Rose here. Also @umbraroze for non-kbin stuff.

  • 2 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•What game do you recommend someone who likes the mechanics but not the setting of Baldur's Gate 3?
    16·
    8 months ago

    I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).

    The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don’t need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)

    However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There’s loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They’re currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn’t have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.

    Oh and it’s a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol’ potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)

  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•The rise and fall of robots.txt: As unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
    55·
    8 months ago

    Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

    For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

    Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

    Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoProgramming@programming.dev•Do any of you program on non-US keyboard layouts?
    1·
    9 months ago

    I’m using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

    I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it’s a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

    Only thing that’s mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it’s shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren’t that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I’m particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don’t mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•Russia bans anti-war candidate from challenging Putin
    282·
    10 months ago

    Reporter: “Mr. Putin, how is it possible that you got 132% of the vote?”
    Putin: “It is merely the byproduct of our superiour domestic mathematical sciences. The numbers are simply greater than the ones produced by foreign-made axioms. Do think of all of the great achievements our mathematicians have done over centuries, such as proving the Poincaré conjecture.”
    Reporter: (gasp) “Your ballot results were tabulated by Grigori Perelman?”
    Putin: “No, we looked at his qualifications but we figured he was out of our reach, unfortunately. We had the results tabulated by some other weird mathematician with a massive case of cabin fever. We saved a lot of taxpayer money this way.”

  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
    231·
    10 months ago

    Yeah, basically unsubbed from AvE over this too.

    I can’t remember who this was, but there was another engineering YouTuber who, during the pandemic, basically twittered about being frustrated with the lockdowns from business perspective and whingled about being scared talking about his political beliefs because apparently being anything anything right of a model leftist is a crucifiable offence in the bird site, according to him. And how the horse paste actually works. I was like “…oh shit, maybe this dude is a magahatter?”

  • umbraroze@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
    109·
    10 months ago

    I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I’ve been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can’t remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like “yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too”.

    …and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can’t forget the plagiarism thing. …I was like, “oh this all just makes sense now.”