Riskable
Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
- 1 Post
- 40 Comments
Hall effect sensor expert here! No, the magnets in the joycons that are used to attach to the display/body of the Switch 2 would not interfere with hall effect analog sticks.
Two reasons:
- The magnets are too far away (sensors are usually only sensitive to magnets within 10-12mm directly above/below)
- The mounting/attachment magnets would be perpendicular to the magnets in the analog sticks (if you imagine the flux lines they wouldn’t cross the sensory boundary).
Regardless, it would be trivial to place a tiny little piece of ferromagnetic blocking tape wherever necessary to prevent interference.
Oh if I wanted to show off my BS skills I’d post this replay:
https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=20047904
😁
I just remembered that I made a gif demonstrating how to spin in Beat Saber!
Yes! I play on a hard floor wearing socks. I spin all the time! 🕺
In fact, sometimes I slide into position to play! 🤣
Have some more spinning!
https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=19582636
This is another… It’s an older replay but it still checks out:
Beat Saber is the best! If you use the BeatLeader mod it automatically saves and uploads replays whenever you beat your previous score on any given map.
Here’s my Christmas present to everyone to demonstrate this fantastic ability:
https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=20010657
(Make sure to watch the whole silly thing in all it’s glory or you might miss some of the “special moments” 🤣)
I’m 46 and I play every day 👍
It is impossible to do these types of checks on serverside.
If the client can make a determination as to whether or not to draw a player the server can too (and refuse to send those packets). It’s not impossible, just more computationally intensive and thus, more expensive (on the server side of things).
Naive way: Render exactly what the player will see on the server. Do this for every client and only send the data to the client if the another player enters the view.
More intelligent way: Keep track of the position and field of view of each player and do a single calculation to determine if that player can see another. If not, don’t send the packets. It will require some predictions but that’s no different than regular, modern game-specific network programming which already has to do that.
Servers these days have zillions of cores. It really isn’t too much to ask to dedicate a thread per player to do this kind of thing. It just means that instead of one server being able to handle say, 500 simultaneous players you can only handle say, 100-250 (depending on the demands of your game).
If your players host their own servers then it’s really no big deal at all! Plenty of cores for their personal matches with their friends or randos from the Internet. If you’re a big company with a game like Fortnite then it’s a huge burden compared to the low-effort system currently in place.
Excellent defense: “You sent me the packets revealing where all the other players were. If you didn’t want me to know they were behind walls why did you tell me precisely where they were?”
Yeah, doing such checks on the server side of things is more computationally intensive but it would solve that problem entirely and you wouldn’t need client-side anti-cheat bullshit anymore.
The first rule of network programming is never trust the client. How does anti-cheat software work? By trusting the client.
For Microsoft, the key threat is that the Steam Deck isn’t even a Windows OS device by default, let alone having Microsoft’s Xbox services and Game Pass on it. Valve has used the platform, very successfully, to evolve Steam from being simply a digital store that runs (usually) on Windows, into being a very capable gaming OS in its own right.
That, perhaps more than anything else happening in the industry in recent years, is a threat to Microsoft’s plans for the Xbox platform and gaming more broadly – and if the success of the Steam Deck is a key component of that threat, then creating an Xbox device to compete directly in that space seems like the logical response.
And there’s the real reason why Microsoft cares. The success of the Steam Deck is a threat to Windows because it runs Linux. Also, the more games that run on the Steam Deck means the more games run on Linux.
Microsoft normally solves problems like this by abusing their monopoly and crushing their competition. In this case though, Microsoft is the underdog since Steam is the one with a much larger gaming monopoly. They’re going to have to spend billions and billions if they want to stand a chance against the Steam Deck.
The other enormous problem they face is that Windows is very, very far behind when it comes to technology compared to Linux. Devices made for Linux vastly outperform the best hardware that runs Windows. Even if that hardware was made to run Windows!
Windows is decades behind Linux from a technological development standpoint. For example, Windows is still running the same filesystem from over 30 years ago!
What this means is that for any given portable hardware Linux is going to vastly outperform Windows in basically every benchmark from battery life to frame rate. That doesn’t even include the fact that in Windows you’re forced to install many background apps (and kernel level rootkit anti-cheat) that takes up memory and slows everything down just to get basic security and play games.
The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.
The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.
For fuck’s sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!
Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not “IP”. Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).
Then let’s talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It’s nothing but trouble for them.
I’d also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They’re idiots. They opened a can of worms that’s kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they’ve doubled down on their decision.
Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).
Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn’t exist!
Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.
You’re describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.
Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.
Furthermore, “back in the day” manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of “shared engineering knowledge”. Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That’s why patents were necessary: Disclosure
These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.
Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?
The thing runs Windows so it’s not a Steam Deck competitor… It’s a has-been at launch.
Windows is absolute garbage for a handheld gaming device. When are these manufacturers going to learn and just ship the things with Linux? Many Chinese devices (made for running emulators) ship with some customized Linux so why aren’t more mainstream manufacturers doing it? Seems like a no-brainer to make a better device and save money on licensing costs.
To be fair, carrying a child on your back can be fun for MAX an hour at a time. So maybe perfect for a video game 🤔
I used to carry my kids in a kid backpack for hikes on the weekends and they loved it. Too much, actually. In the Florida heat that’s a good way to sweat your ass off.
Can’t say the thing missing from those fun hikes through the arboretum was fashion 🙄
Actually this guy is correct: What Ubisoft is doing here isn’t false advertising, it’s fraud.
False advertising is a very specific thing: You say something that isn’t true in an ad or as part of your product’s packaging. Like saying your product has a USB C port when in reality it has a Micro USB port and comes with an adapter. Companies that pull stunts like that rarely have legal consequences but technically it is against the law (why there’s not usually legal consequences is because most retailers will refund a product within 30 days without any penalty to the consumer).
