Poor man’s TOR :).

It’s not completely inconceivable that ISPs using CG-NAT could keep logs that would allow these users to be deanonymized, but it’s an extra step and they might not have enough information between the Reddit and ISP logs to do it. But… they’d have to be talking to the ISPs anyway, and the ISPs will probably cooperate?

There’s surprisingly few standalone email clients for normal people on desktop platforms as far as I know.

There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

Do you get upset everytime you see it?

There’s a few programming languages that aren’t based around English, but they’re pretty rare and I’m not sure many people use them. It’s kind of sad because it makes programming much less accessible if you’re not an English speaker… But it’s also sort of a blessing because it’s easier to understand code you might have to interact with because it’s probably written in an English-ish language with the Roman alphabet, and you’re not stuck trying to read Japanese or Arabic or something to understand a library. I have mixed feelings on it. It’s convenient for me as an English speaker, but it also seems kind of unfortunate. I’ve heard that computer science is a field which is having a pretty big impact on the spread of English in the world, but I haven’t found a citation for that and I’m not sure I believe it.

What does it do on new hardware? Not a lot of people are running normal desktop Linux on phones / tablets, are they? Which, totally cool if it works better on those things… but I guess I’m just surprised by how much hype there is for Wayland when X just works for me and would presumably just work for most people’s use cases. Like… who are all of these people that are emotionally invested in display servers, and what am I missing?

I mean, 20 years ago or whatever there was always the pain of black screens and X configs… but it just kind of works now in my experience?

What’s so much better about Wayland than X? I mean, I’m not really a fan of X and the security nightmare that it is, but as a user it’s all pretty plug and play these days. What does a normal user get out of Wayland? Would they even know they’re using it?

I’d love to try it, but it currently won’t work with some software I use, so I haven’t bothered… And honestly I’m kind of confused about how everybody is talking about how amazing Wayland is (and how it seems to suddenly be the one true path for a bunch of distros) when my only experience with Wayland is people talking about how great it is and then not being able to screenshare or whatever… Which doesn’t make it seem great from the outside? That maybe sounds a bit flippant, but I genuinely don’t understand why “normal” people are so excited? I mean, I can see people caring about features like HDR and maybe that’s easier to build into Wayland than ancient X11, but I’d be more excited about the specific feature than Wayland itself which may make implementing these things easier?

I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call a company with 1000 employees “small”. It’s not the behemoth that something like Google is, but like… that’s a good chunk of people.

Yeah… This maybe isn’t the nicest way to phrase it, but I’ve seen similar situations. Usually people are just kind of talking behind people’s backs, but sometimes it gets nasty :(. Frankly people kind of get bullied all the time everywhere. It’s maybe not as violent as playground bullying but people will be shitty to people at work, school, whatever. Do your best not to be a part of it, try to be self aware if you might hurt somebody else’s feelings, and try to stand up for people.

Huh. I’ve used chirp under Linux before and I just installed it with my package manager. Maybe it wasn’t available on your distro? Then it can get a lot more tricky. The other problem with these things can be permissions… once you have chirp installed maybe you need to add your user to the dial out group in order to be able to use the serial port to flash the radios.

That’s fair, but IRC also tends to leak information about users to everybody. They’re maybe bad in slightly different ways, but frankly if you care about privacy that much you probably shouldn’t use either, at least not with additional protections.

How has fame changed you?

Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.

The ones I do play, I tend to enjoy shooting at monsters more than people these days, but a lot of the ones I enjoy don’t really have a compelling story or campaign to go alongside them.

Yeah, I think I’ve really fallen off of the whole “modern warfare” thing. I’m sure I could enjoy a military shooter just fine still, but it’s not something I seek out because it makes me think too much about scary things that happen in the real world, I guess. I don’t want to be a soldier, I guess.

That culture shaped my personality and as a mild mannered introvert in real life it lets me engage in that hero fantasy without harm to others or myself. I enjoy it and I’ve come to accept it for being that.

Absolutely, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It can be harmless fun and all, but sometimes I wonder why I enjoy this particular kind of power fantasy, and if I really should. It’s a lot easier when it’s all cartoonishly evil stuff, but things that go for more gritty, edgy, and “real” vibes… I dunno. I can still enjoy them, but sometimes I think too much about it and I’m like “I guess this is kind of fucked, huh?”

If you stop to look at it a overwhelming amount of entertainment in general frequently features violence, and I think it’s just baked into our universal human experience. Violence has been a mainstay in human history, and art reflects reality. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about that. In order to maintain my sanity I choose to accept it as a fact of the human condition and, though maybe not revel in it, I will engage that instinct in a safe manner.

Yeah, I think about this a lot actually. One thing that’s kind of interesting to me is that my partner is often okay with violence in films and TV shows, but is generally pretty opposed to it in video games. I guess video game violence is kind of different in some ways, in some sense you’re often committing the acts of violence yourself… And it probably doesn’t help if you’re not engaged with the story, and don’t particularly care for video games in the first place, haha. If you’re more familiar with film and TV you’re probably more okay with it there.

