My upgrade plan for my PC life included a move from 1440p to 4k for my display a few years ago, but when it came time to do that, I realized that I didn’t even really want it. I already had a 4k monitor at work where the UI was scaled because no scaling made it unreadable. Why add more pixels only to scale them away?

Which left gaming and media. For gaming, I realized I never had a problem with the amount of pixels on the screen. While 4k probably does look better (assuming it’s actually rendered at 4k and not just upscaled 1440p or something), I’ve never felt like adding more resolution would improve the experience. Similar for media, looks great when it is 4k but I don’t really miss it when it isn’t (and it’s usually not even available). Plus I do have a 4k TV I can use if I really want to.

So I just stopped the search for a display with decent specs other than 4k and instead got an ultrawide 1440p.

Anyways, I’ve applied the same logic to 8k TVs.

I’m not sure I’d call video game graphics “solved”, as there can always be more fidelity and accuracy for things other than resolution, but it’s just the tech geek in me that’s interested in that. And that might occasionally come out during a game, but it’s not an important aspect, more of a “oh this isn’t quite right, I wonder how it could be implemented to be correct” that I don’t even notice most of the time while playing.

Threats of taking a walk over a sewer grate make for very well-behaved children.

And then there’s the “ok, fine, time to eat now, oh but my plants are wilting so I need to water them. And now I need to clean some dishes in order to use them. I might as well deal with this mess on the counter and load the dishwasher for all the non-hand wash dishes. Oh right, I need to do some laundry, so I’d better put a load in while I’m thinking about it. Ah what was I doing? Oh yeah, washing the dishes. Might as well clean a fridge shelf while I’ve got the hot soapy water ready and dryer rack space. Fuck I’m hungry already? Didn’t I just–oh wait, I didn’t yet eat, time to check the fridge and freezer. Bah, everything needs time to cook and I want food NOW, no more effort. Maybe this one would be good–40 MINUTES!? I’ll probably die of starvation by then.”

Followed by procrastinating for another hour or so before giving up and just getting fast food.

Or another time, notice the large carrot on the counter is showing signs that it will need to be thrown out soon and somehow end up with carrot cake cookies less than an hour later, at around midnight. Haven’t made them since lol.

Yeah, the game was exactly what I wanted prior to realizing how the enemy AI worked, but then it just took all the wind out of my sails and I didn’t even want to scale up to overwhelm that increasing resistance. That momentum is what I love about strategy games, where at some point you get over the hump and things get easier because you’re strategically dismantling your opponent’s war machine. They should obviously push back, which then becomes a part of your strategy, where to defend to prevent a halt to that momentum as much as where to attack to continue building it.

I liked that game until I realized that the enemies were just spawning random attacks rather than playing against a peer level opponent, which meant there wasn’t any strategy involved in taking the enemy positions. It’s just whack a mole on the attacks on you while you take their bases (also defended by random fleet spawns).

What’s the problem with it, exactly? As long as it lives up to its promise and is a better machine, why shouldn’t they market it as a better machine or make direct comparisons?

It’s not even saying the steam one is bad, just that it is better.

There’s different levels of broken. Like a drawer that doesn’t close all the way still works as a drawer, and while I would call a drawer with its bottom busted out more broken than one that just won’t close, both could use some repairs.

Those look like offers, sales involve both a buyer and a seller agreeing to the transaction.

That would require having enough inventory to meet total demand at the set price.

IMO the best they can do is cut the scalpers out by starting the price off high themselves and lowering it as supply increases. Low supply and high demand will always lead to increased prices and trying to avoid that by keeping prices low will result in others taking advantage of that market inefficiency.

And the best we can do is just not buy the higher priced options and wait for supply to come up.

Ah that sucks, I like KBM but it seems like a good controller candidate as it just needs two vectors (movement and aiming) plus two buttons (at least as far as I got so far, there’s only main fire and secondary fire). Sounds like something that shouldn’t even take long to implement with steam input.

I actually just used steam input for the first time yesterday and thought you might be referring to the same thing as it was annoying during the process of figuring out the correct setup. It’s a Nintendo layout but was being detected as an Xbox layout, so all the buttons were reversed. Either that or Binding of Isaac deliberately set up the controls to be counter-intuitive and my using steam input to remap to more intuitive controls is cheating lol. And it didn’t help that I had another controller that also identifies as an xbox controller and spent some time remapping that one and wondering why it wasn’t doing anything in the game before I noticed it was being picked up (but doesn’t really function so I didn’t even realize it was still plugged in).

