• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Have you ever made a strategic play in a game so good it made you feel kindof bad?
    17·
    5 days ago

    I think I’m about to take liberties with the term “strategic play.” But I’ll tell this regardless.

    I have a friend who is only hyper competitive when playing games, especially board games. In the moment, he wants to win so badly that he will do anything to win. He manipulates, gaslights, he’s dangerously intelligent and he’s good at making it seem like he’s just playing casually. And then once the game is over? He doesn’t care at all whether he won or lost. It’s infuriating sometimes.

    Thanks to also being an extremely competitive person, I saw through it pretty quickly the first few games I ever played with him. But nobody else does. It seemed like nobody ever tried to win by comparison. So when he and I are in the same game, I know I’m going to lose. And he’ll use the other people at the table even if I can see it happening. Even if I made comments about it mid-game, nobody would believe me.

    So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game. Instead, I turned him into a meme. When he ever looked like he was behind, and someone noticed, I’d say in a light-hearted conspiratorial way, “[his name] is always ahead.” Repeated it whenever he would take the lead and eventually when he won the game. “You see? [His name] is always ahead.”

    It caught like wildfire. Our other friends started using the catchphrase, even in games where I wasn’t there. People started using attack cards on him more often. They’d be less friendly with him about trading. People would snub him even when he was so far behind there was no catching up. The day I realized how much it got to him, was one day he told me how much that phrase impacted his ability to play games with friends. It ruined a lot of his fun. Sometimes new friends who didn’t even play with us that often would use it. I didn’t realize how much damage it caused. All I wanted was for people to be more wary of his manipulation tactics. But instead I took something fun from a good friend and made it miserable.

    So I haven’t said it for years since. But our other friends still remember and will say the phrase from time to time. He’s always ahead.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•Let's do micro service
    8·
    6 months ago

    I don’t disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.

    The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.

    Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn’t break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we’re not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.

    When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you’re fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it’s equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

    I’ve done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn’t anymore.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.world•Either ya understand why most women pick the 🐻 or you are the 🐻.
    5414·
    6 months ago

    Guys… This is not a complicated discussion. I’m a trans woman. I’ve been the man. And now I’ve been the woman. I’m telling you without question I’m picking the fucking bear. Men are scary motherfuckers. A sizeable number of you are cruel, calculating, and downright uncaring. If you’re debating women about why they’d pick a potentially dangerous animal to be alone with in the woods instead of you, you have entirely missed the point.

    Go talk to every woman you know in your social circles and in your family, and ask them if they have been assaulted or sexually assaulted by men. The number of them that says yes to that question is going to be depressing. Some of them might even confide in you that they’ve been raped. My own sister didn’t tell me until I asked her why she was so upset with my brother one time. She had recently been raped by a boyfriend and when men got angry around her she’d flip out. Those acts, when inflicted on you, poison your default view of your fellow man. If you can’t imagine a man being more dangerous than a bear, then you’ve never had to.

    A bear can’t break my trust. A bear can’t gaslight me into thinking all the shitty things he does are because he loves me. And if I told someone I got attacked by a bear, at least they’d believe me. They wouldn’t need to bring out a bear assault kit to prove it. The bear is predictable. Men are not.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoGames@sh.itjust.works•Roleplaying evil charactersEnglish
    32·
    7 months ago

    I don’t know how seriously to take this kind of discussion sometimes. I can rationalize that a person can do awful things to people in a fictional setting and it’s not a commentary of who they are as a person. On the other hand I cannot escape the feeling that I am replying to a genuine sadistic monster, based on everything you just said in this post. Forget all of that. Unnecessary commentary when there’s a point I want to make.

    There’s a crucial difference in video games vs more free-form varieties like TTRPGs: You’re on The Rails. Video game RPGs are almost always on the rails. There’s no real sandbox game anywhere. Like there are good attempts, but at the end of the day, any game has programmed expectations for your inputs and what it can output. Video games can’t possibly fathom how deeply evil you could actually get. It would be a developmental and technological nightmare to try programming in all of your awful choices and how they could spiral the narrative. They have to do their best within the limitations of how much could possibly fit in a game. And I’m assuming the game companies also have to take into account the ratings system, and PR. Even if you could play the game any way you want, good AND bad choices, you’re going to get odd looks from people if they know the game allows you to sexually abuse NPCs, or enslave people through extortion. You know what I’m getting at? The real limitation isn’t the technology, even though that’s already a big one. Even in virtual, completely fictional settings, being allowed to play that shit out is wholly monstrous. And I can’t imagine the toll it would take on designers who would be tasked to write it.

    So if you really want all of that and accept the risks, make your own CRPG where you can go all out on Evil. Being critical of developers and designers for not being willing to go as far as your twisted mind can go in a video game is a wild take. Go play in an evil TTRPG campaign if you want to get those kicks. It’s way easier.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•What's the deal with Docker?English
    5·
    8 months ago

    I approve of this expanded answer. I may have been too ELI5 in my post.

    If the OP has read this far, I’m not telling you to use docker, but you could consider it if you want to store all of your services and their configurations in a backup somewhere on your network so if you have to set up a new raspberry pi for any reason, now it’s a simple sequence of docker commands (or one docker-compose command) to get back up and running. You won’t need to remember how to reinstall all of the dependencies.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•What's the deal with Docker?English
    402·
    8 months ago

    It’s virtual machines but faster, more configurable with a considerably larger set of automation, and it consumes less computer resources than a traditional VM. Additionally, in software development it helps solve a problem summarized as “works on my machine.” A lot of traditional server creation and management relied on systems that need to be set up perfectly identical every deployment to prevent dumb defects based on whose machine was used to write it on. With Docker, it’s stupid easy to copy the automated configuration from “my machine” to “your machine.” Now everyone, including the production systems, are running from “my machine.” That’s kind of a big deal, even if it could be done in other ways naturally on Linux operating systems. They don’t have the ease of use or the same shareability.

    What you’re doing is perfectly expected. That’s a great way of getting around using Docker. You aren’t forced into using it. It’s just easier for most people

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.ml•In the near future, it is projected that contrarians will gain self awareness.
    121·
    9 months ago

    The term AI being used by corporations isn’t some protected and explicit categorization. Any software company alive today, selling what they call AI, isn’t being honest about it. It’s a marketing gimmick. The same shit we fall for all the time. “Grass fed” meat products aren’t actually 100% grass fed at all. “Healthy: Fat Free!” foods just replace the fat with sugar and/or corn syrup. Women’s dress sizes are universally inconsistent across all clothing brands in existence.

    If you trust a corporation to tell you that their product is exactly what they market it as, you’re only gullible. It’s forgivable. But calling something AI when it’s clearly not, as if the term is so broad it can apply to any old if-else chain of logic, is proof that their marketing worked exactly as intended.