Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

  • 4 Posts
  • 606 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Even then, I think “check nearby people for what they use” shouldn’t be underestimated. Of course you wouldn’t tell them to use Neon itself, but if they’re using Kubuntu you’d probably be abler to help them than if they were to use, say, Mint, right?

    My point is, that people underestimate the power of offline help, and having acquaintances who know the system well enough to help you out. And that matters a lot when picking your starting distro.




  • TL;DW: an extremely convoluted explanation of the optimal strategy for Guess Who.

    Let’s call

    • “pool” - the number of characters a player did not rule out as not being the right character. For example, if there are 20 chars and you ruled 8 out, then your pool is 12. Your pool is “a”, your opponent’s pool is “b”.
    • “bid” - the number of characters in the pool that a question applies to. For example, if your pool is 12, you ask “do they have a beard?”, and there are 4 bearded characters there, then the bid is 4. And if your opponent asks “does he look like a bitch?”, whatever you do, do not include Marsellus Wallace into the bid.

    So. If I got this right, your bid should be either a/2 or b-1, whichever is the smallest. That’s it.







  • I’m aware that compression rates are a trade-off between space and processing time, and that there’s some balance to be had. However, I don’t see this balance from plenty commercial games; what I see instead is disregard.

    Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

    • to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
    • to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

    FitGirl will consistently pick the later option. And it would be fine if devs picked the former, or a middle ground… but they don’t. Instead, often you get a 10 GiB file that takes 10 min to unpack, the worst of both worlds.

    And it isn’t just a matter of the compression algorithm. The developers also have the freedom to choose how they split files; but they often create 9001 files the size of an ant, that is going to hurt decompression times. (Paradox Interactive, I’m looking at you.)

    Tagging @[email protected], as it addresses what they said too.