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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s a silly flag to use as it only works when running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows, and if you’re compiling from source, you should also have the option to just build a 64-bit binary in the first place. It made a degree of sense years ago when people actually used 32-bit Windows sometimes (which was usually just down to OEMs installing the wrong version on prebuilt PCs could have supported 64-bit) if you really wanted to only have one binary or you consumed a precompiled third party library and had to match its architecture.





  • NFTs, when implemented properly, would be an item tracked on a blockchain with a link to an asset backed by IPFS, plus some kind of copyright notice granting whoever owned the NFT a copyright licence to do stuff with the asset.

    People see IPFS mentioned in the same context as NFTs, and assume it’s a scam. People have seen memes about NFTs just being an expensive hyperlink that can go down at any time, so think IPFS can go down at any time. People have seen twitter meltdowns from people who’ve bought NFTs and then lost access when the previous owner stopped adding redundancy to the IPFS file because the new owner was a moron who didn’t know they were responsible for adding redundancy to the files they cared about and had spent their life savings on a esoteric way of getting a commercial copyright licence to something they didn’t need a commercial copyright licence to without knowing that’s what they were buying.

    It’s basically just down to NFTs being the thing that made most people who’ve heard of IPFS hear of it.






  • They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d’être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn’t tied to the store and did improve even though it’s barely used.


  • They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn’t happen until the time of day you’re least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you’re using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that’s not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don’t want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they’re doing from users who don’t so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.







  • It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

    The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

    Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.