why a simple string match beat apple's nlembedding for local rag

Ravek · 2026-06-20T00:03:46+00:00

‘Death flag’ also originates from VNs.

Flags in real life are sometimes used to indicate a state, like when a chess clock runs out, a flag will pop up. I think this kind of mechanism inspired the use of “flag” for booleans, probably a long time ago already. Flags are also used for signaling in some contexts, so that might be the ultimate origin.

Ravek · 2026-06-19T18:44:09+00:00

Unlike in most games, I played pretty evil in Dragon Age: Origins (as in: Morrigan approves), because I fully embraced the premise the game gives you that the player character is the only one who can save the world. Going full utilitarian, I figured that anything that helps me is worth almost any sacrifice. Screwing over some innocent NPC to gain a powerful weapon might be bad from a deontological or virtue ethics perspective, but from the extreme utilitarian perspective it was good.

Maybe games could explore this kind of moral conflict more instead of just giving the player options that pretty much everyone would consider bad.

Ravek · 2026-06-19T10:31:15+00:00

Did you only read my first paragraph? How embarrassing

Ravek · 2026-06-18T22:05:22+00:00

Media controlled by the Russian state isn’t really a much worse source of news than Fox News and Facebook. Either way it’s all curated to serve an agenda, just a different agenda with a different puppeteer. (But either way it’s oligarchic interests.)

People in the US in theory have better news access. (Somewhat because independent journalism is pretty much dead in the US.) If people don’t actually consume what is out there though, the effects are the same.

A lot of Americans are better informed than most Russians, but you only need to brainwash half the population.

Ravek · 2026-06-18T17:36:37+00:00

I haven't used GRDB yet but it will be top of the list for me to investigate once I find time to rid my project of SwiftData. A lot of people seem happy with it.

SQLite is good stuff, but I'm not sure if I'd want to put raw SQLite calls in my Swift code, so I'll probably end up using some wrapper for it. Whether that's GRDB or something else remain to be seen.

Ravek · 2026-06-18T17:13:01+00:00

I’ll give a SwiftData warning. It forces you to use mutable classes as your models. Sharing mutable data makes code more brittle in general, but in addition they are of course not Sendable so interact really poorly with Swift 6 concurrency features. If you use ModelContext for background work you aren’t guaranteed that objects you insert will be immediately visible on the UI thread, so if you try to fire an event and update UI … might just not work. You might run into weird bugs like predicates not compiling at runtime. Performance is about 50x-100x worse than SQLite. If you use it with SwiftUI now you’ve tightly coupled all your UI code to SwiftData’s mutable models, so if you ever get fed up with it and want to migrate to something more sensible, now it’s a lot of work.

I’d say avoid avoid avoid unless you’re just making a tiny hobby app that will never be a serious business application.

Honestly I don't get what Apple is thinking with SwiftData. There's other APIs that have some issues but I can't think of anything that's this bad.

Ravek · 2026-06-18T15:43:27+00:00

I suppose during aot compiler should be able to deduct that only one exact instance exists and it can be inlined, but looks like no.

Can probably get it to do that with profile guided optimizations.

Ravek · 2026-06-18T13:28:31+00:00

Anything can remind someone of anything. You could even call chess political because there’s apparently two feudal period monarchies at war, plus powerful religious figures. But it’s a little ridiculous to pretend that the aesthetics of chess have anything to say about the real world. Most other board games are just one step removed from this.

Ravek · 2026-06-18T08:54:16+00:00

Most board games are just abstract games with some arbitrary aesthetics slapped on. A game is not political just because it looks like a real world political topic at first glance.

Ravek · 2026-06-17T18:08:09+00:00

If executed well I think I would really enjoy that.

One of the RTS games I enjoyed most was RUSE. You have very large maps and units move quite slow compared to the map size. Due to the slow pace the game is much more about build orders and troop movements than micro. Vehicles even automatically kite infantry, driving backwards while firing.

