How fedi sounds some days

also! here’s a trick that I’ve learned for quests that you’re unsure about:

• accept the quest, then skip past all the dialog
• read a summary of the quest in your quest log
• if it sounds interesting, abandon the quest and you can read the dialog again!
• if not, skip past all of the dialog for that quest

FFXIV sidequests are almost exactly how WoW quests are except they’re often a little bit better-written and I think that’s pretty cool actually

I do like the sidequests in FFXIV though! because:

• I get to very granularly choose what I’m interested in and what I’m not
• there’s a lot of combat! there aren’t too many “go talk to this guy. now talk to this guy. now travel across the planet and talk to this guy. now travel back again and talk to this guy” quests
• if I’m bored by some quest text, I can skip it and I won’t be confused about any of the other quest text (unlike the MSQ which I couldn’t understand if I tried at this point lol)
• the stories aren’t about me, the stakes are low, and nothing is trying to be an emotional rollercoaster. it’s a very comfy experience
• I get to learn about the world and its cities and cultures and people!

@zeichenreihe omgg I just looked up LEAN and it scares me lol. like it seems pretty cool - it seems like it’s able to solve equations at compile time and turn them into constant values? and maybe it can also mathematically prove that certain functions will always be correct, which sounds really cool if that’s a thing that it cna do

but this type of advanced math scares me lol - you can’t even google what something like ∀ means or what a lot of the jargon is

FFXIV should have an addon where people can thumbs-up or thumbs-down whether some dialog is worth reading or if you should just skip past it. and then everyone can see those ratings before they decide whether to read something or not. I genuinely think that would be incredibly helpful for the community to have

every MMO has to have an unreasonable amount of filler because that’s how they keep players occupied long enough to make the next expansion. FFXIV, being a story-first game, puts a lot of that filler in the form of dialog. so NPCs will prattle on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how you should deliver wine to some guy, then you walk over to the guy and he prattles on about how you gave him wine

but if there was a way to know what dialog is filler and what dialog is worth reading, that would alleviate a ton of the problems that FFXIV players face - especially new ones who have to deal with the incredibly slow start of the story

it might even convince me to not skip past every bit of MSQ dialog I encounter :P

Racket’s contract system is so cool!

it kind of works like type annotations in a language like Python, except instead of providing information for static analysis from an LSP, these are checked at runtime and they’re much more granular than just checking types

for example in Python I could write a simple Collatz function like this:

def collatz(max_: int) -> list[int]:
    ...

and that would tell my LSP that max_ is an integer and this function should return a list of integers. but in Racket I can do:

(define/contract (collatz max)
  (-> positive-integer? (listof positive-integer?))
  ;; ... code for the collatz function goes here
  )

and what this means is that max must be a positive integer, and collatz must always return a list of positive integers. if anything else happens, that will cause a contract error at runtime

so you’re not just defining what types your functions take - you’re also defining what specific kinds of values you’re expecting! and you can even define your own contracts from scratch, almost like writing your own assert statements (except it’s also kind of like defining a new type of data)

the one downside to this is that the Racket LSP can’t statically check contracts - they have to be checked at runtime. but still, it’s so cool

@mark_pc ooh I hope that you end up liking Rogue Incursion! it’s definitely not for everyone but it sounds like you might appreciate a lot of the same things that I did - and I also just enjoyed the atmosphere a lot too

for Alien: Isolation, I definitely remember a few times where I stopped and asked myself what a room was used for before everything went to shit and I couldn’t really figure it out

and I also remember that there’s this one specific machine that kept being reused as an objective. in one mission it was a power generator for an elevator but in another mission it was something completely different, and I think it was reused about 3-4 times as different things each time. but I could have also just been confused lol because I had a hard time understanding what Ripley’s moment-to-moment goals were in that game

@emmy that’s an interesting thought! I wonder if that’s at least part of what’s going on

@ruwuby thank you I hate this

@h3mmy @kasdeya automatic semicolon insertion has gotta be my favorite part of js - somehow brendan eich managed to make both semicolon likers and haters mad. unprecedented lows in language design

@nycki that honestly does kinda fit what my experience is. except for the compiled languages which want to be like Java. but Java wants to be like C in a grey business suit

there is a weirdly strong correlation and I’m not sure why that is

how to tell if a language is compiled:

are there semicolons at the end of every line?

no: it’s interpreted

yes: it’s compiled

@Owlor yeah I’ve joined tech.lgbt and now cryptid.cafe and both of them have been amazing! so I’ve never run into this problem on Fedi thankfully

I wonder if that’s because a Fedi server is more like a community where you interact with the folks you’re helping every day - but a Matrix homeserver is more like a public service where you just see an abstract number of how much the server is getting used

this post inspired by me taking this advice and ending up with a homeserver that shut down within 2 weeks of me joining

oh? I noticed that your matrix account uses the matrix.org homeserver. did you know that if you use a homeserver besides matrix.org you’ll be helping the network grow more robust and decentralized?

for example there’s transkitty.nyaan.si which I- oh that one’s gone

well I’ve seen a lot of folks using miau.dev which is run by- oop the server has been offline since a month ago

well there’s always homeserver.project.foxgirls.online which- ah, they’ve announced that the project will be shut down due to creative differences

anyway make sure not to use matrix.org or the network will be less robust!

@codingcoyote hm I’m having trouble imagining what those higher order functions would be or how they work, but I think I roughly understand overall! it kinda reminds me of Python’s duck typing, where as long as the expected fields are there then everything is okay. almost like following an implicit interface

also this has me worried that I’m going to have no idea how to do abstractions in Racket lol. I think you use structs for that? maybe it’ll make sense when I start experimenting