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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Currently playing Armored Core 6 with a Steam Controller, and I love it. But… the right track pad leaves a lot to be desired.

    The best aspect of the Steam Controller, without a doubt, is the modularity and shareability of it. The standard control scheme a game tries to assume, most of the time it stinks. But being able to browse through community-made control schemes and finding one that works for me is fantastic. The highest downloaded control scheme for AC6 got me 95% of the way there; I just had to change the bindings of the back pedals to suit me. Now it uses the track pad and the gyro in conjunction-- track pad for big sweeping movements and gyro for small adjustments-- and I love it.




  • I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won’t buy the game and it won’t sell. Obviously that also isn’t always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I’d like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that’s true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions… goddamn 400 GB games these days.




  • A cache is not a stack, it’s memory stored in parallel cells. The CPU could theoretically, depending on the implementation, directly find the data it’s looking for by going to the address of the cell it remembers that it’s in.

    Not all L1 caches operate the same, but in almost all cases, it’s easy to actually go and get the data no matter where it physically is. If the data is at address 0 or at address 512, they both take the same time to fetch. The problem is if you don’t know where the data is, in which case you have to use heuristics to guess where it might be, or in the worst case check absolutely everywhere in the cache only to find it at the very last place… or the data isn’t there at all. In which case you’d check L2 cache, or RAM. The whole purpose of a cache is to randomly store data there that the CPU thinks it might need again in the future, so fast access is key. And in the most ideal case, it could theoretically be done in O(1).

    ETA: I don’t personally work with CPUs so I could be very wrong, but I have taken a few CPU architecture classes.



  • I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

    For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

    This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.