Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gaming 2024 2 weeks ago:
If you’re getting back pain from an office chair then your arse is likely too far forward when you’re sitting and you’re putting pressure on your spine due it being at an angle other than 90 degrees from the seat, or your table is too low, lowering your arms, so you’re bending forward.
You’re suppose to feel your arse pushing against the back of the chair not leaving enough of a hole between the chair and your lower back that you can fit an arm in it, and when your arms are resting on the table (which they should be pretty much all the time if your keyboard and mouse are sufficiently forward) you should feel no pressure either downwards or upwards on your shoulders
I’ve been coding for over 3 decades, often for massive long hours (to the point that by the age of 17 I had RSI due to how my wrists were resting at the edge of the table and some years later when already doing it professionally went to the doctor with chest pain - which I feared were due to a hearth condition - which turned out to be work posture related) and at some point in my mid 20s I moved to The Netherlands and to a company which had its own Ergonomics Consultant (this was back in the peak of the 90s Tech boom so there was lots of money sloshing around) who would come around when you joined and adjust everything for you (they even had tables with adjustable height) and explain you all about the correct work posture.
Been following that advice and haven’t had posture related problems since then whilst always using pretty standard office chairs (always with adjustable height, tough).
I have however seen plenty of people doing the lazy (and stupid) posture of being all the way forward on their chair and quite a lot with arms too low or too high (which is more understandable since most cheap office tables don’t have adjustable height).
- Comment on Valve still waiting on a 'generational leap' for Steam Deck 2 - but it's coming 2 weeks ago:
It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).
Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.
Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.
You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the data space which is the game level it’s still but a fraction of the data out there in the corporate space out there, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space).
Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements of immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.
Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.
Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from a one or two dollar cents to, at most, a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tends of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).
Total cost was about $170.
The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.
You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.
It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.
- Comment on There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple. 1 month ago:
Playing Accounting Tycoon on the Steam Deck.
What’s there not to like?!
- Comment on Star Wars Outlaws Is A Crappy Masterpiece 1 month ago:
Well, it’s like this: games are not made by just one person and whilst it seems their art direction for this game is competent, it also seems their game design is not.
Maybe it’s something to do with the MBA CxOs of many of these “top” game makers nowadays neither being nor ever having been gamers, but they can, just like most people, look at something and think it’s pretty (or not), with the end result that they’re putting more money into and hiring better people on that which they can judge - the visual side of things - rather than on that which they cannot - the gameplay side of things.
Further, nowadays it still does make a difference for sales how good the game looks on the pictures and short videos customers see on whichever online stores they use to buy their game, something that also pushes towards focusing on looks more than the rest.
- Comment on this AI thing 10 months ago:
TL;DR: LLMs are like the perfect politician when it comes to output language that makes them “sound” knowledgeable without being so.
The problem is that it can be stupid whilst sounding smart.
When we have little or no expertise on a subject matter, we humans use lots of language cues to try and determine the trustworthiness of a source when they tell us something in an area we do not know enough to judge: basically because we don’t know enough about the actual subject being discussed, we try and figure out from the way others present things in general, if the person on the other side knows what they’re talking about.
When one goes to live in a different country it often becomes noticeable that we ourselves are doing it because the language and cultural cues for a knowledgeable person from a certain area, are often different in different cultural environments - IMHO, our guesswork “trick” was just reading the manners commonly associated with certain educational tracks or professional occupations and some sometimes and in some domains those change from country to country.
We also use more generic kinds of cues to determine trustworthiness on that subject, such as how assured and confident somebody sounds when talking about something.
Anyways, this kind of things is often abused by politicians to project an image of being knowledgeable about something when they’re not, so as to get people to trust them and believe they’re well informed decision makers.
As it so happens, LLMs, being at their core complex language imitation systems, are often better than politicians at outputting just the right language to get us to misevaluate their output as from a knowledgeable source, which is how so many people think they’re General Artificial Intelligence (those people confuse what their own internal shortcuts to evaluate know-how of the source of a piece of text tells them with a proper measurement of cognitive intelligence).
- Comment on Air: Where did that bring you? Back to me. 11 months ago:
As I pointed out further down in my comment, solids and liquids have a much higher heat capacity than air (or in other words, they can absorb a lot more heat before they warm up), so most of the heat dissipated to the river would end up stored in the Earth’s Crust and Oceans and very little of it in the Air.
- Comment on Air: Where did that bring you? Back to me. 11 months ago:
It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it’s not at all equivalent to air cooling?
Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher mass) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth’s crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.
- Comment on Pavlov's conditioning 11 months ago:
Cunning disguises!
- Comment on Bethesda Is Responding to Negative Reviews of Starfield on Steam 11 months ago:
Our survey of shit-enjoying-customers proves that more than 99% of them like our cake.