Currently studying CS and some other stuff. Best known for previously being top 50 (OCE) in LoL, expert RoN modder, and creator of RoN:EE’s community patch (CBP).

(header photo by Brian Maffitt)

  • 10 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle





  • Funny headline aside, semantics and trying to understand expected meanings of words and phrases is fucky and makes for an interesting case. Per the article the court decision was only 4-3 (i.e., close), and the dissent seemed – as a person who admittedly is not well-versed in the language normally used by Ohio’s Supreme Court – to be pretty strongly opinionated.

    From the snippets in the article I find it pretty easy to sympathize with both sides of the argument!


    edit: the full text is available here (the original unarchived source is being hammered by curious people) - you can download the file to read it in full-res

    The question seems to be: “did the restaurant exercise reasonable duty of care”. There is a lot more to the case than the fun-but-sensationalized headline and even article.


  • “Comma-la” unfortunately doesn’t help much for people without US accents lol (though of course people in the US are who the question and answer are most relevant to). On first reading – without the accent or something close to it – it implies “kom-uh-luh”, whereas with the accent it implies something more like “kah-muh-luh”, just based on how people pronounce “comma” differently.



  • Intel fumbled hard with some of their recent NICs including the I225-V,[1][2] which took them multiple hardware revisions in addition to software updates to fix.

    AMD also had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support earlier AM4 motherboard buyers to upgrade to Ryzen 5000 chips,[3][4] and basically lied to buyers about support for sTRX4, requiring an upgrade from the earlier TR4 to support third-gen Threadripper but at least committing to “long-term” longevity in return.[5][6] They then turned around and released no new CPUs for the chipset platform, leaving people stranded on it despite the earlier promises.[7]

    I know it’s appealing to blindly trust one company’s products (or specific lineup of products) because it simplifies buying decisions, but no company or person is infallible (and companies in particular are generally going to profit-max even at your expense). Blindly trusting one unfortunately does not reliably lead to good outcomes for end-users.


    edit: “chipset” (incorrectly implying TRX40) changed to “platform” (correctly implying sTRX4); added explicit mention of “AM4” in the context of the early motherboard buyers.


















  • Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:

    • Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they’re not doing anything.
    • Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that’s essentially “all nearby empty resource gathering”, so you can queue a dozen workers and they’ll distribute themselves as they’re created.
    • Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue “restocks”.
    • Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.

    For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:

    • You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
    • The auto-rally-point doesn’t always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
    • Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
    • Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.

    But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn’t completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the “speed floor”, allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.