But yeah, so much media is centered around violence… And to be honest, I don’t really think it’s because it’s so central to our lives. I mean, obviously it’s still very much present and is a big deal in many ways, and is maybe something we’re hard wired to find “interesting” in some sense because it has been present throughout our evolutionary history… But in our every day lives I think a lot of us go about our days without seeing much real violence or gore or anything… BUT, violence and death is kind of an excellent motivator and catalyst, which I personally think is a huge reason why it’s a central part of so much media. It’s a lot easier to justify why you’re doing something if it’s life or death, and I think it’s a huge part of why it’s so prevalent in video games too… It’s an easy motivator and easy justification for shooting things yourself. There’s definitely non-violent games, but I think it’s much harder to design instant gratification machines that everybody intrinsically understands the goal of unless it’s motivated by “death” in some sense. I think it’s pretty difficult to design something that has the kind of cadence and feedback of a shooter without violence and without it seeming arbitrary to a lot of people. I think platformers get pretty close, but most aren’t purely about jumping. Maybe rhythm games and sports games too? And there’s been other valiant efforts like Pyre, which I think is super interesting. And of course there’s other kinds of games like city builders and sandboxes and puzzle games and whatnot, but I feel like they have a very different pace and feel… Which is totally valid and valuable too, of course… But can you have something cathartic like a shooter that isn’t one? I mean Portal is kind of interesting in this respect too, because it’s arguably an FPS but very different and (mostly) non-violent.

But yeah, I’m kind of just talking out of my ass… And I feel like I’m starting to sound like a bit of a nut who’s opposed to violence in video games and think it will turn people into murderers or something. I don’t feel that way at all, and I definitely do enjoy my fair share of violent video games… I guess I’m just trying to think of the other facets of life that I value and enjoy, and I’m kind of wondering where the expression of that is in my video games? And I guess I’ve also been thinking of my partner and how I can better share this thing that I enjoy with them… But it’s kind of hard because so many games are centered around violence… And I guess in some sense I’ve also been thinking a bit about what I want to do in this world, and I think maybe I want to do something creative at some point (maybe one day I’ll try putting together a small game or something), and I’ve been thinking a bit about why I would even want to do that, if I want to “say” anything with that piece of work, or if I just want to try to make something that’s “dumb fun”… But I guess in the back of my mind I also have these thoughts that I’d like for it to be something that my partner could also enjoy. Iunno.

And yeah, I’ve enjoyed this too :). Nice talking to ya!

John Romero, though no longer at id, is famously quoted as saying that video game stories are akin to the plot of a porno - it’s expected to be there, but it isn’t expected to be good and it isn’t expected to get in the way of the game itself.

I think this is a Carmack quote? I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Romero felt similarly at the time, but it seems a little less their style.

I don’t think this attitude is wrong necessarily, but it really depends! I think it’s fine to just have fun gameplay and no story, and it’s also fine to focus on story too. I feel like lately, though, when I’ve been trying to think of “games with good stories” I’ve kind of had a hard time thinking of any, or maybe I’m just being too critical? It’s certainly true that stories should be different in different mediums, so maybe what it means to be a good story in a game is very different… Maybe they’re shorter and less complex than novels and part of the story is in how the gameplay makes you feel in conjunction with the plot so maybe thinking of the plot in isolation isn’t very fair to it either…

To be honest I’m real turned around on this stuff lately. I’ve always really liked video games, but a combination of getting older and having more responsibilities and having my values change is making me think a bit more critically about them lately and I’m having more meta thoughts about why I like them (which is maybe a bad thing because it can kind of spoil a thing you love a bit, haha, but I think it’s also good to think about these things on some level). Part of this is because my partner doesn’t really like video games, which is fair… They also don’t really like the violence and stuff, which makes me question this a bit too. To be clear, they’re actually super supportive and encourage me to play more games and stuff… But it still makes me think a bit and it makes me think about what they would like and why I like the games that I like (or why I have enjoyed them in the past). I’ve never been particularly scared of video game violence or anything, but I will admit that upon reflection… I kind of don’t want to shoot a bunch of people? And it kind of makes sense that it’s a popular genre because it’s really well suited to the input methods we have and it’s something that ends up being satisfying… But I don’t like war, and I don’t like violence, so it’s kind of weird to have this be a thing that I do all of the time? Not sure how I feel yet.

Dusk is fucking great, but yeah, story wise it’s kind of nothing, other than some kind of x-filesy weird mystery kind of stuff I guess. But yeah, it doesn’t need a great story.

Honestly… I don’t think Bioshock holds up very well these days. I like it and have enjoyed it, but I think it’s mostly a cool setting and idea and falls really flat if you take that away. The story has some interesting stuff but it’s pretty clunky and just feels a bit clumsy. I still like it, of course, but I’m not sure I’d show it to somebody in order to demonstrate how games have great stories, you know? Also Bioshock Infinite really doesn’t hold up in my opinion.

