sp3tr4l
@sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Rumor: GTA Roleplay Server FiveM Victim Of Hostile Takeover - And One Of Rockstar's Own Is Involved 1 week ago:
There is no way to know for certain.
Rockstar almost certainly acquired these idiot clowns because they decided they could make more money by officially/unofficially endorsing and regulating RP servers that fleece people for money with paid memberships tiers and in game item purchases, than they would by suing them all out of existence.
Rockstar very, very easily could have sued them out of existence, and probably put many of them in jail.
There is 0 chance that FiveM devs were not personally enriching themselves in some roundabout manner with their product, before they became official employees.
They very likely got an offer from Rockstar that basically looked like ‘Hey, we know you’re making money off of illegally modifying our product, you can either work for us and make that money for us, or we sue you into an early grave’.
My guess to the future with GTA6 is that if a clear winning group emerges from this current drama shitfest, Rockstar will put them in charge of basically licesensing out a framework for GTA 6 online servers.
Or, if the shitfest is too stupid and obnoxious, they’ll shit can basically everyone involved, maybe keep a few who can actually code decentlt around to work on other parts of the game, and any GTA 6 RP system would have to be built basically from scratch.
… And most of the people trying to build it from scratch would most likely be those people who just got shitcanned, and they would most likely be cease and desist / sued into oblivion.
- Comment on Rumor: GTA Roleplay Server FiveM Victim Of Hostile Takeover - And One Of Rockstar's Own Is Involved 1 week ago:
Not surprising.
If you’ve ever interacted with any of the actual devs or FiveM staff on discord or anything, say you’re looking for actual technical support because their own function calls are incorrectly documented… they’re basically the same as hugely egotistical Gmod RP server devs of yore, happy to powertrip and scam people with reckless abandon, massively overstating their own technical competency and taking any question or criticism as if you’d just personally tied them down to the cuck chair while their gf laughed.
- Comment on A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. 2 weeks ago:
For those in a rush:
Initial paper outlining theorem (2021):
Paper that demonstrates and proves its validity (2025):
I tried a quick search, but I’m not seeing any public implementations that specifically mention or cite ‘Krapavin’ or ‘Tiny Pointers’ anywhere.
- Comment on What really happens inside a dating app. 3 weeks ago:
What do I think about this?
Well, going off of what I’m going to call ‘internal heuristics reinforced by 35 years of raw data’:
The author is very likely female and Chinese.
They use more harsh, accusatory, and direct language when describing men, and they use more soft, explanatory, and indirect language when describing women.
The various grammatical oddities sound extremely similar to ESL, native Mandarin and Cantonese speakers I’ve known personally.
Ok, from my ‘career as a data analyst’ perspective?
AB Testing
…
This is the only actually useful part from a ‘how do you actually make a good dating app’ perspective. It is difficult to AB test the algorithms of the feed because the change usually has an impact on the user that gets a specific variant but also users that he likes that are on any variant. Other than that, you can gain 10 points of retention just with AB testing and finding the best things that work.
It is actually pretty easy to create a dating app that works in terms of retention if you use extensive AB testing.
Yes, yep, AB testing works.
Too bad the vast majority of the analysis is devotes to explaining how things don’t work or aren’t that impactful or at best, prevent retention from falling.
The word ‘retention’ appears 72 times in this post, and that blurb I quoted there is literally the only time it is mentioned within a context of doing something to change the algorithm, the underlying nature of the app, that improves retention, by a specific amount, across the board.
That means AB testing is the actual secret sauce, and well, there aren’t any details because then the sauce wouldn’t be secret any more.
I have some background in economics.
In econ, specifically hedonics, attempting to determine a consumers actual preference for one basket of goods vs another, you’ve got the core concept of cardinal preferences and ordinal preferences.
I’ve also got a background in poli sci.
The same basic concept underlies ranked choice vs first past the post voting.
Long and short of it is: To get a result that does a far better job of actually understanding preferences, and matching them with outcomes… you have to de-abstractify decisions and make people actually think about them.
An example in a dating app would be: If you match on someone who has something you’ve indicated as a red flag, but pass on someone who doesn’t… you tell the user what they did, and ask the user why they did that.
The ‘good’ way to proceed with this would be to inform the user when they are being inconsistent, to actually help them figure out what they actually want, explain their inconsistencies to them, have a way of suggesting
The ‘bad’ way to proceed with this would be just track this kind of ‘hypocrisy’ score in the background, and not help the user become less of a hypocrite. Then, you sprinkle (or firehose!) peoples feeds with hypocrites who have a decent enough chance of matching, but you know have a high likelihood of having a it not working out after some weeks or months, thus creating a perpetual soul grinding machine that keeps you coming back.
- Comment on Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after Meta ends fact-checking 1 month ago:
I nuked my account after Cambridge Analytica.