Ubisoft is giving reviewers a different product than what they’re planning on giving to consumers. It’s like going to a car dealership, test driving a car, ordering that model, then when it finally arrives it’s a completely different car (e.g. smaller engine, different/weaker/flawed parts, etc). Case law is filled to the brim with scams like this. It’s one of the oldest and most widely-repeated types of fraud that’s ever existed: Bait and switch.
Simple example every Comcast customer suffers with: Comcast services (including VoIP and streaming TV) don’t count towards the monthly bandwidth cap. So if you watch 2 seasons of a show in 4k via Comcast’s streaming service that doesn’t count towards the cap but if you watch the very same show via Netflix it’ll put you over your bandwidth cap, resulting in additional fees.
It’s an egregious violation of network neutrality and, IMHO an abuse of their natural monopoly. Internet providers should not be allowed to also sell content/streaming services or own media companies! It’s a huge conflict of interest that will always disfavour the consumer.
Furthermore, when Comcast streams their own services they get priority over all other traffic; even traffic going to your neighbor’s Internet connections. So if your neighborhood is experiencing a bandwidth crunch and your neighbor decides to watch some 4k stream via Comcast’s service the back-end routers will prioritize that traffic over any and all other traffic which will interfere with everyone’s else’s Internet connections. So if your video stream suddenly drops to 480p for no reason (wired connection, no bad weather) it’s probably because someone in your neighborhood decided to watch something via Comcast’s streaming service.
Yeah that’s the one thing severely lacking: Character screen voices. There’s only 8 of them!
They should put out a call to the community to make more and hold a silly contest where the winners get their voices into the game. All Larian has to do is release the scripts and provide somewhere for folks to upload the audio files.
They don’t even need to listen to 99% of them themselves! Just let the community listen to them and vote. Then Larian will only have to listen to like the top ten or twenty and they can have a second round where contestants are given instructions to “fix” certain audio files or whatever (e.g. to make them shorter or longer to match the cut scene timing).
Yeah, maybe? I couldn’t go at that level for 5-6 hours straight but in 30-45 minute segments? Why not? Why is that so unbelievable?
Everyone in my clan says I’m a monster from a stamina perspective, haha. Here’s a ~19-minute, 9 ⭐ map I beat without pausing 6 months ago and I’m way more in shape now than I was back then:
Well, the 1200 calorie days are usually two hours. Normally I get 425-450 calories burned in 30 minutes which is about 15 calories/minute. Doing the math, 90 minutes of that is about 1350 calories so 1200 makes sense.
My heart rate is definitely pumping hard when I’m playing and I have to wipe the sweat off the floor after every session. I don’t take breaks between maps at all, really except to hydrate.
Just look at my BeatLeader profile:
https://www.beatleader.xyz/u/76561198133136058
I didn’t even play that much last night but I burned ~800 calories (if my memory is accurate, haha). It was 16 maps total and if you look at the maps I played and my usual intensity I think you’ll understand. Here’s an example of a a typical play of mine:
https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=7925192
I’m 45 and blind in one eye and I never pause.
Every day after work I play Beat Saber. Usually for about half an hour–as a warmup–then I’ll play again after dinner for 45 minutes to an hour or so. I’ve been doing this for a little over a year now and I’m still completely addicted to this game, LOL!
As much as I hate Meta Beat Saber on a Quest 2 is fantastic (if you get it modded). One of the mods (BeatLeader) uploads every successful replay (where you beat the map or your previous best score) and you can watch them on the web! It’s the coolest thing! Here’s an entertaining example of me playing a silly Hatsune Miku song with the Faster Song modifier enabled:
https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=7668607
Or if you prefer a more recognizable song, here’s Shut Up and Dance:
https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=8047177
Since I started playing this game I’ve lost 15 pounds and gained a ton of stamina (and some muscle tone). Way more in shape than I used to be. Many days I’ll burn 1200-1500 calories playing!
- •
- en.wikipedia.org
- •
- 1Y
- •
the best browser is the one which suits the best your needs and use
This is objectively false. The best browser is the one that gets the job done and doesn’t have endless absolutely terrible security vulnerabilities (e.g. IE before they switched to Edge which is just Chrome) or intentionally leaks your private information (e.g. Edge leaking every site you visit to Bing and Chrome doing the same but with Google).
Also, from a performance perspective “the best” is obviously objectively measurable and Firefox just took the crown which is what the post is all about. Realistically though both Chrome and Firefox have had completely acceptable levels of performance (imperceptible differences to normal humans) for like a decade. So it’s probably not that big a deal.
A bigger deal for normies using their browser IMHO is memory utilization which is a much bigger factor than, “how fast does the browser load and run HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?” Just ask Google how much more memory efficient Firefox is! LOL
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=firefox+vs+chrome+memory+utilization
Firstly: Firefox can import your Chrome passwords and if you enable/sign up for Firefox Sync (which is better–privacy wise–than your Google account) you’ll be able to use them with Firefox mobile (it’ll sync your settings and bookmarks too, obviously).
Secondly: You can export your logins from Chrome to a .csv file (hamburger menu in the settings… somewhere; I forget, sorry) which can also be imported into Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-login-data-file) and other password managers. I literally just tested importing both Chrome’s and Firefox’s saved logins into a KeePassXC database and it worked fine (it didn’t automatically figure out which field was what though so I had to manually tell it which column was the password, URL, etc but no big).
Firefox also has the same .csv password export feature BTW.
If it runs Windows it’s still garbage.