Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Just did a refresher per your request… We did not ever to my knowledge use civics tests. We used literacy tests and what made them particularly offensive was they had various exemptions for white people or simplified variants for white people.

    I am very icy to the idea of tests in general due to the effects having a “test” to vote could have. However, having a very low bar test of some sort administered without exceptions … it might make sense.

    We don’t let people drive whose eyes fail a safety test. Maybe we shouldn’t let people vote if they don’t even have a surface level understanding of what they’re voting for.

    I’m not saying do it, but maybe we shouldn’t totally write it off because of some bad behavior without any safeguards to prevent bad behavior.








  • Yeah, I have issues with random really poor frame times. I’ll be sitting at 144 FPS then get some frames that take 45ms to render each/severe stuttering.

    I “fixed” it using the proton version of the game though I’ve heard some people say that doesn’t work with match making… Haven’t tried that yet.

    I was thinking about trying the -vulkan launch option to see if that does anything if my proton install doesn’t work.

    EDIT: They were right … VAC doesn’t work via Proton. I retried playing the native version and it seemed to run fine this time with or without -vulkan … so I’m not really sure what’s going on anymore.

    Maybe some things have been fixed either on the Linux/Mesa or on the Valve side.


  • I have 0 interest in this guy’s takes.

    He pushed an awful battle royale game that just took people’s money (including mine) and never actually launched.

    He also once got into a Twitter (edit: it was actually mastodon) argument with me when he posted about an open source developer being “selfish” or something like that for telling him “if you don’t like the readme, open a pull request with the changes you want made to it.” Long story short, I told him it wasn’t cool to make a post bullying an open source developer to donate more of their free time to something they didn’t want to do, and that they have every right to tell him “go do it yourself.” He blocked me.

    Yeah, he runs a Linux gaming website, yeah he talks about games that run on Linux which is cool, but … make no mistake he doesn’t have some deeper journalistic insight. If Microsoft does forbid kernel level anticheat, that will indeed be a game changer.




  • By integrating everything into it, it has become a good enough medium of communication for almost everything.

    Except that’s not at all what we’ve done.

    The only reason English dominates is because it’s the dominant language of the world super powers following world war II. It’s not because of some special design, principle, or properties.

    English isn’t just “make up whatever rules and put them wherever”, particularly formal English which is what we’re talking about in the context of education.

    Really, a better argument against changing the spelling is the classic “standards” xkcd, where now you’re just making another dialect of English where they spell words differently again, and now it needs to be adopted, fracturing the language further.

    Language will evolve with or without direction. We have the structure in the form of schools to actually evolve it with direction in the name of making things more consistent and intuitive. We should use it, that’s all.



  • I disagree that it’s a fools errand. Misspellings rarely become popular enough to become “proper” because we teach everyone the “proper” spelling and we have spell checkers on our computers that are used for virtually everything.

    There’s no method for the people speaking the English language to put pressure on a word that already exists because we’ve build up this infrastructure to "lock things in’ and insist that “they’ve been this way so they must continue to be this way.” The only way we get language evolution currently is via slang … which is hardly a way to get a better language.

    I know the history of facade, it’s like many other words we’ve stolen from other languages that don’t make a lick of sense in our alphabet. It’s not an infinite list, it’s fixable, but we need to change the mind share that “it has to be this way.”

    We made up official spellings, we can fix them, they’re not an immutable law of nature.


  • Yeah, don’t do that. You’re asking for the game to shut off at best. They probably won’t have the anticheat configured to outright ban you for that but, as a general rule: do not tamper with multiplayer anti-cheat protected games.

    My recommendation would be to go to their discord and request the option.

    EDIT: I will say this is overly cautious advice, I’ve never seen Crytek in general or any other developer ban people for using render alternating software that wasn’t specifically designed to be a cheat.


  • That’s something only a teacher would say. As someone who did all their school work and got a fancy engineering job, a lot of it was bogus busy work that 99% of us have completely forgotten.

    You can’t tell me that I needed two teachers having me comb through the book for words that weren’t part of the index so that I could rewrite the word’s textbook definition on a piece of paper verbatim on a weekly basis and that that was a good education experience.

    You can’t tell me my high school study hall where they’d give you something to do if you were bored and forbid you from sleeping or playing games unless the study hall monitor “liked you” was a good experience.

    I mean my high school algebra teacher couldn’t even remember the algebra lesson she’d taught every year for over a decade when I had her. If it was really a life skill or that important, she would’ve remembered.

    In calculus they teach you the hard way to differentiate and then they’re just like “ah but actually you can do it this way and that’s how everyone does it.”

    Artificially raising the difficulty by forbidding formula sheets in math is also just stupid. If you can see the problem, recognize which formula to use, and use it, that should be enough.

    We’re just straight up wasting millions of hours of people’s time with our education system that has very little merit in terms of long term results and retention and negatively affects both people that come out of it “passing with flying colors” and people that flunk out because of various home life circumstances, bad teachers, difficult with the material, or a lack of interest.

    Students are miserable (suicide is at an all time high last I checked and I’m pretty confident it’s not just about social media), administrators are miserable, teachers are miserable, and kids really don’t learn all that much that stays with them into adulthood. We desperately try to shove way too much information into people’s heads in a very dry and uncaptivating way. We need to throw the system out and figure out how to teach what matters and change/replace stuff that doesn’t matter or make sense (e.g. we changed the spelling of various words in the past, why don’t we fix them instead of teaching a bunch of ridiculous spellings that make no sense like facade, ghost, llama, etc).



  • They’re probably not talking about using git, since git is decentralized by nature. You can use git without an Internet connection and then sync everything back up when you have an internet connection again.

    Some people literally call GitHub, git and … they’re just wrong.

    They also might be talking about review and project management facilities GitHub provides as a service.