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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • The blank line between the two actually – well, I suppose some clients might act differently than others, but certainly in the Web UI on lemmy and IIRC Reddit – produces a different effect, has a larger horizontal space, and is intended to be a paragraph break rather than just a line break.

    foo  
    bar
    

    (with two spaces trailing “foo”) Gives:

    foo
    bar

    And

    foo
    
    bar
    

    Gives:

    foo

    bar

    It’s not normally a massive difference, but suppose you’re writing poetry, say, you’d probably rather have paragraph breaks between verses and line breaks after each line in a verse:

    Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

    Whose woods these are I think I know.
    His house is in the village though;
    He will not see me stopping here
    To watch his woods fill up with snow.

    My little horse must think it queer
    To stop without a farmhouse near
    Between the woods and frozen lake
    The darkest evening of the year.

    He gives his harness bells a shake
    To ask if there is some mistake.
    The only other sound’s the sweep
    Of easy wind and downy flake.

    The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep.







  • I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.

    If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.

    With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.

    https://proxy.parisjc.edu:8293/statistics/300887/number-of-buses-in-use-by-region-uk/

    In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.

    Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. You need to cover all of your costs out of that. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?

    https://www.statista.com/topics/5280/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/

    Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.

    If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.

    I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential improvement from being self-driving.



  • good d pad

    D-pads are the one aspect of a controller that I wouldn’t worry about much. I’ve only ever had one controller that had a D-pad that I wasn’t happy with, a Logitech in the mid-1990s that had a screw-in mini joystick on the D-pad. That rolled to the diagonal too easily.

    thinks

    Maybe the old NES controllers, which had a relatively-hard, non-rounded D-pad and could be tough on the fingers for long sessions.

    I guess one could prefer the PlayStation-style or XBox-style D-pad position, though I’ve never had issue with either.

    Do you have something in particular that you’re concerned about regarding D-pads? I’d expect pretty much anything out there to be fine, myself.



  • So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

    However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.


  • Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

    “We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

    As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

    The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

    • It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

    • But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. Nor does having written something on the paper. I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

    This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unusual about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the right to compel searching a landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

    I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives, however.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGames@lemmy.worldGreatest video game ever played?
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    1 month ago

    There are a lot of ways to measure that.

    I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.

    Another might be how long after its development it’s still considered reasonably playable. I’d guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.

    Another might be how influential the game is. I think that “genre-defining” games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.

    Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.

    Another might be what the games I play today are – at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them – since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I’m aware of. That won’t work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability – an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here – but I think that it’s a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I’ve played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.




  • investigates

    Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

    reads further

    It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

    https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

    You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.




  • Looks fine to me.

    Little side question: Will the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the motherboard work in Arch? From what I could gather, the drivers for it should be in the latest kernel, but I’m not 100% sure.

    If they don’t for some reason and you can’t get it working or need some sort of driver fix, can always worst case fall back to a USB dongle or similar until they do. Obviously, preferable not to do that, but shouldn’t wind up stuck without them no matter what.


  • Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

    He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

    The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

    It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.