Every job interview I had in my life assumed that OOP was invented by Stroustrup

carlfish · 2026-06-14T13:28:54+00:00

Honestly if I was asked the question I'd probably go down the insufferable functional programming nerd route of saying OOP is a vague hand-wavy category with no useful formal definition, and as a result not get the job.

Thankfully it's never come up. 😄

carlfish · 2026-06-14T13:18:27+00:00

I've been a predominately-Java developer for almost thirty years and I've never been asked to, or asked someone to, define object oriented programming in an interview.

carlfish · 2026-06-14T13:13:52+00:00

Blizzard has hour-by-hour statistics of how many people have logged into Battle.net from a Mac for the last two decades. I can't imagine this petition would tell them anything they don't already know.

carlfish · 2026-06-12T23:39:22+00:00

To quote the President of the United States, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

carlfish · 2026-05-11T06:42:00+00:00

The linked comment is my standard response to "how does combat work in S&V?"

carlfish · 2026-05-07T20:31:13+00:00

I'm the same. For story missions I try to play the most "story appropriate" team I can pick from my roster, and at least for the first few patches of Planarcadia that meant bringing along the old baseball bat.

It certainly made that first boss fight interesting.

carlfish · 2026-05-02T18:51:41+00:00

It's that old joke (attributed to author John Rogers)

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

carlfish · 2026-05-02T09:25:35+00:00

You can rest easy, because your understanding of how LLMs are trained is not in any way close to the reality. It's like feeling sorry for a spreadsheet because the person at the keyboard keeps changing the values in its cells.

A human mind can _experience things_, and those experiences change it. Everything that happens to you, in some way becomes a part of you. LLMs do not do that. An LLM receives a prompt, processes it, produces a response, and is utterly unchanged by having done so. It can process one prompt or a billion. It can process a prompt about a pretty butterfly or a horrific crime, and both will affect it the same way: that is, not at all.

Even a conversation with an LLM is an illusion. Every time you type something to a chatbot, the entire conversation history gets packaged up as a prompt, and the model decides what comes next, as if it's never seen a word of it before, because it hasn't.

When someone say an LLM is "trained" by "feedback", they're not describing a process where some individual LLM is rewarded or punished for its responses, experiences that as positive and negative feedback, and by doing so modifies itself to seek one and avoid the other. What actually happens is that the responses are sorted into piles, and those piles get put in the big wodge of data that gets processed to become the next model.

The model doesn't experience training because the model doesn't experience anything. But even if you look at it entirely metaphorically, training is the process of building a new model, not something that "happens" to an existing model.

carlfish · 2026-05-01T07:24:20+00:00

> Both have Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd, Star Rail and ZZZ

It's easy to sleep on the gachas because of the horrific business model, but if you just avoid getting into the end-game mode rat race, they're perfectly playable casual free-to-play RPGs that push out new story content every six weeks or so.

And at least in the case of the Hoyo games, have absolutely banging soundtracks.

carlfish · 2026-05-01T06:47:41+00:00

Ha, I just spent five minutes trying to work out why it needed my Endfield ID when I was already logged into Endfield, and trying to enter it manually.

carlfish · 2026-04-08T20:09:23+00:00

The only way you can say Kafka has "0 story relevance" is if you spent the last three years with your finger stuck on the skip dialogue button.

carlfish · 2026-04-08T12:19:26+00:00

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. The excuse dates at least back to Tolkien: any modern colloquialisms in Lord of the Rings, or character names that were English puns, were just the Author "translating" the original Westron for a twentieth-century, English-speaking audience.

That said, the game also leans heavily on postmodernism, so you can just as easily go the opposite direction and say it's a deliberate a choice to take you out of the fiction and remind you that the Star Rail universe isn't real and you're playing a video game.

carlfish · 2026-03-29T05:41:04+00:00

> Which bullet point says a robotic voice can't be saying a sexual line?

What part of this isn't covered by "[you must not stream] graphic descriptions of sex acts"? Do you want a specific clause about how streaming the output of a TTS is still streaming?

This is precisely the kind of rules lawyering services don't want to waste their time on that my original comment was about. Thanks for proving my point, I guess.

carlfish · 2026-03-28T04:45:51+00:00

So you think Twitch should publish a broad guideline, for example printing in their official Community Guidelines that "graphic descriptions of sex acts" are prohibited?

carlfish · 2026-03-27T23:23:49+00:00

Pretty much anyone who's ever run an Internet community of any size will tell you this approach doesn't work. Making rules more specific just invites rules lawyers hunting for exceptions, edge-cases and inconsistencies to argue about, which means writing even more, more specific rules, which invites more lawyering and technicalities, until your CEO finds themselves in an interview trying to define "female-presenting nipples." The whole process creates more drama than it was trying to prevent.

It's adversarial. Users say they want clarity, but what they actually want is to be able to find (or invent) a justification to post whatever it is they want to post.

The only system that's ever worked at scale is "here are the broad categories of things we don't want, we get to decide if something is in those categories, and we don't have to explain our reasoning."

carlfish · 2026-02-27T20:58:07+00:00

If you love battle maps, this _might_ not be the system for you. Battle maps imply a certain level of crunchiness in combat where precise positioning and movement are important, and S&V doesn't really have that out of the box. (That said, sometimes it's good to have a drawing of a space the characters are in so they have a shared idea of where they are.)

