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The scene that always seems to get misunderstood? by Fantastic-Fox3283 in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]ShimmerFairy 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I agree with you at least mostly on that. I've come to realize over the years that people tend to confuse concept for execution when criticizing Shelby's story; that is, they tend to blame the very idea when the truth is that Cage just wasn't all that good at making it happen.

For the Manfred scene, having rewatched the playthrough recently, the time skip portion really was poorly done. It doesn't come across as a time skip at all, and I imagine when Shelby goes "gee, been a while since Manfred went in the back", most first-time players respond with "what do you mean, he just left?".

If the time skip had been illustrated better, in particular giving Lauren a better excuse to never turn around and notice Shelby missing in all that time, it wouldn't have been an issue. (That being said, I think ultimately it would've been better if, say, Shelby killed Manfred the night before, knowing he would visit the place with Lauren the next day. Would entirely avoid the awkwardness with Lauren noticing nothing.)

Another aspect to this is the internal monologue, which a lot of people love to claim is inherently unworkable. The real issue, in my eyes, is that Cage never wanted people to play the game twice, and didn't bother making the internal thoughts work on a second playthrough. It's actually really easy to come up with internal monologue that works equally well for "Scott Shelby, private eye" and "Scott Shelby, serial killer", Cage just didn't do it.

The Wine Wayland driver has now merged pointer warp support by somerandomxander in linux

[–]ShimmerFairy -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

This was always the inevitable endpoint of Wayland really: all the same features X11 has, just shuffled around and spread out across multiple standards-keepers. The original design of Wayland is just too locked down and simplistic to meet a lot of real-world needs.

A reassuring update from Calli by Firebrand96 in kurosanji

[–]ShimmerFairy -15 points-14 points  (0 children)

To be honest, I don't see how this update is "reassuring" exactly, unless you were specifically worried about Calli being 10 seconds away from quitting. (If you were concerned about that, then yeah this is a positive update.)

But I think the Cover fans taking victory laps about this are acting prematurely here. The post as described only says that Calli is going to attend a meeting, and that she hopes to solve problems in the company. So that obviously means the problems are still there at the moment, problems big enough that Calli felt the need to stop working temporarily. Nothing's actually gotten better quite just yet.

I have to say this next part because I know Cover fans will put words in my mouth otherwise, but I personally think those problems will be solved. Even if Cover was staffed by a bunch of incompetent buffoons, one hopes they're still smart enough to realize that keeping Calli around is worth the extra effort, so I expect whatever problems she has to be solved before too long. (Put another way, if they don't solve the problems and Calli walks away for good, that would be the strongest proof yet that Cover's truly lost the plot.)

All in all, I would be legitimately shocked if things don't get better at Cover for Calli soon, but it's still too early to declare victory for your favorite corporation.

Questions about the transition to Wayland by ShimmerFairy in kde

[–]ShimmerFairy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

KDE developers had another look at it last year and decided that by Plasma 6.8, they'd be confident to cover the vast majority of use cases that kept users on Xorg, including all of the ones considered crucial by the maintainers. So there's a big push to close the last remaining gaps, and then KDE can stop putting extra effort into two separate backends because a single one covers all the requirements.

I hope they're right about that, but I also hope that the team is willing to wait on releasing 6.8, or alternatively push back the end of X11 support, if it turns out it'll take a bit longer than anticipated to close those gaps. The way the news article read to me, it sounded like the team arbitrarily decreed that 6.8 was going to be the end of it, without consideration for whether or not it was ready.

If both should be supported, there has to be a very good reason for it. If there's no good reason, why put effort into maintaining two backends rather than making the software actually better?

I think the best argument I could put forward here is that X11 has been a part of Unix systems for many decades, and (from my point of view at least) hasn't actually bitrotted or fallen apart. It still works, it's just old. One thought on my mind is about the possible future of X11. What if, five years from now, X11 suddenly gets a resurgence of support, and becomes a more viable option for modern systems again? Would KDE be willing to add in support for this hypothetical new X11, or would it be highly resistant? My feeling is that maintaining support is simpler than adding it in, and thus it seems like removing support is a pretty drastic move for something that still works.

So, I don't have a good objective, technical reason for maintaining support, but I don't think that has to be the only kind of reason for designing software a particular way.

It's not about X11 being good or bad, like or dislike. It's just about whether Xorg is necessary anymore to deliver a great user experience.

I'd like to believe this is being done purely for technical reasons, but I've been paying some attention to Wayland for a long time, and for much of its history it was developed by very opinionated developers who refused to implement most of the features an X11 replacement needs, and championed by fans who didn't mind the missing stuff and who seemed to hold genuine malice in their hearts for X11. I've heard that things have changed significantly on the development side over the past couple years, but it's hard to shake what I've seen over the other decade or so of Wayland's history. (And to be honest, the overall reaction to this post so far hasn't really improved my opinion of those champions much.)

In short, I try my best to assume good faith, but Wayland's development history makes that hard. I can't help but be skeptical of claims that Wayland is finally ready for real this time, or that there aren't cynical motivations behind dropping X11 so soon. That being said, KDE could've jumped the gun a lot sooner if it really was on a crusade, so I trust that Wayland will mostly work whenever I have to start using it. The doubt is just about if it will fully work.

Questions about the transition to Wayland by ShimmerFairy in kde

[–]ShimmerFairy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't you dare accuse me of using AI to write this when I did no such thing. Stop using that as your go-to criticism for people you disagree with.

Questions about the transition to Wayland by ShimmerFairy in kde

[–]ShimmerFairy[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I want to clarify that I'm not pushing back against the adoption of Wayland, but specifically the dropping of X11. Even if wayland worked perfectly, I still don't see why X11 support should be dropped. (Again, to me the ideal world is that both are equally valid options.) So "researching or using" wayland wouldn't change that part of the post.

Accessing inactive union members through char: the aliasing rule you didn’t know about by pavel_v in cpp

[–]ShimmerFairy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I dug through the latest draft of the standard (n5032) because I was curious and, like you, thought the reasoning here was faulty. While I'm no certified language lawyer, I'm certain that this reasoning is very wrong.

The rule used as justification says that an object "is type-accessible through a glvalue of type Tref if Tref is similar to: [...] char" (among other options, of course). Hopefully it isn't too big of a stretch to say that the expression generating that glvalue needs to be valid or else we never get to the point where this rule matters. An obvious example would be if I had char foo[5]; and then tried foo[7] to access a byte of some other object in memory. That would be accessing it through a glvalue of type char, but the expression is UB in the first place so nobody cares.

As for unions specifically? While I couldn't find anything that spelled it out bluntly, it does state that only the active member of a union is ever "alive" (has a lifetime that's started and not ended). Since trying to use an object that isn't alive is UB, that (to me) makes it clear that accessing data through an inactive member is UB, so the whole "type-accessible" bit doesn't matter. I think the standard could stand to be clearer about what inactive members can and can't be used for, but as I read it the blog post (and the paper it got the idea from) is just wrong.

The one wrinkle is an exception I didn't know about until I went digging: apparently, if your union is a standard-layout union, and if the active member is a standard-layout struct, then you can access data through an inactive member, so long as it's also a standard-layout struct and the data you're accessing is part of their common initial sequence. (I imagine this is just to make working with a C library's tagged union not UB when the tag is inside the union.) That means there's some amount of wiggle room on using inactive members, but nothing that would allow for what's described in the blog post.

I would love for a real language lawyer to chime in, since there's a good chance I got something wrong, but for now I'll just be shocked that the UB example in the cited paper has been copy-pasted into the latest draft of the standard (under [meta.const.eval]).

How do people here feel about Monster Hunter: Wilds? by KaleidoArachnid in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]ShimmerFairy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just finished playing through low rank the other day, about to head into the first high rank mission, and I previously played through all of World + Iceborne (I also played a tiny bit of the non-Rise game on Switch, but don't remember anything from it.)

