Mikina

joined 2 years ago
[–] Mikina@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Hmm, you are right, replacing gender with race does make a good point I didn't realize. "I want to be able to choose a white driver because I wouldn't feel safe with a driver of different race" is basically the same point as with gender, but sounds way more wrong and it shows pretty well why is the whole idea a bad one.

At least I'm struggling to find any arguments for the gender version (which is not a bad thing, mind you), if I take this race example into account. You are right that way more rigorous screening of drivers with 0-strike policy would be a lot better than this.

In general this might work for a lot of similar situations, treating gender as a race. I'll keep that in mind, because it makes sense and I never really though about it that way. Thanks!

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.

I wouldn't call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn't work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it's more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It's not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.

But, it's one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I've been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.

If I stopped playing, I'd give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we're mostly used to. She doesn't really play other games. So far, it's still worth it, but I'm really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I'm basically held hostage.

I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won't get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It's a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it's extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.

Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could've been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there's reskinned content that's heavily time-gated, and it just screams "low effort".

Do yourself a favor and don't think about giving Blizzard money.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The major advantage of Matrix (not sure if DeltaChat can do the same) is the support for a lot of bridges, and how easily can you host it.

Matrix has a really good and robust ansible project, with which you can set up your own sever in like an hour, assuming you have a place where to host it (I use Hetzner for like 7$ a month) and a domain. Adding bridges and configuring the ansible only needed like changing 5 config lines at most, and it's very well documented. It's also super easy to maintain, I "just update" every few weeks and it's so robustly written, that it lets me know what changed and what config I need to update. I never had an issue with it in the past two or three years I've been using it.

And then the bridges - I did not need to convince others to switch, becuase I run Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger bridges on my Matrix server, which does bridge all of the apps into my Matrix server. Sure, they still get your conversations data, but at least you don't have to have their spyware installed on your phone/PC and have it all consolidated into one Matrix app. I can also slowly convince people to switch to the more secure messengers like Signal, but don't have to drop contact if they decide not to.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

That doesn't make any sense. Can male strippers sue that there's not as big demand for them as there is for female strippers? I don't think so. (This is just a metaphor, I have no idea how big the male stripper business is, but that's not the point, I'm sure you could come up with a similar example where gender is an advantage, becasue there's simply smaller demand for the other gender).

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 4 points 1 month ago (7 children)

That's not the point, though.

I understand and support there being an option for woman-only drivers. It's unfortunte that it's required, but women has to deal with a lot of harrasment and I don't see a reason why not provide a safer option for them. (I'm not implying that creep women exist, or that men don't have to deal with similar problems, but it's simply way less common).

I don't agree with this lawsuit, but adding a men-only option would solve the issue from legal standpoint. You are not giving someone advantage over their gender, both have the same options, and it's up to the customer/market to decide which one they preffer. The people suing Lyft for providing an option that's unfortunately required because women have to deal with a lot of creeps can get fucked, and this is the best way how to do it.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

I second this. I only started slowly switching to nvim few months ago, and I already can feel slightly annoyed when I have to take off my hands of the keyboard to reach for a mouse, or when I'm editting a text in i.e a browser, want to make an edit few words back, and I have to spam keys like a madman instead of just jumping where I need to be.

It's addicting and extremely comfortable, having a good keyboard navigation controls.

I really need to look into tiled window managers and a browser.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I do also like all the alt and ctrl combinations with arrow keys to move lines, blocks and jump over words.

That's what I love the most about VIM, that it has dozen little tricks like these. Need to jump over a word? Jump to next occurance of letter L? Jump five words? Jump to second parameter of a function definition? Jump to matching bracket? There's a motion for all of that, and more. Including "go to definition" or "go to references", if you set up your vim correctly.

I don’t even know where to start to make vim or neovim do all that.

What I did was simply install IdeaVIM into my Rider, so I can start learning the motions while also keep the features of the IDE I'm used to, but also more importantly installed LazyVim, which is a pre-made config for nvim that can do most of that by default, or has a simple addon menu (LazyExtras) that automatically download and install plugins relevant for a language you are working on. I.e I need to work in Zig, I just open LazyExtras menu, find zig-lang, and it install LSP, debugger, linter, etc that's specific for that language.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don't think there's any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the "testcase replay gruntwork" to a script instead of a human.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There's a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you're at all interested in QA.

It has nothing to do with AI, it's just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It's definitely something I'd love to have implemented in the games I'm working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it's not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.

However, I don't think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn't match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won't be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.

Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an "AI" to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Large companies probably do that anyway.

Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it's a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don't know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that's hard to properly catch in testing, since there's quite a lot of variables.

But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn't available by design in the Remix, there's just no excuse. They either just don't give a fuck about an issue that's literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate (while also being pretty easy to fix), or no one ever tested it even once. And it's not just some random sidequest, it's literally the main class campaign, one of the main features of the expansion.

As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can't imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That's something you catch immediately. Hell, you don't even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

There are some ways how to get around NAC. If it's older 802.1x, you can use https://github.com/s0lst1c3/silentbridge, but what usually works for us is simply cloning the printer MAC, because older printers can't do authentication and rely on MAC whitelisting.

Making a MITM device that just clones the MAC when you plug it between the printer and the network isn't that difficult.

But I agree, NAC is important!

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It depends on how well segmented is their network, but all you might need for that is a Raspbery PI with ethernet and GSM.

I've done some engagements where we sent someone into the company to get in as an air conditioning tech, and when they got in he planted that device between a printer and the network. It was set up to forward all traffic, but also allowed us to connect through GSM and get into the network.

It takes like a few seconds to plant it.

Or if it's really bad, then you might be able to reach it from the WiFi.

view more: ‹ prev next ›