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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

    If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.



  • It’s a silly flag to use as it only works when running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows, and if you’re compiling from source, you should also have the option to just build a 64-bit binary in the first place. It made a degree of sense years ago when people actually used 32-bit Windows sometimes (which was usually just down to OEMs installing the wrong version on prebuilt PCs could have supported 64-bit) if you really wanted to only have one binary or you consumed a precompiled third party library and had to match its architecture.




  • They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d’être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn’t tied to the store and did improve even though it’s barely used.


  • They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn’t happen until the time of day you’re least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you’re using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that’s not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don’t want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they’re doing from users who don’t so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.


  • I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

    Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

    If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlGame difficulty
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    2 months ago

    Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.








  • Fixing the script extender itself won’t take that long as it doesn’t need to hook that many functions (although depending on how much free time people have and whether there are any surprises, it could still take longer than most people expect). Fixing all the mods that depend on it will take much longer, as between them, they hook lots more functions than the script extender itself, and with this update, it’s not just a case of most functions being the same, but at a slightly different address (as was typical with creation club updates, which tools could help with), but instead lots of functions have changed slightly due to using an updated compiler, and lots of functions have been inlined differently (so instead of just existing once, they get copied into every function that uses them, and then optimised differently in each place based on the surrounding code).




  • Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It’s that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there’s no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

    That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it’s part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn’t.

    We also don’t know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren’t true, and they settled out of court, so the public can’t see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they’d make Yuzu’s position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn’t require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

    Not long before this, Dolphin’s Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn’t at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they’re generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.