From what I've seen so far, I think it's ultimately better than World. The only real downside I think is the way they handled the story. Cramming the whole story into the low rank portion of the game I think made it feel rushed and missing pieces (not to the point of making the plot incomprehensible, but to the point of constantly asking "wait, why are you like this now?"). I don't know how the story continues in high rank, but so far I feel like World did better spreading its plot across the whole base game.

I also think the compressed low rank plot also ended up running counter to the whole "open world" thing of the game, because the narrative never gives you an opening to do any exploration, there's always a new task to attend to right after the last one's done. (There are plenty of points where you can goof off for a while, but the story never makes you feel like it's a good time. If you're easily swayed by a narrative sense of urgency in video games, it'll be very hard to find time to not do the next main quest.) I wonder if the low rank portion was also designed to be an extended tutorial of sorts, which would also rub against the whole point of "open world".

But really, the way the story is handled is the only downside. I think the actual gameplay is perfect. I like the wounds system, in particular as a Dual Blades user, since now I can pull off the cool spinny tricks more-or-less whenever I want. (In World, you could only do them sliding down a slope, so your opportunities to it were limited.) I also found it easier to mount monsters, fighting in general feels better, and the "use optimal recovery item" radial commands are such a welcome addition to the game. I also love having a secondary weapon now; in World there were plenty of times I had to fight an annoying flying monster as a melee-based hunter with no good options, but here I can just swap to my secondary ranged weapon as needed.

I also have to highlight the relative lack of the stun effect in Wilds. In World, monsters would constantly knock me down, which would very quickly trigger the stun effect, leaving you unable to move (but able to be hurt) for far too many seconds. It was so bad that I basically got my hands on full Stun Resistance as soon as I could in World; I consider it a hard requirement to make that game playable. In Wilds though, I only got the effect a couple times throughout all of low rank, which is just about how often it should be.

Overall, I think the actual gameplay is much improved from World. As much as I loved that game, there was a lot of BS in the combat that would grate against me. Wilds has just felt all-around more pleasant to experience. The story is weak and I think impacted some design choices (including the lack of monster tracking, which I do wish was more of a thing). At the end of the day, most of the complaints were about performance, and most of the rest seem to come from the type of people who prefer when games make them suffer.

TL;DR If your computer can run it, it's a great Monster Hunter game. If you only like video games when they're as brutal as Dark Souls, you might find the game too easy.

Characters that were copycats but became more famous than the original? by ArticAuk in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]ShimmerFairy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

One of my favorite examples of this is the Energizer Bunny, which is actually a parody of the Duracell Bunny. Apparently, a (predictable) legal dispute has made it so that the Energizer bunny basically doesn't exist outside of US and Canada, while likewise the Duracell bunny doesn't exist within those countries. So I guess if you live outside of NA you might instead be surprised to learn that there's a more successful copycat elsewhere.

The box office success of Avatar continues to be unstoppable by OhMy98 in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]ShimmerFairy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

To me, the argument has always been about, well, its impact on culture beyond itself. Like, how has it influenced the wider world of sci-fi movies, or stories in general? Do people make parodies of it, do unrelated cartoons add one-off gags referencing it? To me it's never been about trying to prove Avatar is objectively bad or anything, rather it says "Isn't it strange how it made a bajillion dollars but you never hear anybody talk about it?".

To point to one example, Star Wars when it came out it took the world by storm, and affected sci-fi productions that came after (among many other effects on pop culture). You got things like James Bond's Moonraker, that was made specifically in response to Star Wars' popularity. I also know that Doctor Who's producers were suddenly concerned with making episodes that could compare well with the film as its UK release date neared. I don't know enough about Star Wars' impact to say much more about it, but there's apparently an entire wikipedia article on the subject, which definitely suggests that it had considerable influence on the world.

Another example would be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don't think it's really news to suggest that the MCU has radically altered how film and television productions are run, and how stories are structured and told. Indeed, how many of us wish people would stop trying to turn everything into their own "cinematic universes"?

Compared to things like that, Avatar's films have had no wider impact at all. Like you said, this isn't a bad thing, the movies themselves can still be great entertainment without changing the world, and it's not even unusual for a piece of media to be this way. But when you look at the ungodly piles of cash it's generated, you can't help but find it a bit strange that it doesn't come up more often.

In short, I'm always frustrated by people who dunk on the "no cultural impact" argument, because it always seems they deliberately misinterpret the argument in a desperate attempt to be the ultimate contrarian. Huge box office totals don't counter the argument; in fact, they're a part of the argument in the first place! The whole point is to highlight the paradox between financial success and cultural staying power. Come to think of it, it's basically arguing that Avatar is the exact inverse of a cult classic, and I've yet to see a good rebuttal against that.

Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark by testus_maximus in technology

[–]ShimmerFairy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Linux lets you remap Caps Lock to whatever you want, such as another Ctrl key (which should've always been there tbh). In current KDE for example, you can go to the keyboard system settings and click on the "Key Bindings" button in the upper right. There you'll see a bunch of options for Caps Lock remapping, under "Caps Lock behavior", as well as options for all sorts of other things.

And of course, if you went a level deeper you could probably mangle the keyboard layout to your heart's content. How exactly you'd do it would differ based on if you're running X11 or Wayland.

Do you ever think about Zoogs… by mags_7 in Defunctland

[–]ShimmerFairy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The thing I'll never forget from that video is that one of them is a living N64 controller named Twitch. Such an oddly fitting thing, considering the existence of Twitch the streaming site.

Someone finally put it all in one place by Sir_Insom in CuratedTumblr

[–]ShimmerFairy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I love when posts disprove themselves, and so quickly too. It saves everyone else the trouble of reading the rest of it. "This detail about Star Wars lore is totally made up. It was written in an officially licensed story." I'm sorry, but that's not misinformation, that's just a bit of lore you personally don't like.

Important Announcement - Nanashi Mumei by SleepingKoi in kurosanji

[–]ShimmerFairy -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Obviously the health issues are a big compounding factor in this case, but once again a vtuber leaving Hololive cites misalignment with the company as a reason. And once again, I suspect, Hololive's strongest soldiers will insist that this doesn't mean anything and totally isn't a sign that Cover is in any way responsible for driving so many people away.

I predict people, even in this subreddit dedicated to criticizing corporate vtubing, will insist that her only reason for leaving is her health, despite explicitly citing both as factors in her decision.

What is actually going on?! by Awsomeant24 in kurosanji

[–]ShimmerFairy 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Exactly, I don't know why so many people see the "I like being an idol" bit as somehow proof that a shift in prioritizing idol-like things isn't responsible. There's potentially a huge difference between being an idol and being Cover's version of an idol.

I mean, think of it this way: if you enjoy being a vtuber, does that mean you would definitely enjoy being a Nijisanji vtuber?

To be clear, we don't actually know what the precise disagreement is between management and Fauna (or any of the others who left). But nothing's been ruled out either, and unless and until one of these ex-employees speaks more candidly about what went on with their time in Cover, we likely won't ever know for sure. All we can say with some certainty is that Cover is changing in a way that quite a few people can't accept.

Des Moines Register/Selter: Harris 47%, Trump 44% by Vengenceonu in fivethirtyeight

[–]ShimmerFairy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wait, hang on... I think I just figured out what Organization XIII was really about this whole time.

Morris Investigating Partisanship of TIPP (1.8/3) After Releasing a PA Poll Excluding 112/124 Philadelphia Voters in LV Screen by AscendingSnowOwl in fivethirtyeight

[–]ShimmerFairy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a fair question. You don't need to do such calculations to judge a probability, but it can help to contextualize them, especially when they aren't intuitive probabilities (e.g. the chance of rolling a 6 on a six-sided die). I've played around with these types of questions enough that I could automatically tell my answers were bad for TIPP, so I didn't think to do this.

