They always release their “Creation Kit” which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1946180/Skyrim_Special_Edition_Creation_Kit/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1946160/Fallout_4_Creation_Kit/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2722710/Starfield_Creation_Kit/

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The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).

I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

Yes, that’s obvious.

The dithering pattern is random in each frame, so distinguishing between dithered gradients and noise/film grain baked into the Blu-Ray source is hardly possible.

For the encoder, randomly dithered gradients and film grain are just noise. Both AomEnc and SVT-AV1 can remove this noise (thus causing banding) for better compression, but also record information about the noise to allow for statistically identical noise to be composited back on top of each frame during playback, hiding the bands again.

My issue here is simply that there is no reference for what noise that requires --denoise-noise-level=1 looks like, or how I should recognize noise that requires --denoise-noise-level=6 and so on. If my anime screenshot is level 6 already, then is “Alien (1978)”, level 12? level 18? Higher even?

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

Will die Frau mit ihrem Buch den Begriff “Woke” bestimmen? Frag’ Zehn dieser Vögel was “Woke” ist und du bekommst Zehn verschiedene Antworten. Der Begriff ist doch längst zum Platzhalter für alles geworden, gegen das Rechte, Konservative und andere empfängliche Opfer aufgewiegelt werden.

Konservativer 1970: “In dem Film sind zwei Männer die Händchen halten! Ich find’ Schwulensex eklig, deshalb sollten wir eine Schlafzimmerpolizei einführen, die private Interaktion aller Menschen überwachen, einschränken und die entdeckten Schwulen einer Gehirnwäsche unterziehen oder sie gleich erschiessen”

Konservativer 2020: “In dem Film sind zwei Männer die Händchen halten! Der Film ist Woke! Hollywood will mir Ansichten aufzwingen! Die bösen Liberalen sind alle pervers, Sittenverfall! Die globale Finanzelite steckt dahinter brabbelJudenbrabbelEchsenmenschenbrabbelAusmerzenbrabbel”

Das ganze alte Gewäsch engstirniger Opas aus den 70ern kommt zurück, nur diesmal stimmen Andere mit ein, die gegen Transsexuelle oder Feministen oder Black Lives Matter oder soziale Gleichstellung oder freie Bildung indoktriniert wurden - ist ja schließlich alles “Woke.”

It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.

I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone’s hardware useless if they didn’t sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.

What a complete nosedive that was.

They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it’s steady state – HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.

I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.

But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the “market perception of what this technology should cost” (and they’re producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.

Linux Unix since 1979: upon booting, the kernel shall run a single “init” process with unlimited permissions. Said process should be as small and simple as humanly possible and its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Linux since 2010: let’s write an enormous, complex system(d) that does everything from launching processes to maintaining user login sessions to DNS caching to device mounting to running daemons and monitoring daemons. All we need to do is write flawless code with no security issues.

Linux since 2015: We should patch unrelated packages so they send notifications to our humongous system manager whether they’re still running properly. It’s totally fine to make a bridge from a process that accepts data from outside before even logging in and our absolutely secure system manager.

Excuse the cheap systemd trolling, yes, it is actually splitting into several, less-privileged processes, but I do consider the entire design unsound. Not least because it creates a single, large provider of connection points that becomes ever more difficult to replace or create alternatives to (similarly to web standard if only a single browser implementation existed).

Es gibt solche Leute und vielleicht bin ich zu einem gewissen Grad auch selbst betroffen.

Hat jetzt nichts mehr mit der KPÖ zu tun, ganz allgemein ist eine Pro-Russland-Haltung ein absolutes No-Go for mich, deshalb kontrolliere ich das grundsätzlich. Auch nicht erst seit dem Angriff auf die Ukraine, obwohl ich mich freue das viele nun allgemein “aufwachen.”

Hintergrund: als Ende 2014 diese ganzen perfiden, gehässigen “Alt-Right”-Nazis auf der Bühne erschienen habe ich meinen Medienkonsum absichtlich dem entgegen orientiert und wo landete ich? Unter anderem bei “Redacted Tonight,” (= “RT” = “Russia Today,” englisches Äquivalent des Sputnik). Angeblich Links, aber immer sachte gegen Rechts, dafür rund um die Uhr Hetze gegen Liberale und Aufbau eines einseitigen, verdrehten Weltbildes. Siehe das erwähnte “Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht” in Deutschland, das Quasi als russisches Geschwür aus der Linkspartei gebrochen ist und nun russische AfD-Politik an Linke vermarktet. Hinter Brexit/GB, Trump/USA, Bolsonaro/Brasilien, Orban/Ungarn steht jeweils eine Ameisenburg aus wuselnden russischen Trollen, rechten “Think Tanks” und dubiosen Geldspenden. Ich möchte nicht in den Ameisenhaufen.

