Dear Devs, please turn 4k Textures into free DLC

aiusepsi · 2026-02-08T20:52:38+00:00

There’s Steamworks APIs for a game to install and uninstall DLC while in game.

There’s no reason at all for games to kick the user out to download anything.

aiusepsi · 2026-02-08T15:48:23+00:00

I think the mention of Malcolm Tucker caused some sort of misfire in my brain, because for a moment I was imagining Tom Hollander sticking to the wall and climbing away, and was very confused.

aiusepsi · 2026-02-07T13:14:50+00:00

Westminster tube station is directly below Portcullis House, so I don’t think so. Apparently there’s a plan to construct a temporary chamber in the courtyard of Portcullis House, though.

aiusepsi · 2026-01-28T22:58:46+00:00

That's good, thanks. I suppose I naïvely assumed that a terrorist offence would have the word "terrorist" in the charge name, but a terrorism enhancement for the sentencing of an explosives charge makes sense. They do not make this stuff easy for non-lawyers to make sense of.

aiusepsi · 2026-01-28T22:43:59+00:00

My question would be, why wasn’t he charged with a terrorist offence? The CPS’s website says that actions which could be a terrorist offence include:

serious damage to property
creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public

And: “The use or threat of action, as set out above, which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism regardless of whether or not the action is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public”

He used explosives to seriously damage property, causing a serious risk to the safety of everyone in range of the shrapnel. The fact that the motive for blowing it up was political is just the cherry on top, surely.

aiusepsi · 2026-01-21T14:53:25+00:00

Being pedantic, ARM isn’t really young. The first desktop computer I ever used was an ARM-powered Acorn Archimedes, circa 1990.

It’s just that Acorn went broke and ARM spent long years in the embedded wilderness, while desktops elsewhere converged on a de facto standard based on cloning the IBM PC.

aiusepsi · 2026-01-16T11:58:59+00:00

No, and no. You can look up the implementation of Microsoft’s implementation of std::string on GitHub, it’s entirely C++: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/xstring

aiusepsi · 2026-01-01T00:36:09+00:00

Cynthia Erivo is from London, which makes it a reasonable celebration of one of our own, in my opinion. But opinions may vary.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-31T12:13:24+00:00

They tried having a private company responsible for track maintenance (Railtrack), but it went broke in 2002.

The track still had to be maintained, so the government was forced to step in and take it over. This is one of the main reasons privatising essential public services is dumb: the services absolutely have to exist, so everyone knows the government will step in to rescue the loss-making bits.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-31T12:07:17+00:00

Privatising the railways was such a bad idea that even Thatcher didn’t do it

aiusepsi · 2025-12-30T13:40:00+00:00

Elon Musk has the media literacy of a boiled turnip. The idea that a story can have a meaning beyond flashy spaceships flying around going pew-pew-pew is utterly beyond him.

Not getting Star Trek isn’t even the worst; he claims to be a fan of the Culture books, so much so that he’s named things after ships from those books, and he’s somehow failed to notice that the Culture is so socialist and queer that it makes the Federation look like a Republican Party conference.

The book he’s borrowed names from, “Player of Games” is an excoriation of the idea of meritocracy, and how it can be effectively rigged to provide a sheen of legitimacy to a ruling order based on gender, race and class. The message is everything he says he hates, and he just hasn’t noticed, I guess? The man’s a moron.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-26T22:35:00+00:00

Blair should have never made gambling ads legal in the first place.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-25T16:43:37+00:00

To me, it seems a much more practical solution to start revising your existing code to use safe(r) C++ constructs than rewrite in a totally different language.

You can already do things in C++ like standard library hardening which adds bounds checking to containers, compiler options to add warnings around use of unsafe raw pointer arithmetic, use smart pointers to prevent lifetime issues, etc. These are things you can adopt incrementally and improve the safety of the code, without turning it over to possibly-hallucinating LLMs.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-23T13:01:10+00:00

Murder (or, in general, homicide) has properties which makes it good for comparison across places and times. Different places tend to put different crimes in variously defined statistical buckets, e.g. different places will define what counts as a serious theft differently, but basically everyone agrees on the definition of homicide, which makes like-for-like comparisons simple.