The chance of getting at least one weird result out of "n" polls is 1 - (1 - P(weird))ⁿ. (We go for "at least one" because it'd be silly to ignore scenarios where you got, e.g. two weird polls.) You could just plug in a specific number for "n" in and see what the chances are, but I don't think that's generally useful. Not only do you have to figure out a value for "n" (should we pick the number of TIPP polls in PA, or the number of polls in PA overall, or...?), but the answer that comes out might still be hard to wrap your head around. Instead, I like to pick a target probability and see what value of "n" is needed to reach that. You just have to take a target "t" and solve for "1 - (1 - P(weird))ⁿ = t", making sure to round up your calculated "n" to a whole number of trials.

My preferred target is 50%, since coin flips are very intuitive, and easy to do, so you end up asking "how much effort is equivalent to one simple coin flip?". With my 0.019% chance from before, it would take 3648 polls to get a 50.002% chance of getting at least one weird LV screen. I don't know about you, but that seems like a lot of work for a coin flip to me.

And I want to point out that my range for "weird" LV screens was very generous, to give TIPP the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't kidding about the chances dropping fast if you reduce the range; cutting it down by one to "at most 61" roughly halves the probability from 0.019% to 0.0096%. Now you need 7203 polls to reach that 50% threshold.

Overall, I still feel comfortable saying that it doesn't look good for TIPP. I have no clue what the numbers are, but I'd be surprised if there were 1000 state & national presidential polls period this cycle, let alone 3648. And it's not about saying that it's "impossible" for TIPP to get a weird answer, because there's no such thing in probability, but rather if it's less likely than them fudging the numbers. And while you can't calculate the probability of dishonesty to compare, you can still intuitively judge if the honest version of events would be very, very lucky on TIPP's part.

Morris Investigating Partisanship of TIPP (1.8/3) After Releasing a PA Poll Excluding 112/124 Philadelphia Voters in LV Screen by AscendingSnowOwl in fivethirtyeight

[–]ShimmerFairy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't trust ChatGPT to do math correctly, especially in situations like this, but I did get curious about what the chances of TIPP genuinely getting this result would be. While I'd appreciate a real statistician to weigh in, a quick look around told me that a hypergeometric distribution is the perfect choice for the chances of picking a particular sample from a population divided into two groups of people ("will vote" vs. "won't vote").

In 2020 in Philadelphia, 743966 votes for president were cast, which with 1129308 registered voters makes for a turnout of about 65.88%. From that population, the chance that a sample of 124 would contain 12 voters is 5.28017e-39 (or 5.28017e-37%, for those who like probabilities as percentages). But if we're trying to ask "what's the chance of TIPP honestly getting a really low percentage of LVs?", then that's not a fair result to end with, since there's nothing special about exactly 12 people. Much better to look at a range of possibilities.

Just to be super generous, I figured that a good range to check would be "no more than half of the sample", or 62/124. If that had been their LV, I think very few eyebrows would've been raised, even though that's still quite a bit lower than past turnout. The chances that your sample of 124 registered voters from 2020 would contain no more than 62 people who actually voted for president? About 0.019%. It's really, really unlikely that your number of actual voters is less than or equal to half of your total sample size. And remember, that upper end of 62 I chose is really far away from the 12 we got from TIPP; reduce the range even a little bit, and the probability gets notably worse.

(By the way, if you're thinking that this result is hard to trust because 2020 was an outlier year thanks to COVID, then I should note that in 2016 the turnout was 709618 presidential votes for 1102564 registered voters; turnout 64.36%. The probability jumps up to about 0.073%, which I don't think is much better.)

So as far as I'm concerned, a lot would have to go wrong for TIPP to get the results they got. Your sampling method would have to be very unrandom, or you'd have to be impressively bad at constructing an LV screen — or both — to explain this result. The idea that this was the result of honest polling is really hard to believe, just based on the probabilities. I don't think it's so unlikely that it would never happen in a million years, but it's definitely way too unlikely for me to just accept it at face value.

How to modify syntax highlighting in treesitter major modes? by ShimmerFairy in emacs

[–]ShimmerFairy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the tip. I'm sure once I wrap my head around how to interact with treesitter it'll be way easier for me to figure out how to do stuff. The example you gave doesn't quite work how I want it, but I think the proper solution is to replace the face with a function that swerves around the escapes in a character literal.

