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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Retro is a good starting point. You can store just about every NES game ever released in less than a GB, and the SNES isn’t that much bigger. Once you get into the 3D era you might have to be a little more selective, but you could still fit a lot of early 3D games in there.

    Another way to economize space would be video game mods. Since many mods reuse the same models and textures to make a new game, you could multiply the amount of content you get per MB that way. And there are a ton of Half Life 1 mods, Thief mods, and Doom WADs out there. Gmod can run over LAN, and there’s an absolute ton of maps and game modes for that.

    Finally, there are some more modern games that are remarkably small. Animal Well is only 35 MB. Gloomwood is only 2.07 GB, comparable to the size of its inspiration Thief (1998), though Gloomwood is unfinished at the moment and will probably be bigger once it’s out of early access. Shadows of Doubt is 1.31 GB. Lethal Company weighs in at 1.07 GB and can apparently be made to work over LAN. ADACA at 2.44 GB is actually smaller than its inspirations Half Life 2 and STALKER, probably by dint of having only vertex colors and no textures.




  • Nah,

    If I walk up to you on the street and tell you to hand over your money or I’ll kill you, that’s enough to land me jail. Its maybe even enough for you to be justified in punching me in self defense, if you feared for your life and there was no other way you could ensure your safety.

    But suddenly if I say I want to put a million people in a gas chamber that’s A-OK? Suddenly no one can punch back or else they’re “just as bad”? Suddenly the lines are super blurry and the slopes are super slippery and its absolutely impossible to tell what a threat of violence is.

    Its a crime to say you’ll kill one person, its your right to say you’ll kill a million.





  • I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public

    There’s no ‘in theory’ about it.

    I’ve actually had an extension I was using be revealed as spyware (it was hoverzoom, I immediately switched to an alternative afterward).

    I don’t read every line of every piece of software I use because that would be impossible, but I do actually look at some of it and modify it to suit my needs. It was because there are many thousands of people like me that do this that the problem in hoverzoom was caught. It’s been ten years, so I don’t have the best memory of the event, but I think it only took a few days to catch it as well, despite the fact that the offending code was left out of the GitHub repo and was only in the compiled extension.

    The state of open source isn’t perfect (not everything has reproducible builds yet) but in general I ‘trust’ that every other programmer in existence isn’t in on a conspiracy to screw me over specifically.




  • Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

    Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn’t have as much global warming denialism.

    Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn’t come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

    But I think you’re right though. I’ve given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it’s clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it’s better to use an electric car if they’re not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it’s better to be vaccinated if they’re not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they’re unwilling to understand what federation even is?


  • The first STALKER game. Near the beginning when I had hardly any ammo.

    I saw a pack of feral dogs in the distance and while they didn’t sound friendly I didn’t know whether they would be hostile or how close I could get before they would aggro. Since I had so little ammo I resolved to not take any shots unless they got close.

    Well, one of them did start running towards me, but before it got that close it cut off and ran away at a 90° angle. Then another, and another did the same thing. “Maybe they’re not hostile?” I thought to myself, “Do they just run around randomly?”.

    Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.