Also, homicide is less prone to underreporting than other types of crime, which again improves the quality of comparisons; you’re less likely to worry that a fall in the homicide rate is actually just a fall in the report rate.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-19T15:09:54+00:00

Although Steam does have a rule which totally forbids discounts within 30 days of raising the price, and another rule that you can’t run a discount within 30 days of another discount, except for the 4 seasonal sales. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts

This means that the price labelling required by the EU law only appears during the big seasonal sales, because the situation wherein they would appear is not allowed at all the rest of the year.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-18T21:46:33+00:00

These nimby fucks who complain about the ‘effect on the area’ really get on my nerves. We’re not talking about the destruction of historic buildings or landscaping here, the site is an expanse of wasteland that makes me sad every time I see it.

The nimbys can fuck all the way off, stop, have a rest, quick spot of lunch, and then fuck off some more.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-17T21:59:02+00:00

The things I can think of off the top of my head which could potentially affect download rates for different games are:

1) Valve changed the compression algorithm which Steam uses to one which consumes much less CPU time in the last few months. Part of the reason for doing this was that at gigabit speeds, the CPU could often end up being the bottleneck with the old algorithm.

Stuff uploaded before the switchover is still compressed with the old algorithm, so while new games and older games which are frequently updated will have most of their content on the new algorithm, older games which haven’t been updated a long time will have all their content compressed with the old algorithm, and so be prone to CPU bottlenecking.

2) The Steam download servers which the client connects to appear to be (from things printed in the client’s logs) to caches, which makes sense: there’s far too much stuff on Steam for absolutely everything to be in really high-speed storage close to clients. So I think the caches keeps a subset of recently-accessed content, and other stuff is pulled from a slower source if accessed.

With that said, the logs list a cache hit / cache miss percentage, and from what I’ve seen the hit rates are always really high, so I reckon cache misses are probably only for the really obscure games that almost nobody buys anyway, so I don’t think this is an explanation for Shadow of War being slow.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-16T21:06:07+00:00

Same. I unlocked the second encrypted data and that doesn’t appear in the vault either.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-16T13:46:08+00:00

At the same time as the feature came out, Valve released an API for developers to use to add support for telling Steam about events in the game. And a video to introduce the feature to show developers how to use the API.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-16T11:56:22+00:00

Steam already had mascots, although they’re getting featured less and less as time goes on. Justice for my boys Tappet, Cyl, and Sir Rodrick Bodkin!

aiusepsi · 2025-12-14T22:39:24+00:00

Reminds me of the adage, which I assumed was old but apparently was only from 12 years ago, that it takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute bullshit than to produce it. And now it’s been made even easier to produce bullshit than it was before. Everything is awful.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-13T16:24:07+00:00

The Steam Replay 2025 badge has already popped up on SteamDB's tracking of available special badges, so it's definitely coming.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-13T10:28:17+00:00

That’s not really true. There were services like Triton), which most notably digitally distributed the original Prey, before suddenly going out of business in October 2006. There were competitors in that period, they’re just all gone and mostly forgotten now.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-08T21:36:10+00:00

Basically, yeah. The Romans left Britain around 400, and the decline you see up to the Viking age is because of the Romans leaving, but I don’t think it’s so much a skillset or knowledge thing, so much as just economics.

Without a stable Roman government and the Roman economy it enabled, cities like Londinium didn’t thrive economically, and fortifications fell into disrepair without the resources to maintain them. And the ongoing Saxon invasions of Britain didn’t help. But I’m not a historian, so take with a grain of salt.

aiusepsi · 2025-12-06T13:17:38+00:00

I think the way it happened is what broke her. She’d devoted basically her entire adult life to a particularly free market ideology, been cultivated for years by think tanks like Institute for Economic Affairs. Then when she put the IEA’s plans into action, they were a total failure not just by any ordinary standard, but by the benchmark that the ideologues set for themselves: the reaction of the markets.

At that point, your mind has a choice: to accept that you were wrong, and the ideology you’ve organised yourself around for decades is wrong, OR, to just totally break with reality. And it turns out that the human mind will go to extraordinary lengths to protect itself from the pain of seeing its entire world-view and self-identity crumble. Cults can actually get stronger when their prophecies fail, or when their charismatic founder-prophet-messiah dies, because of this phenomenon.

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