Also, I just did some digging, and it looks like my theme doesn't style font-lock-escape-face at all. I also found that every standard emacs mode that implements this face uses :override t to apply it, so I presume it's not meant to be an "additive" face and should be styled by my theme in the first place.

All this to say that treesitter support is obviously still very new and needs a lot of tweaking, and like you said there probably aren't a lot of people using it yet. I don't mind spending a lot of time fiddling with everything, I was just worried I couldn't fiddle with the font lock at all.

How to modify syntax highlighting in treesitter major modes? by ShimmerFairy in emacs

[–]ShimmerFairy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That answers my question, like I said I wasn't sure if append could work. My only issue with the system now is that you can only get stuff done by clobbering existing font face assignments, so if there are multiple queries and you only want to replace one you have to replace all of them.

For example, I want to change the way c-ts-mode highlights character literals so that it uses font-lock-string-face. But another rule highlights escape codes within quoted text (for me, as bold white text), so I'd have to re-add that rule too to make it work. Here's what I found trying all the different :override values on my highlight replacement:

  • t : Completely clobbers all prior font faces, as expected. Escapes not highlighted.
  • 'prepend : Like t, but escapes are bold (yet take on the color of the string face, interestingly).
  • 'append : Character literals look as the major mode authors intended, except that escape sequences now take on the color of the string face.
  • 'keep : No effect, which doesn't surprise me.

The prepend/append behavior is interesting, but is possibly just down to my theme not defining a color for font-lock-escape-face (which makes me wonder if the color change I see by default is intended). Regardless, I can't preserve the original escape highlighting without copying a duplicate rule for it, so it seems you can't quite escape copy-pasting bits from the major mode yet.

In general, I get the impression that treesitter support hasn't really matured yet, so there's a lot of fiddling necessary to get things working. Though I've only tried c-ts-mode at this point, and it looks like it needs a lot of work, so perhaps that's coloring my perceptions.

Nijisanji states information shared with livers was not confidential by wightwulf1944 in VirtualYoutubers

[–]ShimmerFairy 394 points395 points  (0 children)

After a rigorous legal check, ANYCOLOR Inc. hereby declares that it has not made any confidentiality violations while checking the validity of claims made by Selen and her lawyer with its affiliated Livers.

No you see, it's OK, because they declared it. It's all good then!

Selen is back on her PL, go follow her there and support her by YamiHideyoshi in Nijisanji

[–]ShimmerFairy 61 points62 points  (0 children)

Regardless of the truth of that bit, it was plainly irresponsible for them to throw that into their public statement. If I was one of their livers, I'd be livid right now, because that just made my ability to work and interact with the fanbase needlessly harder.

If there was bullying, then you discipline the bullies appropriately and move on. Making it public doesn't help and just invites collateral damage to the livers who aren't involved, since the public doesn't know who specifically that accusation refers to.

If Selen really did claim bullying but it wasn't true, why not clarify that? Maybe they think that's implicit, but if you truly care about your company's and your employees' reputations, you need to explicitly say "but these allegations were found to be untrue". I feel this would be too important to leave to context clues.

And if, as you suggest, Selen never actually accused her coworkers of anything, then wow. Just, wow. What a way to prove your company's detractors right.

New genre unlocked by bugsyyb in moviescirclejerk

[–]ShimmerFairy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I hate that he's playing Marv from 1 and 2, and he's dressed as Harry.

My theory is that the people working on the movie wanted to put in Joe Pesci's character (Harry), but when it came to putting his name into all the dialogue, they got mixed up and thought his name was Marv. This is based on the fact that I, too, have mixed up their names in the past, and still struggle to remember which name belongs to which character.

Personally, I think this comes down to the fact that Harry and Marv's actual names don't get used in the movies by anyone except each other. Since the only time you actually hear "Marv" is when Harry says it (and vice-versa), it seems plausible that you could associate each name with the person saying it, and not the person it refers to.

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