A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net

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  • 13 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

    The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

    H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

    It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.





  • JPEG is getting old long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

    However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.






  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.mlThe Future of Odysee
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    2 months ago

    In the comments of that second link you provided, someone made a salient point:

    At the end of the day, it all comes down to content residing on someones hard drive. That will cost, either directly through cloud services, or indirectly by decentralized storage like the libry app where users donate their disk space and bandwidth. It is not clear to me how the new system works, and who carries the cost?

    Odysee’s response was this link, which another commenter then pointed out:

    I love how Arweaves biggest flaw (bandwidth) is only mentioned as a cliff note “Notably absent from Arweave’s formulation of the Kryder+ rate are bandwidth costs. Arweave covers this using a separate set of karma-based incentives – see here.” And the article linked just dodges the actual question at hand by throwing an empty promise to incentivize people to give their bandwidth for “karma”

    So Arweave is literally just Peertube with another brand new crypto on the backend to incentivize people to start using it and ultimately ‘sell’ their hard-drives to the blockchain to be used to host the video content. Otherwise, you need to pay to ‘permanently’ store your content on the blockchain for a baked in 200 years worth of storage time (so, I imagine that will be rather high).

    It should also be noted that in the FAQ regarding what will happen to LBRY Coins once this new crypto replaces it, they simply say “It’ll still be yours to do with as you please!”, I.E, this shit is worthless now since nothing will use it, but hey, it’s your shit, and that counts for something!

    Again, I would highly recommend viewing Folding Ideas video on the subject if you haven’t yet. This is ultimately going to be another thing that makes the creators a tremendous amount of money, but will ultimately crash and burn for everyone else.


  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.mlThe Future of Odysee
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    2 months ago

    So they were bought by Forward Research.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arweave-adds-over-7m-users-140000864.html

    Foward Research is a crypto blockchain company that owns Arweave, which as far as I can tell is trying to incorporate crypto into a cloud data storage service. It’s all very vague, but that’s what I sussed out.

    I wasn’t aware that odysse was originally a crypto video sharing platform, I thought it operated more like YouTube.

    Forward Research also bought solarplex, which they boast as having sold “over 120,000 NFTs”, which tells me all I need to know about their intentions.

    I’d steer way clear of this, nothing good can come of it, and if you have any doubts, watch Folding Ideas NFT video.

    Stick with Peertube.



  • This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

    TL;DW:

    • Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
    • EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
    • EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
    • Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
    • Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
    • Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
    • UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
    • Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
    • No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
    • Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

    This is a simplified version of simplified version.






  • The OG comment is referencing the body of this post, which are stats from the website. The website is using outdated steam stats, the comment is pointing that out.

    The comment you replied to that was pointing that out was not corrolating the steam stats as general linux stats, only pointing out that the linux userbase on steam has grown since those outdated stats.