• 0 Posts
  • 102 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle


  • I skipped buying Death Loop despite a decent sale on steam just yesterday because of denuvo.

    It also made me more glad I just dropped Xbox game pass because that client didn’t show it used it at all (or if it did, I didn’t notice it), and it was on my wishlist because I had been playing it via game pass.

    I wonder how many sales publishers leave on the table because of denuvo (both from people boycotting denuvo and from the lack of free advertising piracy gives) vs how many sales it generates because someone couldn’t pirate a game instead of buying it.

    Like my own experience with this is when I was playing pirated games, I picked games based on availability of a pirated version. If there was a specific game I wanted to play, I might have looked for it, but failing to find it wouldn’t have meant I was headed to the store for it.

    I later bought some of my favorite games after playing the pirated version. Great games made me want to give the devs money. Plus, people tend to talk about games they love, and others who hear about it might not go looking for a free version.

    So all that makes me wonder if those who use denuvo are just paying extra for something that just hurts their sales instead of helping.


  • A compiler making assumptions like that about undefined behaviour sounds just like a bug. Maybe the bug is in the spec rather than the compiler, but I can’t think of any time it would be better to optimize that code out entirely because UB is detected rather than just throwing an error or warning and otherwise ignoring the edge cases where the behaviour might break. It sounds like the worst possible option exactly for the reasons listed in that blog.


  • I think they meant the other way around, that if you wanted to use it in C/C++, you’d have to either use assembly or some specific SSE construct otherwise the compiler wouldn’t bother.

    That probably was the case at one point, but I’d be surprised if it’s still the case. Though maybe that’s part of the reason why the Intel compiler can generate faster code. But I suspect it’s more of a case of better optimization by people who have a better understanding of how it works under the hood, and maybe better utilization of newer instruction set extensions.

    SSE has been around for a long time and is present in most (all?) x86 chips these days and I’d be very surprised if gcc and other popular compilers don’t use it effectively today. Some of the other extensions might be different though.


  • And I had to stop using vscode because of its ridiculous resource usage. I got tired of it filling up my home dir and just went back to vim.

    An intern was using it, but I saw that he had set it up to run locally and connect to the ETX we were using and figured he had found a way to avoid that. Nope, turns out it runs a server on the ETX that also likes to fill up the home dir and he also just uses vim now.














  • I’m the type that when I see descriptions like “be the hero of your own Star Wars story” for a tourist destination, I immediately think it’s going to be some cheesy oversold experience because you can’t really mass produce a main character role.

    First of all, just the resources that would be required for the one on one time that would be involved is unrealistic for any scale beyond small groups.

    Second, they aren’t like DMs that can roll with whatever their characters design; “your own story” needs to be pigeon holed into a limited set of choices they can prepare for, especially if there’s supposed to be high production value involved and special effects.

    Third, of course any interactive elements are going to be ridiculously easy. They’d rather deal with people disappointed at how easy it is than people (especially kids) frustrated that they can’t do something.

    So I knew right at the start of this video that it wasn’t my kind of thing.

    But this thing didn’t even live up to the cheesy experience I would have expected. Seems like they bit off way more than they could chew with the initial idea but then we costs ballooned, they could only cut features and offerings while increasing the price, leaving it as an overpriced but underwhelming thing, in the end.

    So much corporate shit is like this now. I think it’s just another symptom of the problems capitalism brings. Under capitalism, you get a mix of people who want to do a thing and make money from it and people who want to make money and think doing a thing will get them that money. Those that are focused on the thing will generally produce something of much higher quality than those focused on the money they’ll make. One asks, “is this good? Could it be better?” while the other asks, “is this good enough? Could it be cheaper?”

    She touches on the other aspect in the video a bit, but could have gone a bit further (though I understand why she didn’t): the misleading marketing. Social media marketers with conflicted interests between being honest with their audience and keeping the providers of the free shit happy so the free shit keeps flowing. She touches on that aspect.

    But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those trolls defending Disney are paid by Disney, maybe directly maybe indirectly. I’m not aware of any regulation against hiring people to pretend to like your product online. I’m not sure that would even technically count as advertisement, if truth in advertisement even matters anymore these days.

    Jenny has integrity, at least as far as I can tell. Those “influencers” that don’t are scum, whether they are doing it for free shit or getting paid to do it directly.