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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Ah, this got a good writeup by news piece. I first learned about this from Medlife Crisis’s The Epidemic of Fake Disease. Statistics about anything as big as cancer diagnoses are beyond complex, and honestly it would take a gargantuan effort of science communication to get this out to the general public. It’s… sobering to know that mortality is not morbidity and that harsh side effects create the most important optimization problems of patients’ lives. I hope that if (or maybe when) I get confronted with a similar diagnosis, I can face the numbers and the odds with as much of a level head as possible.


  • Yooo, they still got the classic cab at Arcade Odyssey down here near Miami. Some guy walloped my ass real bad at it, so I can imagine you can get really good at it. The singleplayer is hard as balls, and you have to be real tactical. Duel wielding joysticks is surprisingly intuitive, but you really have to mind your startup, execution, and cooldown times for both weapons and your movement, meaning conservative play and taking cover is imperative. I can’t believe I found reference to it on Beehaw.

    Arcades with real arcade games need to make a comeback (damn you D&B for only having DDR). Sadly they’re all Japanese and Korean, so you gotta look for smaller arcades or Round1. Rhythm gamers have lots of machines to play these days, so go hunt some if they’re nearby.


  • There’s two views I see here from a software engineering perspective: multi-targeting devices with different specs can get really hard, and that modern development consumes resources in excess.

    View 1: If you design a device that won’t catch up to modern expectations (limited, shared memory being the factor here), don’t expect to run all of the games. Some (or most) games will demand a certain level of resources. Microsoft either expected their status to swing their will upon the developers or were willing to help but just flopped on predicting what would be needed over the device lifetime. It’s a hard job, balancing developer need and cost. The hardware developers did their best. This comes down to

    View 2: It’s an old coot viewpoint, but goddamn are modern computer programs are bloated pieces of mess. This is NOT an insult to the game developers, but it is to the OS and the engine developers as a whole. The entire programming industry has assumed that bigger more betterer computer always gonna come in a year or so. So now we have gigabytes of unused HQ textures in game downloads for no reason. Windows OS with Chrome takes gigabytes of RAM to display a webpage. We went from ultra strict data streaming to CPU rates for Crash Bandicoot to an NVME SSD shoveling half a terabyte a second when you want it in the Xbox Series X. This has left those who cannot afford strong PCs (note: most of the third world) and now consoles from playing the latest and greatest games. Developers leave them behind by grasping at the end of Moore’s Law. If BattleBit can produce good gameplay with 256 players on a raw potato, AAA game engines should try and appeal to everyone now.