• 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle

  • The original PS1 controller didn’t have joysticks, and when it did, the position sucked for larger hands. I have always preferred the XBox layout.

    Right. I meant the second PS1 controller, not the original one. The design changed over the years, but the general specs stayed as the baseline of controllers.

    The XBox layout with its six face buttons did not stick, and the XBox 360 conformed with Sony’s design of four face buttons and two triggers. Which makes more sense for shooters (since you have more buttons while keeping your thumb on the right thumbstick)


  • The entire industry has agreed on a de-facto standard for controllers, which is pretty much the PS1 controller:

    • Two clickable thumbsticks
    • Four face buttons
    • D-pad
    • Four triggers
    • Two menu buttons
    • The only thing the PS1 didn’t have (but games can’t use it, so maybe it doesn’t count?) - a button for showing the platform’s menu

    You can add things on top of that (trackpads, gyros, making some of these digital buttons analog), but if you don’t have that - your controller won’t work for games that expect these inputs to be available.

    If I had to put a date on when this became the established standard, I’d say 2005 or 2006 - the years when the XBox 360 and the PS3 were released, since both consoles had these capabilities (Nintendo kept doing its own thing, and only supported this standard starting with the Wii U). So when the Steam controller was released in 2015 - this standard was already established, controllers for PC made sure to support it - and even PC games stuck to it.

    This is why I think the Steam Controller failed - you had to map it. You couldn’t use it like you would a standard controller even if the game was made for standard controllers.









  • I like the description by a Finn who said: Rust is like a car with automatic, while in C (or Zig) you need to change the gears.

    I don’t think this metaphor is correct. The automatic gear’s analogy would be the Garbage Collector, which almost every mainstream language has. Rust’s memory management, in comparison, is still manual. Maybe not as manual as C or Zig - but I’d say about as manual as C++. The difference is not that it has some weird gear-changing (memory cleanup) scheme that does not require human intervention - it’s that it yells at you when you don’t do the regular gear changing (memory management) properly.










  • The best solution I found for the Paradox of Tolerance (or, more accurately, for a bigger class of problems that contain that problem) is https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for-the-short-end-of-a-tradeoff/

    The gist of it is that we decide on the following maxim: in conflicts of interest we should favor that cannot easily back off over the side who can.

    For example - we want to tolerate a black person existing and we also want to tolerate[1] a racist person being racist. These two toleration are conflicting. The black person can’t stop being black - they were born that way - but the racist person can choose to stop being racist. So we favor the black person’s existence, and do not tolerate the racist person’s racism.

    This maxim is not perfect, of course. It does not apply to all cases, and it does leave up to debate the question of who is forced into the conflict and who is doing it out of choice (e.g. - a conservative may claim that LBGT people are willingly choosing to be so while they are forced, by word of God, to hate them). But I still think it’s an improvement:

    1. It’s morally arguable. As long as we don’t go into the details, it’s easy to defend as a principle.
    2. The question of who if forced into the conflict and who is willingly entering it can be discussed more objectively than the question of what should be tolerated and what shouldn’t (I’m not saying it’s always easy to agree - just that the discussion is more objective)
    3. Even in cases where both sides are forced or cases where both sides are willing, looking at it through the lens of this maxim allows to point at the true perpetrators and/or the true victims, instead of arbitrarily picking one side to blindly side with.

    1. You may argue that we should not tolerate racism at all to begin with, to which I’d say the reason we should not tolerate racism is that there are people who get hurt from it, which is what this maxim is all about. ↩︎