@tabletopgamingdeals y’all Eclipse Phase is so good just for the worldbuilding and transhuman tech alone. I definitely recommend getting a copy

it has some very disturbing aspects that you might expect for a techno-thriller or horror setting, but you can skip past those and just get to the cool gadgets, transhuman bodies, augmentations, etc.

plus there are anarchist communities and the book goes into a decent amount of detail about what life is like there

also this book is licensed under Creative Commons! so you can share it with your friends if you want

RE: https://dice.camp/@tabletopgamingdeals/115759638128795293

Without getting into the story that's making the rounds, here are my thoughts on using generative AI for placeholder assets in #gamedev. (1)

Anna's Archive backed up Spotify. They got 99.9% of metadata, and 300TB of music representing 86 million tracks - original 160kbps OGG for tracks with popularity>0, and re-encoded 75kbps for popularity=0. absolutely wild project.

the metadata in particular is a hugely useful data source. MusicBrainz catalogues 5 million unique ISRCs (like ISBNs but for music releases), whereas this archive has a whopping 186 million.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

Draculo is now streaming!! Come and join the fun!!!

Doom: Hideous Destructor Co-op !!

#retro #gaming #foss #linux #games #streaming #videogames #owncast

https://secret.draculo.net

the funny thing is I tried it on its own first and I was like “this tastes like chemicals in the vague shape of a cookie but I see the vision. maybe if I dilute it with coffee it’ll be good”

but then I put it in my coffee and the coffee brought out only the “oil refinery on fire” flavors and there was no trace of cookie left

just tried coffeemate for the first time and it’s so gross

I got the brown butter flavor (the one that’s supposed to be like chocolate chip cookies) and now my coffee tastes like burned chemical factory runoff. if you told me this was a petroleum product I’d believe you

I think I’m sticking with two sugars, no cream lol

one of these days I will have a way to celebrate holidays that feels special. but unfortunately I don’t have one yet

happy winter/summer solstice! 💙

@tempest that’s interesting! to be honest I was wondering about y’all as I was writing some of this because you seem dramatically more comfortable with BCTs than I am. but I wonder if a lot of that is because you needed to learn them for work. it also sounds like you’re just more comfortable learning about them than I am

also it’s so cool that you’re able to make your own things using the same principles as the BCTs you’re copying

@foxysen oohh thank you! I’m trying to learn Unity so this will be really helpful

@foxysen yeah… I do think I want to learn this so I can collaborate, because it seems important, but I hate it so far lol

it does seem like there are a lot of patterns to learn - and also a lot of terms that are used for their specific meaning in programming. maybe I need to see some code and compare it to the terms to really understand

in fact I think I’m just very uncomfortable with vagueness in general. that’s probably an autism thing but I have a hard time and tend to get frustrated when people speak to me in overly vague terms

even just giving me a high-level overview of code that uses language like “each game entity has components that are processed through a data pipeline” is difficult and frustrating for me because:

• the intended takeaway from that sentence is a very vague high-level understanding of how the code is organized
• and I have that vague understanding - it was successfully communicated to me
• but it feels like I have no understanding at all
• I feel like one of those raccoons trying to wash cotton candy like there’s nothing there? what was I supposed to get?

and yet it’s a genuinely valuable form of communication - maybe even an important one for collaborating with other programmers. but it frustrates me anyway lol

what I’m also noticing is that as a developer I’m only comfortable learning things from the bottom up (starting with the small details and expanding my knowledge from there)

but BCTs seem to invariably be taught from the top down (starting by building a broad and vague understanding of everything, then getting less vague over time) and that completely makes sense, because the point of a BCT is to get your code working quickly and having a broad, vague understanding of the BCT is perfect for that. if you tried to learn a BCT from the bottom up, you would probably be learning for a very very long time until you could make something practical with it

but I’m Extremely Uncomfortable working with a BCT that I only understand in very vague terms. so that’s very not fun to me

anyway I’m thinking about this a lot as I force-feed myself Unity and C# - two things (one of which is a BCT) that I do not want to learn, but might possibly be paid to use at some point in the future

a pattern I think I’m noticing is that - if you’re results-oriented as a developer then the best move is to use something very big and complex to do a lot of the work for you. like a web framework, a GUI framework, a game engine, an SPA framework, etc.

and because of that, getting hired to write code generally also involves learning (at least on a surface level) several of these Big Complicated Things. because corpos are very results-oriented of course

what I’d expect is that amateur* programmers avoid Big Complicated Things because learning them takes a long time and none of that time is fun for them. but actually it seems like amateur programmers are more split on whether they use BCTs or not. and I find that interesting. I wonder if:

• some amateur programmers enjoy the process of learning BCTs
• some amateur programmers enjoy getting results faster than if they didn’t use BCTs
• a third reason?

* amateur: doing something out of pure passion and love - with no need to be paid for it

Need to gather some views on a hypothetical situation.

There's 2 technologies

• Technology A
• Technology B, that supports everything made for Technology A and was involved in some drama

EDIT: Drama around tech B is not affecting the end users. It's a drama around it's management.

If you develop a program for technology A and it happens to work with technology B, would you intentionally mark it incompatible with technology B?

Please boost for more answers.