• 1 Post
  • 377 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

    Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

    But…

    spoiler

    You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.

    Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.


  • I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

    There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

    There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

    There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

    And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

    Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.




  • Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

    SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

    You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

    It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

    You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

    It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

    You can do transactions.

    There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.


  • Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

    It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

    But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.


  • I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

    • Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
    • Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
    • The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
    • Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
    • The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
    • Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

    It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

    I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open






  • Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

    Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

    I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

    Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

    I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

    Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

    My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.






  • Depends on how strange and impactful their choice is.

    If it’s something that I think should be in the style guide, I’d promise try to achieve consensus. I’d prefer not merging in the dubious code because then other people may take it as precedent.

    One guy really wanted to write his code differently than the existing code and how others were doing it. It kind of sucked. Not that his way was bad, but no one else on the team subjectively liked it. I relented and let it go, and then had to deal with that unpleasant code for months. Eventually he moved on and a lot of that code got replaced. I retrospect I would have preferred if we had somehow convinced him to keep in the style we preferred. I’m sure he wasn’t happy that the rest of the team wasn’t keen on his style choices.

    If it’s just a little weird, mention it as a non blocking comment. Like one guy would have weird line breaks in his longer comments. It technically followed the guide (under max line length) but it was weird. We asked him to stop, he said ok, no problem. But I didn’t block a merge over it.