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

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  • A big part of the reason was that Facebook offered game studios a big upfront sum if they made their games work on whatever headset they were selling at the time in standalone mode with no major caveats. The headset only had an anemic mobile GPU, so was only capable of as much as mobile games were doing at the time. A bunch of studios took them up on this offer, and cut back their projects’ scope to be viable under the hardware constraints, so nearly everything that got made was gimmicky mobile-style minigames, and obviously that’s not what makes people want to drop hundreds of dollars on hardware, as they can get their fill by borrowing someone else’s headset for an hour.

    Mobile GPUs have improved, so standalone headsets aren’t as terrible now, but we missed the expensive toy for enthusiasts and arcades phase and soured most people’s opinions by making their first VR experience shovelware.



  • It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.





  • You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

    The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.








  • 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.



  • If past support questions showed up in searches, then more users would be able to help themselves and would never need to ask for support, so it wouldn’t matter as much what platform it happened on.

    Personally, I think it would be good if support discords were all bridged to matrix spaces (currently doable, but matrix needs locking down more than discord to stop spam as the tools to prevent and remove it are worse) and the matrix history was archived somewhere search engines could index it like mailing list archives are (currently not doable). That approach would let users use what they want without forcing anyone else to, and keeps self help as easy as it was in the days of forums.


  • Desktop mail clients all seem to be dire, but Mail for Windows 10 seemed to suck a lot less than anything else. I, too, am a victim of it not noticing new mail for a couple of hours after it’s sent unless I explicitly refresh it, despite it being set to get new mail on push, but I’d still rather use it over Thunderbird, which I tried years ago, and tried again when they started warning about forcing Outlook onto people. Unfortunately, it looks like Mozilla decided that there were a non-zero number of good things about Outlook, and made a clone of it, as it’s got basically all the things I hate about Outlook.