I mean I do agree, and particularly as an immigrant myself, I’d be crazy not to…

But I’m not sure it’s pride that’s the problem per se - it’s the automatic and non-negotiable nature of it that bothers me. I mean I’m proud to live in a society that, for all its flaws, values universal healthcare more than the right to shoot each other or the right to shout nazi slurs - I think that’s something that shows what we can achieve as people and it’s nice to be proud of it.

But when we elect some right-wing fucktard who tries to undo it all - then I will be ashamed. My pride is not eternal, unearned or unquestioning.

It’s the whole shagging the flag and belting out the national anthem every morning in school, and “our military are all heroes even when they’re committing war crimes”, that I find really sinister.

Proof, if any were needed, that you really can’t win 'em all

I’m not sure that makes me feel better about the game - it sounds like playing a role in a Hegseth wet dream - but I do appreciate the additional context, thank you!

Damn. Wing Commander II on the Miggy is one of my favourite games of all time, and I really wanted to love this - but I just watched the trailer and the Gee-Whiz Top-Gun Yankee Navy Saves The Universe aesthetic is just nauseating. That’s a hard pass, then.

You guys need to learn nobody thinks you’re The Good Guys any more.

It’s the wrong way round.

If someone said “I’ve had a bad day, but it’s really been my year” you wouldn’t say “oh poor you”.

If they said “I’ve had a rough year, but at least it’s been my day” you’d say “thank Cthulhu for small mercies I guess”.

Translation: “We’ve made the preprocessor a first-class language feature!”

(jk, don’t kill me)

I just finished Pragmata (had to speedrun the last few levels to fit in Control: Resonant, which I feel bad about - but I’d had C:R preordeted for ages and love anything from Remedy… Anyway, I digress.)

Pragmata I thought was good, and Capcom deserve some credit. An actual new IP, a genuinely fun and different game mechanic, visually looks good - and is bright and striking rather than regulation brown - and was just good fun to play. My only criticism would be that the dialogue/plotting felt like it was kinda rushed - like they skipped a couple of chapters and you go from “just met” to “devoted partners” in one scene and missed the plot/character development needed to get from A to B. I feel bad saying it though, because it’s a decent and topical plot and has some genuinely affecting moments.

Credit where due; I hope it does OK because God knows it’s hard enough to find games doing anything new these days.

Battery cages are illegal in the EU, and the minimum provision for caged hens is 750cm^2 per bird.

The US has no such law, but “industry standard” is 430 to 550cm^2 per bird.

Because washing the eggs allows you to cover up the fact that the hens are crammed so tight that the eggs are covered in shit by the time they’re collected.

Making it illegal to wash the eggs forces farmers to maintain some semblance of sanitary conditions.

Definitely on the casual end of the spectrum - I can’t even remember needing tickets, although I suppose I must have! The opening/closing ceremonies, Kok-Boru (crazy, but well worth experiencing) and wrestling/floor-events were in proper venues - the Kok-Boru one is a permanent stadium, but if I remember right the wrestling ones were temporary constructions for the event, both on the edge of lake Issyk-Kul. The rest was essentially in a field in the middle of nowhere - public transport was either Marshrutka, or as I learned on the way back hitchhiking is much more efficient - and it was all pretty easygoing as I recall.

Really recommend it; Kyrgyzstan is a beautiful country, sparkling rivers that are so blue you could almost think they were dyed running from snow-capped mountains through green plains below… Amazing place. And I found the Kyrgyz people to be some of the most friendly and hospitable I’ve ever met (although I know that sounds trite and everyone says that about wherever they go, but still, it’s true.)

My theory is there’s half a continent of knucle-dragging fucking inbreds set on destroying the planet, who build their shitty-ass houses out of spit and cardboard and then complain that running a cable is too damned hard.

Potato, potato.

I suppose asking an American to do something to save the planet rather than save a buck would be a complete waste of time, so fair enough, you do you. Don’t worry, it’s everyone else that pays.

I tried to watch the video, but apparently I would have to log in to YouTube for age-verification because “it may not be suitable for children.”

Honest to God, how the Republic of Dumbfuckistan gets to lecture the rest of the world on freedom remains the eternal mystery. I do hope y’all are using good long tablecloths in case a shapely table leg gives you the horn. (Then again, I suppose Vance needs plastic sofa covers so…)

Because in summer you’re then paying for the AC to get rid of that heat? It’s just wasted energy. If you don’t care about wasting energy then… Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American ¯_ (ツ)_/¯.

Maybe you can switch to cooking with Clean Coal and really wrap yourself in the flag.

Thank you! I genuinely didn’t know that.

Well, all credit to you!

Sometimes Lemmy can be surprising in a good way :^).

The patent is not on haptic feedback. The patent is on a very specific means of implementing haptic feedback using ferrofluids and electromagnetic actuators that it is claimed (and Apple deemed it good enough to copy, so presumably truly) allows for both a smaller implementation than typical mechanical haptic feedback (i.e. the off-balance-flywheel approach of phones of old), while also allowing for low- or zero- noise compared to “speaker or piezo” based haptic feedback.

There are a lot of shit patents in the world, but on a surface reading at least this seems sufficiently novel that I don’t see why it should be invalid. One also presumes that if Apple had any grounds to invalidate it on prior-art they would have done so.

TIL the NY Times Crossword isn’t a Cryptic.

Which personally is a good thing, because I’ve always been terrible at cryptic crosswords. But I’m now a lot less impressed by anyone who says they complete the NY Times crossword…

I went a few* years ago; it was super cool, and Kyrgyzstan is a crazy beautiful country.

I’m glad it’s back in Kyrgyzstan; when I went Erdogan was making a big deal of it and the following year it was supposed to be in Turkey and then it seemed to disappear of the radar for a bit. Good to see it back. I found a couple of pictures, God knows what I did with most of them…

.*: goddamn, a few = 8 years ago apparently. Damn.

It’s not going away.

Everyone who complains about the quality of the code it produces is overlooking one important fact: 90% of the code developed by the software engineering profession is utter dogshit, pasted together by people whose understanding just about extends to typing in stackoverflow.com by banging their head against they keyboard.

LLMs are not replacing artisinal hand-crafted code developed by a skilled engineer from a top-10 university, it’s replacing the utter shite produced by the people with an NVQ from Timbuctoo Community College that actually powers the vast majority of websites and enterprise software.

And it’s fucking good at it.

Look, when I started my career I used to hand-write assembly code. I used to personally review the output of the Keil C51 compiler because its optimiser was objectively dogshit. Nobody is doing that any more - partly because the compilers are better than programmers at writing assembler these days, and partly because we have so much CPU and memory we don’t know what to do with, so who cares if they aren’t. Both apply to LLMs, and we will soom be at a stage where reviewing - or even caring - about the quality of LLM produced code is as anachronistic as thinking you need the check the compiler’s output. (TBF, Clang/LLVM for AVR still produces dogshit assembler, but that’s by the by.)

Just as assembler did before, high-level code is going to become just another intermediate representation that isn’t really important; what will matter are the prompts and context you give to the LLMs. And there’s still a hell of a lot of engineering skills that need to go into that.

Software Engineers - the real ones - have nothing to fear from LLMs, and in many ways it’s much more satisfying working with an LLM than a team of barely skilled “coders”. The barely skilled coders who wouldn’t know malloc from a semaphore though? They’re fucked.