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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I haven’t played it yet but would like to so no spoilers please, but from what little I’ve seen it just looks like reskinned and slightly upgraded D:OS2.

    DOS2 is one of my favorite games of all time and i am somewhat suspicious that people think Baldur’s gate is some novel masterpiece when really it’s that Divinity is super under rated and relatively unknown by comparison. Can anyone who has played both games weigh in on this?

    And if it is the case that gameplay is very similar, is it just the setting / writing that is much better in BG that makes it stand apart or was it just coincidence / hype that made this game succeed harder?



  • I always thought Oblivion was a much better setting than Skyrim, but I replayed Oblivion recently and I realized nostalgia was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I came away not knowing really what to think. Oblivion still held up and was clearly a great game but it wasn’t perfect and was a bit dated (Jeez I mean skyrim is also dated lol). Maybe everyone just kinda feels that special something about their first ES game lol.

    Edit: I should add, I also played Morrowind somewhat recently (much longer after playing the original two) and it was also a great game but didn’t seem necessarily better than the other two.

    Edit: Edit: I also played daggerfall, it was very ok lol

    Edit: Edit: Edit: I also played ESO, 5/10


  • This isn’t a well formulated idea but something that’s been kicking around in my head for a while. There have always been bad movies and TV but I think what is somewhat new is that the blockbuster films are so big budget that it’s always “a good movie” in that its well made but the substance is always lacking. It’s kind of a bizarre and unsettling feeling watching a well produced 200 million dollar movie that kinda… sucks? Is boring? Because movie magic has become so commodified its hard for a movie to ride on flash and sparkle alone.



  • My hot take is that unmaintainable monoliths result from poor system design / too strong coupling. If you can’t cleave off portions of your monolith without breaking it you built it wrong in the first place, and the choice between monolith and microservice isn’t going to save you. Perhaps starting with a microservice forces people to make (or at least consider) better design choices from the beginning but 1. there is no reason you can’t make those same architectural decisions with a monolith and 2. you can still strongly couple microservices with poor design.

    Getting back to basics of “what makes for good application development” using good abstractions, Go4 patterns, SOLID / KISS / DRY / etc, means that whether your threads are running colocated vs on another VM vs on another box vs in another datacenter vs in another continent shouldn’t affect you much. If your app breaks in ways beyond “I wonder if moving this job to another system means we’ll suffer from memory nonlocality or sync latency” the walls are already closing in lol.


  • That is an interesting read. Everyone in the comments are ripping the author as pretentious oof lol. As I said in my OP, I think this problem goes much deeper than shallow video games. Movies and TVs are struggling to find novelty in the endless deluge of content we’re currently experiencing. (Books and webserials seem to be doing more ok but I’m also a lot pickier about what I’ll consume there so its selection bias) We’re in an infinite monkey typewriter situation and at this point it seems mostly random when something is just different enough to be good television. A tale as old as time, the situation remains: the best stories are character driven.


  • Never seen so much truth in one article. 90% of applications would be fine as small VMs running monoliths. Dev time is an expensive resource compared to VMs and the simplicity promised just isn’t there. And having tech companies that run the major cloud platforms also be the software evangelists that herald “the new best way” of doing development was always a conflict of interest.

    That being said, FaaS is nonetheless a useful tool in the toolbelt for the odd app that does actually need crazy scale to 1000000 scale back to 0, or for certain kinds of simple apps. Traditional app development still rules the middle space when it comes to team productivity.



  • The changes:

    Intel® APX doubles the number of general-purpose registers (GPRs) from 16 to 32. This allows the compiler to keep more values in registers; as a result, APX-compiled code contains 10% fewer loads and more than 20% fewer stores than the same code compiled for an Intel® 64 baseline.2 Register accesses are not only faster, but they also consume significantly less dynamic power than complex load and store operations.

    Intel® APX adds conditional forms of load, store, and compare/test instructions, and it also adds an option for the compiler to suppress the status flags writes of common instructions. These enhancements expand the applicability of if-conversion to much larger code regions, cutting down on the number of branches that may incur misprediction penalties. All these conditional ISA improvements are implemented via EVEX prefix extensions of existing legacy instructions.