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Akronymus

4,173 karma · joined July 30, 2019

email: akronymus@akronymus.net website: akronymus.net
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Akronymus··on The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
This one [0] by chance?

[0] https://youtube.com/@theguardrailguy

Akronymus··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
I personally find old reddit on mobile more usable than both new and the app version.
Akronymus··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
> this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again

Just today I ran into a parkingmeter that was covered up in favor of ONLY allowing to pay via app. Which I find horrendous. (austria, for context)

Akronymus··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
> To most modern users, web browsers kinda suck if they don't know URLs. For example, if they want to find an item they saw on Amazon, searching it in browser history just sucks compared to the in-service search.

And, more and more, browsers are trying to hide the URL as much as possible. Which is REAPLY annoying.

Akronymus··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
> This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all.

As with many reddit problems, old.reddit.com is a pretty universal fix.

Akronymus··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
> - I can see when it gets updated (versus a website that gets updated every time I load it). For security reasons it's better, I can even verify my app with other people online and make sure we run the same thing.

in many cases this is no longer the case. Discord, for example, has introduced capabilities to update parts of the app without goung through the play store on android, same with youtube. Which they obviously use to enshittify things against your will.

Akronymus··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
Wait, so in america you can literally just click one button on a product and instantly have it paid for and set for delivery?

That seems rather accident prone.

Akronymus··on Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach
On private/community hosted/moderated servers my experience was that cheating was mostly a non-issue. Only with the advent of forced matchmaking/only official servers and such has it become a real problem.
Akronymus··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
If the donations were to the opposite end of the political spectrum, do you think there would be a similar amount of backlash?
Akronymus··on Don't verify email addresses by sending spam to them
Kiwifarms did something like that, where you have to send an email to confirm your signup.
Akronymus··on Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia
or:

1: the media has a vested interest in only reporting a certain slant, because it involves criticizing the media

2: because the media is the only source deemed reliable, that slant becomes the truth

Akronymus··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
Mostly by looking at the calling site where the code is already used and the calling site where I want to reuse it. If both of those mean the same (calculate the tax on x products, for the purpose of applying to the shopping cart, vs for applying to generating reports) then I'll reuse it, if it can be achieved without adding stuff like flags, in most cases. In other cases, it just looks the same (sum some field + calculate a percentage of that, for example, for discounts vs taxes on products) where it's obvious that they don't mean the same. (Though, I do heavily rely on a good type system to deal with future evolutions of that copied code)

TL;DR: Vibes

Akronymus··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
My metric for that is "does that code MEAN the same thing" or "does it just look the same". Has worked quite well for me so far. I frequently find myself making a copy of some code rather than adding a parameter (most commonly done with code that would get some flag added)
Akronymus··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
I assume to split the overall behaviour (loop through all elements, transform some value, etc) and the specific one (apply this function to all elements, transform it in this way, etc) into multiple functions and combine those to achieve the actual intended behaviour.

At least that's my interpretation

Akronymus··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
To be more specific, incidental complexity.

Many problems have tons of inherent complexity already.

Akronymus··on CSSQuake
Id assume "a fun challenge" could be enough of a reason
Akronymus··on A generic dynamic array in C that stores no capacity and needs no struct
That's pretty clever code. Too clever for my tastes.
Akronymus··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Oh right. Guess the " (2 bits per color? how is that possible)" is what threw me off there, because I read it as 2 bits per colour channel, rather than cga colour. Of course, "indexed" colours can get away with much fewer bits.
Akronymus··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
> (2 bits per color? how is that possible).

this is probably a rhetorical question, but lemme answer anyways: By packing the colour channels into a single byte. So, for example, you'd have RRGGBBAA within a single byte, for each pixel. Giving you 64 possible colours, with 4 steps of alpha.

Or if you don't need to have alpha, you could pack it even further down to RRGGBB in a byte, which leaves 2 bits left over for the next pixel. Via that, you can pack four pixels worth of colour data into 3 bytes: RRGGBBRR|GGBBRRGG|BBRRGGBB (italics for delineting pixels, vertical bars for delineting bytes)

The latter is a tradeoff between compression and a more complex accessing pattern.

A bit of a tangent, some system used RRRGGGBB for colours, because the eyes are the least sensitive to differentiating the amount of blue, so that's another way to use up a full byte per pixel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

Akronymus··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
The movement explicitly DOESNT want to force companies to keep their servers running. It is singularily concerned with keeping games playable in some form after shutdown. Be it via patching out the requirement on a server, providing a way to host it yourself or any other option, really.
Akronymus··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Hopefully SKG can serve as a precedent to help consumer rights expand.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Battle passes/mtx would IMO definitely fall under monetary considerations, which would make the excemption not apply. But as is written now, there still needs to be a precedent set for that, to really cement that interpretation
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Gray area, as in it has to be ruled on in court because that's 100% gonna be an avenue for some companies to try and weasel out of obligations.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
My comment was not meant as any form of value judgement upon the game at all. Only that it is an example I could think of where the death of the game was communicated upfront and where it was expected.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
It's not endless support but more "Don't stop me from playing the game". For example, win xp is no longer supported. You can still use it.

For a lot of games the current situation is essentially the same as "The OS is no longer profitable enough, so the developer prevents you from using it"

Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
And then lose the rights to those franchises/codebases/etc? I don't think that'll realistically happen.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Then communicate that lifespan front and center. One game I can think of that did that, afair, was "the cube" from peter molyneux.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
I doubt it, as that'd not nullify the contract established by people who bought the game before it went FTP.
Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
I can absolutely see how you came to your interpretation. Thanks for being so cordial.

This definitely has to be ruled on to know one way or another for sure.

Akronymus··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)

[emphasis mine]

AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.

Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.

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