Yeah, it’s likely just a buffer needs to be filled with amplitude samples, and sample frequency plus bit depth needs to be programmed (and volume). Then from there it’s just a matter of adding codecs to decode/decompress various audio formats from media (which would be the same code as on desktops, though complied for ARM or whatever instruction set the phone’s CPU uses).

Oh also, there’ll be determining the method it handles multiple channels (separate buffers or some sort of interleaving in a single buffer?).

And then adding virtual buffers can help with output device management, as each output might use a different buffer, so having apps writing their audio to a virtual buffer means your code can manage things like the user switching from phone speaker to aux cable or bluetooth (which is a whole other beast and involves encoding the audio to specific codecs to make up for the relatively low bandwidth available).

Though whatever is already there could add complexity, but my guess is it’s just a matter of matching memory mapped addresses up and then the existing linux audio code will handle the rest.

I’ve been playing through the first Hollow Knight and don’t know why I slept on it for so long (but am glad I did as I get to currently experience it).

Cuboid Keeper was already on my wishlist and showed up as the cheapest game at 1.59 CAD. Notable because it currently has a 100% positive rating (though only 11 reviews). Released in 2019, too. I added the game to my wishlist because the same people (person? Website seems to suggest it’s just one guy) made Eventide Matter, a short space resource gathering/building/upgrading game.

Ah glad you mentioned that because I had the base game on my wishlist and saw it for under $2 and just added that.

But now, looking more closely, I’m a bit confused. I see the DLC bundles, but only one of the DLCs (other than the soundtrack) has a price, though the others are a mix of Free and N/A. Going into bundle details does show a price for the N/A ones but I’m just confused about what’s going on there. Are the DLCs only available through the bundles and that’s why they don’t have their own prices unless you dig a bit?

Anyways, they are all 90% off.

Though with the way valve handles bundles, at least it isn’t really an issue, whatever is going on. It’s refreshing that they don’t try to nickel and dime you and even warn you if you have a game in a cart when a bundle with that game is cheaper (because you already have the other games and it still gives you the bundle discount without needing to buy those games again).

Yeah, it was way less friction than I was expecting. It went smoother than some windows updates do (specifically the ones where they just reset settings to their shitty defaults).

Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.

Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.

Hell, even the fact that the term “African American” was invented because “black” was considered offensive. Judgement was baked right in (or at least assumed to be by enough that this somehow got popular) to using their skin colour as a descriptor.

Which then led to many people being called “African American” despite having no connection to either Africa or America.

Yeah, I got a wii U game fairly recently and panicked when I fired it up because it wanted to access the internet to look for updates. Luckily you could just skip past that and still play, but it made me wonder about the newer games that are just download codes and how they will be handled. Though I already have a good guess.

It’s annoying enough that they didn’t patch either the systems or games to not bother trying connecting to servers that no longer exist. Though now I’m wondering if anyone cooked up some home brew servers they can redirect DNS to that at least say “connection accepted, nothing new here, grey out the options that depend on this being real” if not attempt to support actual features.

Hell, even with smaller projects, you’re going to have debug cycles and if AI is driving those cycles, it will be acting as a new coder for each invocation (which happens multiple times per prompt for systems like claude code).

So you’ll get shit like duplicate helper functions, other code not using those helper functions anyways, debug code added and then not removed, errors and warnings using a variety of styles, overly verbose and redundant arguments, support for enhancements that don’t even make sense in that context, confidently incorrect assertions about what is and isn’t happening or possible, etc.

My manager wants me to make a presentation that sells some AI debug solution but the hand holding I have to do for it to actually understand and not give useless conclusions means I don’t even believe in it. Or the case where it did help, turns out it didn’t even use the tools provided by the solution and was just CC.

I’ve mentioned the cycle of being impressed with what these LLM-based systems can do and feeling like I might have been unfairly critical, and then running in to a major issue that justfies the earlier critical view. Last times I mentioned it, I said I was in the impressed (but skeptical) part of the the cycle. Well, I’m back to the “this might just be a complete waste of resources” part of the cycle.