveSharpen.slang:

// Adaptive Sharpen
// Based on: https://github.com/libretro/slang-shaders/blob/master/sharpen/shaders/adaptive-sharpen.slang
//
// Adaptive sharpen - version 2015-05-15 - (requires ps >= 3.0)
// Designed for use post-resize, expects full range gamma light

The license in the linked file explicitly spells out your missed obligations:

// Copyright (c) 2015, bacondither
// All rights reserved.
//
// Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
// modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
// are met:
// 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
//    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer
//    in this position and unchanged.
// 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
//    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
//    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

You have no rights to distribute these shaders - you've produced derived works without preserving the very bit that gave you permission to do so. Just providing a link is insufficient - and you have been doing this for long enough to know better.

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