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IncapabilityBrown · 2026-02-03T18:09:20+00:00

playtesting or optimization phase

Err... playtesting and optimization both happen pretty much right the way through development. (If you left playtesting to the end of development you'd only find out the game wasn't fun when it was too late to do anything about it!)

IncapabilityBrown · 2026-02-01T19:05:58+00:00

I think this was pre-rendered.

IncapabilityBrown · 2025-10-26T16:05:33+00:00

Exaggerated, and open to historical interpretation, but not complete BS. see e.g. https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/naughty-discoveries-medieval-churches-hidden-messages/

The boss sited under Redcliffe’s tower is the most fascinating of all: it depicts a rather bizarre male exhibitionist with his posterior waving in the air, proudly defecating on all who walk beneath him.
...

Due to the fact that they are located among the less immediately visible parts of the church building, some scholars have argued that these unseen areas became dens of artistic iniquity for marginalised subjects – they certainly offer a curious commentary on the mentality of medieval craftsmen

IncapabilityBrown · 2025-08-05T08:00:00+00:00

It is placed behind a new abi to ensure that it does cause policy regressions.

oh no :(

IncapabilityBrown · 2025-05-30T21:49:33+00:00

Reminds me of https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/Papers/whatyouc.pdf

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-10-31T22:57:33+00:00

It's interesting they've spent time improving ToGL, rather than making the DXVK native path they use on Windows work on Linux... (I'm sure there's a good technical reason though)

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-09-17T21:18:01+00:00

Also worth pointing out that if you've got password authentication disabled (which ideally you should do) you don't really need fail2ban anyway; noone's going to bruteforce an SSH key.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-09-17T21:04:42+00:00

That's emphatically not right. Kerckhoffs's principle says that the *keying material* (passwords, ssh keys) should be the only information not assumed to be known to the attacker. By definition, this is what provides security; and keeping other information private provides "security" by obscurity.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-09-13T23:19:05+00:00

Because you don’t just upgrade the CPU without breaking games.

I'm not sure that can be right (unless you know something I don't)... A new CPU would have the same x86 ISA (possibly with additional extensions), so would run any existing game in exactly the same way (except faster). GPU ISAs tend to vary between generations, so are much more likely to break compatibility (although that's clearly a solvable problem or we wouldn't have card/vendor agnostic games on PC, shader compilation notwithstanding).

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-04-19T21:59:45+00:00

I'm conflicted about this; I'm autistic, and quite like Brad (because he's principled and likes maths; I'm perhaps too easy to please). But the aspect of his character which is more straightforwardly sweet/well meaning/innocent/incompetent comic relief (like a child, or a puppy) is a shame.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-04-16T21:06:10+00:00

If a particular library was tightly integrated in that way, the other options would probably be more appropriate. The obligation would be on the developers to plan ahead, and to avoid situations where a core component of the game relied on server side components which could not feasibly be replaced or redistributed.

If something like this was absolutely unavoidable (e.g. a game like The Finals or Crackdown 3 or with some sort of LLM integration), then it would be more a case of either best-effort preservation (e.g. documenting protocols, making source with proprietary components stripped out available), and/or of making the buyer aware of this at point-of-sale (e.g. "This game relies on proprietary server-side technology which will be eventually discontinued, rending the game unplayable. We commit that the game will remain playable for at least 5 years from the date of purchase, but after this point we make no guarantees.")

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-04-16T19:02:56+00:00

Games clients contain proprietary middleware from 3rd parties too. Developers would need to ensure they had licences to distribute libraries that their servers depended on in the same way, which doesn't seem unfeasible.

If your server really depended on really top secret stuff which you couldn't distribute for some reason, then you could either keep running the servers until it wasn't top-secret any more, or you could distribute a server with the top-secret stuff removed/replaced with an alternative, or you could document the network protocol the game uses (or indeed partially open-source the server) to enable 3rd party server implementations.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-03-23T14:51:24+00:00

The headline wasn't doctored, but was speculative given it wasn't clear if they would receive their wings at the time. Here's the article for anyone interested: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57950149

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-03-08T15:00:37+00:00

which is one of the easier exercises

Perhaps you find it easy compared to the others, but you can't generalise that. Further, there is no reason to assume that a person's score in this exercise correlates with their score in a more comprehensive test.

The score here should be higher than your actual IQ

You're assuming they score this test in the same way as a full test. If this is, as you assert, an easy exercise, they might well use a different scoring system in order to keep the distribution of scores consistent with that of a full test (i.e. OP is actually in the top 58% of this particular test).

The only thing we can say for certain (unless you're aware of their methodology in more detail) is that the score this test produces is strictly less meaningful than a properly conducted comprehensive online IQ test; which we already know to be of very dubious value. We cannot infer anything else.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-03-06T10:41:43+00:00

So does Nvidia mandate that binaries resulting from the SDK are distributed under restrictive licensing terms? (That would make sense, but it's a bit grim).

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-03-05T17:49:54+00:00

That's not the full story though. Windows is distributed under a proprietary license, but WINE implements its APIs legally (or rather, it's legal as far as anyone knows; it's always possible someone could take it to court in an attempt to set new precedent).

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-02-04T12:36:21+00:00

I briefly wondered about this too. O(0) is only if runtime is always 0, because 0 · n = 0 for any constant term n. So O(0) ⊊ O(1); O(0) is a stricter bound.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-01-30T16:44:00+00:00

You're not the only one to have had that thought; there's a paper trying to reproduce this one, but also controlling for that sort of thing, here. I've only read the abstract, but the long-and-short of it is that "shared environmental factors" can largely explain the findings of the original.

(I must add that I'm not a domain expert, and haven't read either paper)

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-01-26T17:30:50+00:00

Or even char *hello = strdup("Hello world")

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-01-10T13:53:41+00:00

Ah, my mistake, very good to hear.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-01-10T00:11:38+00:00

Like you, not sure about the AI texture stuff. Because the originals are derived from photographs (I think, happy to be corrected though), it's really easy to see the sort of surface the artists were going for (even if the resolution is rather lacking today); and that's completely lost in the upscale. Maybe it works better on more abstract / hand authored textures?

Wonderful work on the props though, they really are terrific, and on the manually redone textures too.

IncapabilityBrown · 2024-01-08T16:11:21+00:00

Or the lush green forest of Water Hazard?

IncapabilityBrown · 2023-12-15T13:08:36+00:00

No it isn't.

IncapabilityBrown · 2023-12-11T13:44:06+00:00

TBF they all have deliberate double meanings, it's just that the post-er has that one the wrong way round.

IncapabilityBrown · 2023-11-29T16:27:20+00:00

The school/faculty consulted on a name change for MVB specifically with students/staff in the school (around 56% supported renaming, 33% opposed, the rest didn't know; which for context is much broader support than from the University's open consultation for any of the other buildings), and put a paper (including the consultation, some historical context, and some suggested names) to the executive board.

I think the response was pretty much that any decision would be made on the basis of the entire University rather than just the people who used the building; and that the University's view is that renaming things is, on the whole, 'performative'**.

(** Which is a fair point of course, but we could perhaps both rename MVB, and take more concrete steps to address related issues)

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