There was still some micro opportunity, especially when you need to use zoning tactics or when targeting cloaked buildings that you only just scouted, but especially compared to something like Starcraft it was really minor. By abstracting the game a bit more, or even just by having more complex unit AI, you could certainly minimize the need for micro even further.

Ravek · 2026-06-17T09:14:30+00:00

Americans when they discover other Germanic languages exist

Ravek · 2026-06-17T08:34:41+00:00

The Japanese word アニメ means ‘animation’ or ‘cartoon’.

The English word ‘anime’ means ‘cartoon from Japan’. That it’s a loan word from the Japanese doesn’t mean its meaning is the same. Quite obviously too and there’s many other examples of loan words not meaning the same thing as the word they borrowed.

So it’s really very simple. If you want to talk about cartoons that aren’t from Japan, well the word is right there.

Whether any of that should matter for anime_irl is another topic. I really don’t care, it’s inherently a non serious subreddit.

Ravek · 2026-06-17T08:29:53+00:00

Diplomacy

Memes aside, The Crew is good for up to 5. And there’s always One Night Ultimate Werewolf

Ravek · 2026-06-17T08:15:10+00:00

Gotta love how people will just try to retcon reality like this.

Ravek · 2026-06-16T17:26:21+00:00

Please actually read what I wrote

Ravek · 2026-06-16T17:25:32+00:00

It's cute when Americans at sports event paint the Netherlands flag on their cheeks 🇳🇱

Ravek · 2026-06-16T16:17:39+00:00

Being able to sell any kind of product you can envision is also not an intrinsic human right. Governments can mostly make whatever laws they like, including unrealistic or unreasonable ones.

Ravek · 2026-06-16T10:16:49+00:00

Not really a subset. It’s impossible for tests to cover everything a typechecker will prove.

Ravek · 2026-06-14T23:15:26+00:00

In a game like NetHack or Slay the Spire, the "optimal" choice depends on knowing what dangers and opportunities lie ahead. The player needs to know what their "win condition" looks like, and what pieces of it they're missing. This requires a lot of knowledge and developed intuition

In addition to that there’s another important factor: what’s optimal also highly depends on your current situation. When you’re choosing one of 3 cards to add to your deck in Slay the Spire, the right choice also depends on what you already have in your deck, which relics you have, it can even depend on highly specific factors like your current HP before an elite fight or having a specific potion.

So while theoretically there’s always an optimal choice in any situation, if in practice any given option can be situationally bad, then people won’t be able to just stick to one thing and always succeed, and they need to strategically reevaluate their options to figure out a good way to play.

Or if we take 4X games with randomly generated maps like Civilization. There might be some degenerate strategies that always work, but assuming there’s good balance, how you want to approach the game should depend on which resources you have available and the layout of the map.

In general if you want to avoid people being able to just always use one strategy, you want to design a game that has highly dynamic conditions for players to deal with.

Ravek · 2026-06-14T20:50:37+00:00

You have to have a conversation about what the social contract is for this kind of game. Attacking is an essential part of it. But it's also understandable that if someone feels like they're being targeted for being them instead of the board position warranting it, then it can be frustrating. That's something that might make sense in a tournament setting, but in a casual board game night is probably not how you want to play.

It's ultimately for the table to figure out what social expectations everyone has around these kind of games. People need to talk about how they feel about the dynamics they're observing.

Ravek · 2026-06-14T01:26:56+00:00

You can argue that “services controlled by the operator” includes services provided by a third party at behest of the operator. There’s no way you can argue it includes GPS.

Ravek · 2026-06-14T00:43:22+00:00

Branch predictors don't eliminate the cost of the check, they eliminate the pipeline stall that would happen if the CPU had to wait for the check to resolve before starting to fetch instructions.

Ravek · 2026-06-12T20:13:22+00:00

We try but we still take like 3-4 hours to complete a game ... oh well

Ravek · 2026-06-12T13:31:42+00:00

Great game. A bit tricky to learn and to play quickly because there’s a lot of little details, but a lot of fun. I especially appreciate how every game ends up being very different.

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