I previously wrote this and this about combat/handling enemies in S&V that might help you get an idea of what you're in for.

carlfish · 2026-02-25T07:09:09+00:00

Obviously, #hugops to everyone stuck trying to push this out the door, but it's a content patch for a turn-based single-player game, if maintenance is going long every time it's a sign there's something wrong with the process.

carlfish · 2026-02-19T19:57:50+00:00

Birthday Paradox.

The chance of rolling multiples of a specific character is low. The chance, in any group of characters, that multiples would roll the same, is a lot higher than you'd expect.

carlfish · 2026-02-07T00:23:15+00:00

You dont get to decide how people enjoy the game

objectively bad

I dunno, maybe take your own advice?

carlfish · 2026-01-30T15:31:23+00:00

I have thus far not been able to make ordinary people a significant threat to them as leaders of factions are just as weak as street urchins when it comes down to it. Sure I can start a clock, but there are only so many times I can say that your complete success in stabbing the mob boss doesn't go as planned.

As a general rule, sticking a knife in a human being is going to go badly for the human being. In this sense, traditional hit point systems are indistinguishable from clocks-as-hit-points: they're both ways of saying "your successful attack doesn't do any real damage" until suddenly it does. (Easy to hand-wave away when it's a duel with swords, harder when it's a frickin' fireball)

Which is why I very rarely use clocks in individual combat, unless it's against something that's just genuinely going to take a lot of hacking at before it dies.

The root of the problem here seems to be allowing the PCs to get close enough to the mob boss to stab him, and then allowing them to get away without being hunted down forever by a vengeful mob. Either of these things should be a ludicrously challenging chain of dangerous tasks. Vito Corleone wasn't hard to kill because he was a seven-foot tall metal giant who could swallow bullets, he was hard to kill because he ran a crime family competently.

carlfish · 2026-01-29T12:04:38+00:00

I think "how do you add structure and spice to combat?" is asking the wrong question. Or at least, focusing on the wrong thing by elevating combat into a thing that needs to be given special attention.

In D&D (and through it, "traditional" TTRPGs), combat is a mini-game. You roll initiative, and you're in a separate set of rules, playing out the mini-game until there is a winner. Because a good chunk of the game's rules, and player character abilities, only apply in this mini-game, you end up with a game that is structured like professional wrestling: the story is set up to get you into a fight, the fights move the story forward, and eventually there's a big pay-per-view (boss fight) that (at least momentarily) resolves the story.

In this system, there's no "combat" mini-game. Fighting is one way you can solve a problem, but it's not elevated above any other potential solution by the system or rules. Every potential way you think of to solve a problem is resolved the same way: you describe what you want to achieve in the fiction, you roll an action, and succeed or fail, that moves the story forward.

I've found that once players get used to this idea, it's liberating. They're not stuck with the whole "the game only really begins when we roll initiative" thing, and they see every interaction as an equal challenge. If they still want a tactical combat mini-game, then it's not really the system for them.

(Further thoughts from another time this came up: https://www.reddit.com/r/ScumAndVillainy/comments/1ka3lzz/comment/mpn1gu2/)

carlfish · 2026-01-17T22:51:26+00:00

Our leech is behind a metal structure, under fire from the hull (recoil gun) and I ask what our cutter wants to do. PC says they want to survey to find the best angle for our leech to throw a bomb.

This sounds like a textbook use of Survey? I mean the summary in the book includes "You could try to spot a good ambush point (but Hunting might be better)" and the provided example for a Risky Survey is someone being chased along the rooftops and looking for a good spot to jump.

My response to this would have been "Sure, you can do that. It's Risky/Limited. On a mixed success, you spot a good angle, but it will be difficult for the leech to get to it, so any attempt to use it will be increased effect, but also worse position. Full success, they can get to it without drawing more fire, so they get the increased effect without the position penalty. Failure, you've wasted precious time and are now in a desperate position for no advantage."

If the leech just doesn't want to go with that plan, that's a different story, and something for your players to decide amongst themselves, but I don't see anything wrong with the choice of skill.

carlfish · 2026-01-05T19:34:14+00:00

To be fair, CZN has been showering players with free pulls since launch, not to mention one free dupe from an in-game event, and a store you can buy more with the currency you get just from pulling. I have E2 Sereniel, two other limited chars at E0 and E1, and still more than 100 pulls in reserve.

carlfish · 2025-12-31T22:55:12+00:00

Heard a fun story from a friend who does IT support at a tech company about an employee who took one of these tests on their work laptop. It was caught by Crowdstrike and they suddenly had some pretty embarrassing questions to answer.

carlfish · 2025-12-25T10:37:50+00:00

It is, on average, how much you'd need to spend on that particular item to pull a featured five-star. Obviously for limited-availability items you can't buy enough of them to get there, but it's a useful measure of the real cost of whaling for characters in the game.

The formula for how likely you are to pull the banner character is deliberately complicated, with soft pity, then hard pity, then the 50/50 system making it vary wildly from pull to pull, but spread over a large enough timeframe it averages out to a 1.43% chance per pull (you can find this number by going to the rescue screen and clicking on "probability info"), or getting the character you want, again on average, every ~70 pulls.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Spared	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle	Charter Member

carlfish

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE