Very true, I would do the same and feel my stomach drop farther each time.

Hmmm command not found, let me just try the same command a couple more times, this time it will work right?

In IT teaching users to actually read and understand errors is always an uphill battle.

If you are statically charged and you touch the bare PCB, you will do damage. Having a case prevents you from touching the PCB directly and a metal grounded case will also allow you to discharge without damage.

No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.

So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.

In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.

And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.

Nope that’s not necessary at all, the client experience can be the same as it’s always been. See my other response for what I was thinking of.

Also, this doesn’t work very well in the current YT implementation. If you skip around a video with ads, sometime you’ll get ads even though you’ve just watched a pre-roll for example.

Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.

I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.

Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.

Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.

It has Blast Processing!

Oncoming drivers? I’m getting blasted by “cars” behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It’s getting ridiculous out there.

Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.

The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.

Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.

Hello pretty lady bobs or vagine

Windows 11 has changed this, many many people now warn other people about not using Windows 11 because it is such shit. Doesn’t matter what you run, just don’t run Windows 11.

Nothing, Nintendo can wipe it at any moment. The dev will probably not get sued if he removes the game at the first request and since he hasn’t monetized it in any way. But if Nintendo feels like it he can definitely get sued.

We can hope Nintendo let it be, but in the past they’ve killed many fangames like this one. Like the 2D OOT which was very good but got wiped by Nintendo.

“incorrect” “better”

Make it make sense

What do you mean by security of the docker container? Security from who?

Yeah this is the biggest issue.

The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.

Yeah but publishing is still work though. It’s become much easier to self publish on Steam as a small developer, but there is still value in having a professional publisher. It’s hard to say how much value and sometimes the publisher takes up more than their fair share, but it’s not like zero value either.

Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn’t advanced at all, it’s actually very simple. And it can’t be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.

Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn’t matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.

Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.

Upscaling isn’t like that, it’s a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren’t bad either. That’s why something like DLSS doesn’t just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.

Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we’re playing games our brains aren’t looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won’t even notice the difference. So it’s a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.

There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there’s also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn’t work well and just makes the game feel like it’s ghosting and smearing.

But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.

The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn’t a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.

My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.

Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn’t really show the difference anyways.