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Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset
  • They always release their "Creation Kit" which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:

    .

    The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven't done any modding since the Skyrim days).

  • What the heck is a god dang cloud?
  • Stage 2:

    Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you're even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

  • How the far-right gained traction with Europe's youth
  • I think this aspect of far right recruitment is the same everywhere: Wealth disparity and a strong, negative news cycle drive people to anything that claims to be against the established order.

    And despite all of this being a direct result of 40 years of ring wing policies (Reagan, Thatcher, privatization, deregulation, etc.), they successfully pinned it on liberals the the left at large and declared those to be the establishment.

    It is all too easy for someone wanting to rebel against the existing system to fall into the hands of this far right "counter-culture."

  • Tankie try not to sound like a fascist drooling over 'warrior cultures' challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
  • I scrolled across that comment (and it was here on lemmy.world or at least an instance it federates with). The sheer amount of fascist tropes this commenter lines up is surreal.

    I would also like to nominate that tankie for second place who argued themselves into a corner in one of those "dOn't VotE beCaUse gEnoCide" meme posts and stated with utter conviction that he will only be satisfied if the US uses their military to stop Israel. Might end up being the same user, though :)

  • So...
  • I liked that about the comic.

    Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it's not true love. You're not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it's a "failed" relationship.

    The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.

    Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can't stand each other anymore.

  • the fear of missing out a better compression
  • I'm the weird one in the room. I've been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in "best" mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

    zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

  • Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects
  • I liked agile as it was practiced in the "Extreme Programming" days.

    • Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

    • Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

    • Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

    .

    But it's just a corporate buzzword now. "We're agile" often enough means "we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow" or "we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers."

    Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the "project owner") are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

    Maybe we need a new term or an "agility index" to separate the cases of "incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning" from the cases of "project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team." :)

  • Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
  • Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go

    Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don't have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.

    2021 PEW poll showing that 89% of liberals and 24% of conservatives support tuition-free college.

    Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won't roll, after all, liberal means "live and let live."

    As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I'm not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be "the left."

  • Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
  • Thanks for bringing this up, it's really needed.

    Your example is just one of many I've seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

    I don't know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there's no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in "raids" on other instances.

  • I am genuinely confused by hexbear's opinion on the Ukraine war
  • My pet theory/explanation is that, the more people see things go wrong in society (or, rather, believe them to), the more they tend to become contrarians. They look for views and beliefs that are opposite to what people in authority say. It seems to be built into us, like a tribe of stone age people will question their leaders' methods and decisions after a row of bad hunts and then desire to hunt in a new place, at a different time, using different techniques.

    Modern information warfare appears to use that idea centrally. The far right has been indoctrinated to believe that the "establishment" they rebel against is left wing and that a hard turn towards right wing politics is needed. After Trump won in 2016 and they were officially in power, they splintered a bit until they found a new lore: "actually, we're still being ruled by the left, they're the deep state, the cabal, etc." to rekindle the contrarian / siege mentality and come together again.

    I see all that in tankies, too. Society feels like it's going wrong, so they sponge up any reason they see to hate the "establishment," which is where the already running information warfare provides them ample facts to blame liberals and hate western powers, etc.

    Also, on the hostility... yeah. These echo chambers seem to almost intentionally breed a nastiness that shuts down any useful discussion. Try to defuse anger and you're "whiteknighting," try to point out that something decent is good and you're "virtue signaling." When these communities erupt into other spaces, they quickly drive out anyone discussing in good faith. Survival of the nastiest.

  • It’s not just boomers, young people are voting far right too
  • That what I read out of it, too.

    Disillusion with our future is setting in (and to what part it's due to the negative news cycle, the growing gap between rich and poor, social media propaganda or other things can be argued).

    But there was, and is, no large, left movement with an attractive message to pick up those people, and right wingers both own all the big media and have long been conditioned to blame liberals and the left at large for all of their problems.

    During the Occupy Wallstreet days, I had hope, but what once was a movement of angry people with a good cause feels like it has since been replaced by a movement of even angrier people fighting those that want to fix things.

  • Republicans enraged by Biden’s efforts to keep gas prices lower
  • Man, I remember when the "Tea Party" (what became the Freedom Caucus, then MAGA) was laughed out of the room by the vast majority of people, and Sarah Palin, who, it is rumored, can still see Russia from her house in Alaska, was not idolized but ridiculed to the point where movies like "Iron Sky" spoofed her with clueless villain characters. Good times.

  • “NATO is good with computers! WAAAAAAHHHHHH”
  • I assume this is about the physical connections.

    It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.

    It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.

    Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn't find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):

    incomplete crossover points between European internet and Russian internet

  • Why are we wasting our server bandwidth on shit takes?
  • Um, no? You can vote and push for change at the same time.

    Imagine half of the people in the room wants shrimp pizza, which you happen to detest. Yet you're exclusively dunking on and shouting at the mushroom group to keep it shut and stop suggesting mushrooms. Well?