I thought about New Vegas too. It’s arguably more of an RPG and the open world stuff maybe puts it in a different category altogether. It’s a very interesting way to tell a story, though, especially with the links between the DLCs and stuff. I go back and forth between thinking it’s really well done and kind of overrated, haha. I think the world and factions are interesting, but any individual peace of dialogue or quest isn’t amazing, it’s more how everything fits together in aggregate that makes it interesting. It feels like it’s a somewhat innovative way to tell a story, but not fully perfected and polished yet? And Fallout gameplay is certainly far from perfect, haha. I do keep coming back to it, though… Literally started a new run a few days ago.

Anyway, I feel like I’m coming off too negatively :). These are all great games in their own ways! I’m just putting too much scrutiny on things to my own detriment, haha.

Titanfall 2’s campaign is very good… I’m not sure if I would call it the “single best campaign to be included in a first person shooter ever” and I feel like that might be overselling it a little bit, but maybe not? I think the main thing that gives me pause is that while it’s great, it still feels a little weirdly like it’s tacked onto a multiplayer game (I think it’s the fact that there’s kind of a huge selection of weapons to the point that it’s a little hard to keep track of and stuff), and I didn’t think the story was all that interesting.

That said… If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m not really sure what campaign I would consider to be better, and Titanfall 2 has at least one very high point! The story isn’t particularly amazing, but I’m not sure if any first person shooter has a particularly fantastic story… Hell, the more I think about it lately the less sure I am that any game has a particularly good story (though maybe “video game story” is just kind of its own category and can’t really be compared to novels or anything else).

I think Half-Life 2 and its episodes are what I think of most immediately when I think of “best single player FPS campaign” and I feel like the lore in Half-Life has a bit of a more interesting mysterious vibe to it… But there’s sort of not much to the story either (kind of intentionally, I guess). I’d also be unsurprised if somebody thought Titanfall 2 was better than Half-Life 2.

In sum… HMMMM. Food for thought! Saying Titanfall 2 has the best single player campaign in a FPS feels wrong to me… but I’m actually not sure I disagree with that take. I think lately I’ve also been having a hard time enjoying first person shooters too. I like them, but I guess the violence is starting to seem kind of dull these days :/.

Oh, okay. Not sure if you want an explanation, but it’s here if you want!

The kernel is kind of the part of the operating system that glues everything together. It provides common interfaces for accessing hardware, provides a library of useful functions to programs, and manages running all of your programs at the same time (like, you know how you can have more programs running than you have CPU cores? The kernel is responsible for scheduling when each program gets to execute instructions on the CPU and stuff).

A binary blob is just what we call it when some piece of software (in this case a driver), is only available in the executable binary format. No source code available, so it’s effectively a black box unless you make a substantial effort to reverse engineer it.

An API is an “application programming interface” which is more or less just a library of functions to do stuff. So if the interface for graphics drivers to talk to the kernel changes or something the old binary version of the driver may not work with newer kernel, and because it’s a binary blob nobody can update it except Nvidia.

There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).

The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).

Other people have mentioned it a bit, but a huge thing in my opinion is just support for newer kernels. I held on to a GTX 570 for a looong time because it worked just fine for everything I wanted to play, but I was kind of upset because 1) it never got the Vulkan support Nvidia promised at one point, and 2) eventually the Nvidia binary blob driver stopped supporting it, and eventually the old binary blob no longer ran on newer kernels due to changing APIs. Open source drivers make it a lot easier for somebody to support the hardware if they care about it enough for a very long time. This is one of the main reasons why I kind of refuse to buy an Nvidia GPU now. I just wish GPGPU support was better on AMD platforms (though this seems to be improving?)

I kind of feel like “untyped” is a term that doesn’t really have a proper definition right now. As far as I can tell when people say “untyped” they usually mean it as a synonym for whatever they consider “dynamically typed” to mean (which also seems to vary a bit from person to person, haha). Sometimes people say assembly is untyped exactly for this reason, but you could also consider it to have one type “bits” and all of the operations just do things on bits (although, arguably different sized registers have different types). Similarly, people sometimes consider “dynamically typed languages” to just be “unityped” (maybe monotyped is more easily distinguished from untyped, haha) languages at their core, and if you squint you can just think of the dynamic type checks as a kind of pattern matching on a giant sum type.

In some sense values always have types because you could always classify them into types externally, and you could even consider a value to be a member of multiple types (often programming languages with type systems don’t allow this and force unique types for every value). Because you could always classify values under a type it feels kind of weird to refer to languages as being “untyped”, but it’s also kind of weird to refer to a language as “typed” when there isn’t really any meaningful typing information and there’s no type system checking the “types” of values. Types sort of always exist, but also sort of only exist when you actually make the distinctions and have something that you call a “type system”… In some sense the distinction between static and dynamic typing is sort of an arbitrary implementation detail too (though, of course, it has impacts on the experience of programming, and the language design makes a bit of a difference in terms of what’s decidable :) (and obviously the type system can determine what programs you consider to be “valid”)… But you can absolutely have a mix of static type checking and dynamic typing, for instance… It’s all a little more wishy washy than people tend to think in my opinion).