I assumed this would be the obvious, en masse response to learning, definitively, that FB is absolutely using its algorithms and data to intentionally manipulate society in general.
Nope!
A decade ish later and here we are, society ripping itself apart with neuroses and hatred, apparently just apparently not realizing that the algorithm optimizes toward outrage, that this makes everyone emotionally unstable and believe insane mis and disinfo.
Great work Zuck! Speedrun of destroying the underlying social fabric that allows a functioning democracy to be possible.
Onward to oblivion.
- Comment on Tinder Warns of Declining Revenue While It Rethinks Core App 2 months ago:
Match Group owns:
Match.com PlentyOfFish Tinder Hinge OkCupid
…and many more.
So, no, same company actually, just different products.
- Comment on FBI recommends coming up with a 'secret word or phrase' to make sure your family know you're you and not some hellish AI copycat 2 months ago:
My family gaslit me for decades.
I can only hope someone bothers to harass them with my own voice.
- Comment on AT&T says it won’t build fiber home Internet in half of its wireline footprint 2 months ago:
Rememinder that as of 2015, the US taxpayer has given $400 billion to ISPs/TelCos to improve internet infrastructure, and they … didn’t.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.
Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.
They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…
… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.
And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.
I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
… What?
It… it goes into the company.
theverge.com/…/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-p…
They run an absurdly profitable business.
They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.
That’s after wages.
Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.
The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?
Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?
… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?
… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…
Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.
Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.
Valve’s position allows them to do this.
Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.
As a certain wise old man once said:
“These things, they take time.”
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 months ago:
Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…
This actually is basically how Valve works.
They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.
They are a private company, not public.
That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’
(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and the the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)
(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)
…
They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.
Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, not rushing anything.
A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.
People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 5 months ago:
Thats … amazing.
Reminds me of when someone figured out that a huge part of the reason Halo Infinite takes so long to load and go between various menu screens was something like the game redownloading hundreds or thousands of the same exact image, in very high resolutions… basically instead of just pointing multiple instances of the image being used to a single file and directory, for some reason each distinct usage of this same image had its own unique directory…
Its the kind of oopsie daisy you expect from a first time modder, not some of the most expensive dev teams in the world.
Also along those lines, kind of: BF2042 has had and still does have a fundamental flaw with the engine level code for fucking mouse movement interpolation.
They never fixed it. They admitted it exists in their bug logs, but they never managed to fix one of the most fundamental parts of a shooter game, how aiming itself works.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 5 months ago:
I do not, could you explain it?
It’s been… about half a decade since I last played GTO.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 5 months ago:
Its broken in the sense that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t broken in the sense of oops we accidentally broke something.
They added BattleEye anti-cheat to online, without bothering to support linux.
Even though BattleEye can and does support Proton compatibility, and has for years, the developers of the game have to request or opt-in to this functionality.
But uh, Rockstar didn’t, because they don’t give a shit about linux players.
- Comment on Robot dogs armed with AI-targeting rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation 9 months ago:
Please, give them a mouth with toxin injecting teeth, and I’ll get my flamethrower and play Guy Montag.
- Comment on Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? 9 months ago:
I will have to look into nix more. I remember when it came out, thought it might be neat if it caught on and got developed and supported well, maybe that’s the case these days?
And yeah I would want to keep SteamOS as yeah the whole steam deck control interface, as far as I know, only works on SteamOS, it’d be good for testing and I do like playing games on the thing.
I’ve got the Terabyte OLED version, so I could probably dual boot on that alone fairly fine, but having an SD and an external drive would probably be good ideas too.
- Comment on Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? 9 months ago:
Assuming you meant read only (How would a write only OS or software work lol), you can actually disable the read only nature of the OS and install your own packages.
That being said, yeah, it is a bit of a mess as all of that can be wiped out or thrown into dependency conflict hell following an SteamOS update.
That being said: As someone who is using my SteamOS as my main PC was fucking stolen…
I am both trying to get into game dev and also just far more used to Debian and Debian based OSs.
Trying to get a game engine other than Godot to work on Arch has been an insanity inducing experience, and I’ve found Godot 4 to be insufficient.
Unreal and Unity and 03DE work on debian. They release debian variants.
Sure, there are AUR repos or whatever, but theyre based on many alternative libs that cause things to bug out, and they don’t even actually list all the dependencies, you just have to spend hours and hours googling errors when you try to build, figure out what you are missing, then find the Arch version of that lib, or the AUR version, in which case oh fun more unfully listed dependencies and compatibility errors.
So… yeah basically an actual reason to install another linux OS on the Deck would be if you wanted to do software dev in Linux and don’t want to deal with the tangled rats nest of basically everything that actually works on a debian distro either resulting in you having to rely on slapdash AUR bullshit, or massively space wasting containerized packages.