  • Putin starts tactical nuke drills near Ukraine
  • I believe the idea is:

    1. Mention nukes and grab everyone's attention
    2. Run social media campaign ("oh noes, <insert undesirable politician or ideology> is leading us into war with nuclear power, they bad")
    3. Have bought politicians and lobbyists push to reduce sanctions or block additional sanctions
    4. Profit.

    .

    But increasingly, I see step 2 fail and people simply hate the guy more for his destructive megalomania, as they should.

  • Ukraine’s Zelenskyy rejects Macron’s Olympic truce proposal
  • Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:

    • +0 Hours: Shelling stops on both sides, occasional gunfire erupts in places.
    • +1 Hours: Russians rush supplies to their troops.
    • +3 Hours: Russians violate truce and try to gain as much ground as possible in a surprise attack.

    .

    Fool me once...

  • It's okay, tankies love fascism, so they're not put out by the result
  • I wonder what their idea of the outcome is.

    Tankie: "I convinced 20 Democratic Party voters to stay at home (and did the same for 0 Republican Party voters). Wait until Democratic politicians see that more voters favored the far right party. Then they're going to move left and fall on their knees and beg me to forgive them."

    (Cue scene: swastika-adorned tanks rolling past the window)

    "Stupid liberals, unwilling to fight the fascists like us true leftists." (Watches tanks and twiddles thumbs.) (Fetches keyboard.) "Let's tell everyone online that it's their own fault and they deserve this." (Sudden sound of harsh knocking on front door.)

    At best, their actions will "only" cause another grid-locked presidency where progressives can't get their reforms to pass (which will then be used as the reason to abandon the likely last line of non-violent defense against fascists).

  • GitHub-like WebUI for Subversion

    I already fear that this may be a bit too specific since it's a bit of a niche need, but here goes:

    I'm hosting several Subversion repositories for my indie projects. So far, I just did the plumbing by hand and wrote Apache configs (hosting via mod_dav_svn).

    But if I look at all those shiny tools Git users can wield, I really wish for something with a sleek UI and the option to create repositories, manage users and display source and markdown that worked with Subversion.

    I know (and have tried):

    • Gitea - What I want, except Gitea is for... Git and I do Subversion. Gitea manages users, created repositories and displays their contents in a clean, useful way.

    • VisualSVN Server - This would be what I'm looking for (WebUI), but it is Windows-only (I don't get it, who in their right mind hosts development stuff on a Windows clunker?)

    • Redmine - It's a Ruby on Rails project. With the Zenmine theme, it almost looks like GitHub, but Redmine shies away from repository management and focuses more on project/issue management.

    • Trac - A bug tracker with Subversion browser and timeline, written in Python. While aforementioned part is great, it can also (barely) manage users and permissions for a repository using an add-in.

    As well as various abandoned PHP projects with grotesque UIs and which either never fully worked or broke somewhere along the road from PHP 5 to PHP 8.

    Can anyone recommend a decent WebUI for Subversion that would let me create repositories, manage users and view repository contents in the browser? Eye candy preferred, as I'm already doing everything I need via CLI tools and WebSVN.

    -----

    Gentlemen and -women, I have posted this in the hope that someone might know of a niche Subversion UI that I have missed so far. I know everyone means well, but up to here, zero people offered recommendations and all comments either have me to explain why I use Subversion or recommend Git outright

    Why I use Subversion

    I am already using Git where it makes sense, but believe it or not, apart from being a distributed VCS with decent merging, Git plays a weak game, especially in terms of branching, versatility, binary files and external linking.

    I have several use cases, including game development assets weighing in from tens to hundreds of megabytes each, to audio production with 5-channel float64 clips that I store uncompressed and edit / clean incrementally. And I link individual assets, deep in the directory tree, into my projects. Absolutely trivial in Subversion, a complete blocker in Git. Even if Git somehow suddenly could do what I need, I wouldn't want to tackle such a migration for at least a few more years.

    17
    Banding: aom-av1-lavish vs. svt-av1-psy - how to estimate noise level?

    I'm planning to encode some of my blu-ray discs to AV1 with maximum quality in mind. After thinking I had a good set of settings nailed down, I got sensitized to the topic of banding and found that in certain frames, my encodes were suffering from it quite badly.

    I also found the biggest magnet for banding in an animated show: the very first episodes of "The Eminence in Shadow" shows a purple blanket that has crazy banding even at 10-bit with high bit rates.

    Here's aom-av1-lavish, the "opmox mainline merge" branch as of November, 14th, 2023 with --arnr-strength=0 --enable-dnl-denoising=0 --denoise-noise-level=1

    !

    After seeing that another (x265) encode did it much better and even SVT-AV1 with mostly default settings performed well (see further down), I changed to --arnr-strength=1 --enable-dnl-denoising=0 --denoise-noise-level=6 and what a difference:

    !

    Finally, this is the result of SVT-AV1-psy as of January, 22nd, 2024. The settings are --film-grain 6 --film-grain-denoise 0:

    !

    So how does one estimate a video's noise / grain level? Do I just develop a feel for which setting corresponds to what look? That might involve quite a bunch of failed encodes, however.

    3
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)CY
    cygon @lemmy.world
    Posts 2
    Comments 194