Aber – wenn ich nicht auf der Couch hänge laufe ich auch schonmal mit Fridays for Future oder demonstriere mit Antifas gegen Rechts (habe selbst eine Flagge :D) und ich teile die Ansichten der Waldbesetzer und der Letzten Generation. Vielleicht verdiene ich ja nur eine halbe Portion von deinem Ärger…

Uh… I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another… oh well… :)

Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it’s an exploration game, but what you’re exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.

Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that “huh?” factor where right until the end you’re not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?

Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.

Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).

Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you’re a robotic loader than can put down dots. That’s all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You’re attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.

Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you’re the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you’re up against and that all the corpses stay. It’s not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.

Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It’s 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You’re an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the “freaky alien attack” recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?

Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you’re digging underground for metal and for “lumen.” To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.

Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.

Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You’re a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the “SCP” universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won’t spread again.

Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you’re bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn’t grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.

Space Run - 2D base building. You’re a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don’t do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.

Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you’re just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species “gift” to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.

Do you have any actual evidence?

No, it’s just me and my assumptions here, but you can find a lot of cases showing Russian financial backing, for the Brexit campaign as well as connections between the Tories and Russia.

Also please address your statement that a pro-russian party is about to win in the UK

Sorry, you lost me there. I have no idea what party is currently predicted to win.

Ein Gegenpol zu den ganzen Rechten wäre wirklich schön, aber nach kurzer Recherche schaut das bedenklich wie das “BSW” aus - eine russlandhörige Linkspartei.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/opinion/the-brief-the-rise-of-left-wing-populism-in-austria/

Like the FPÖ, the Communists are inherently Eurosceptic. For them, the EU is nothing but a devilish neoliberal project. One of their regional branches in Styria even called for an exit from the EU – a move not even the FPÖ dared to do.

Their position on Russia is also quite similar. Like the right-wing populists, the KPÖ seeks to end the Russia sanctions, […]

Genau so isses.

Und dazu kann man auch gerne noch anmerken dass sämtliche Medien in RU von der Regierung kontrolliert werden und dass es inzwischen nicht nur statistische sondern harte Beweise für den massiven Wahlbetrug von Putin in der 2018er Wahl gibt.

The attack on Ukraine may have shaken things up, but before that, the Tories seemed quite close with Russia and, forgive this non-Brit for making assumptions, to me it looks like the entire Brexit thing was started and then heavily pushed by Russia as part of a larger plan to splinter the EU and cause infighting (from a quick web search: Wikipedia, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guardian).

I’d like to believe that our intelligence communities do, but I don’t know.

What I do know that that Russian propaganda tries to “immunize” their marks against mismatching views. One method is to pull them out of the shared media ecosystem by seeding distrust against non-aligned media. Another is to associate any undesirable viewpoints with weakness, idiocy or perversion.

Last but not least, Russia already tested a complete internet disconnect of their country so they could isolate their own population from anything not state controlled, should the tide turn or an emergency happen.

Same. The Russian IRA follows a simple, time-tested method: do whatever you can right now, little by little.

Most of it is just simple opinion shaping (try to connect the anger of internet strangers to the EU, US, liberals or the left). The interest slowly accumulates. Spreading bedbug hysteria causes just a little harm to France’s reputation, causes just a small bit of disillusion in its people and reduces Olympic revenue by maybe just some 10’000 euros – but ever so slowly, it alters the overall course.

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.

I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft’s servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft’s web browser now.

And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

Meine Stimme hätte er. Die Energiekrise hat er kompetent gemeistert (und ich bin mir sicher dass andere Parteien hier einfach geschlafen hätten), auch das Heizungsgesetz halte ich für einen guten Schritt. Wie geil wäre es, vom ständigen Ölkauf loszukommen und mit einem Ruck den Einfluss der Öl-Diktaturen zu reduzieren.

Aber… erinnert sich noch jemand an den Auftakt zur Wahl in 2019?

Für eine Woche lagen die Grünen auf Platz 1. Zwei Tage später schwenkte die russische Propaganda mit Brachialgewalt auf sie ein. Die Grünen würden “von oben herab” regieren, sie seien wohlhabende, realitätsfremde Weltverbesserer, der Begriff “Linksgrünversifft” wurde als Anschuldigung/Beleidigung gefestigt, etc.

Ich befürchte das würde sich einfach wiederholen, falls die Grünen irgendwo Wahlerfolge erzielen.