Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Oh I see, interesting. I guess they’re named after the fact that normally they’re at a restaurant?

    The Wikipedia article was…interesting. The first paragraph of the “history” section seemed like someone had removed a sentence at random. “After that initial meeting”, without ever having described any first meeting, but having set the stage where such a first meeting might take place. If someone has knowledge & sources about that first meeting, that’d be a great opportunity to improve Wikipedia.



  • We could have used the tilde, which has been used in formal logic & maths for negation in very many contexts for a long time.

    It’s used instead in C and many C-like languages for the far less useful bitwise negation. Of course, we could have had it work in the same way as bitwise vs logical and & or, by dialling up the symbol. Which would have massively improved its visibility compared to the bang.

    But for some reason, no. They chose the bang instead.





  • Not a scam. Higher prices give other benefits outside of safety. Better venting or aerodynamics. More fashionable. Might be more likely to have a “free replacement if you crash” type of deal.

    I am surprised that the article has no mention of MIPS, Wavecel, or Kineticore, because looking at the study itself I found its discussion of rotational vs linear injury to be the most interesting bit, in relation to popular discussions in the cycling community. It points out that

    Nine best performing helmets were equipped with the rotation management technology MIPS, but not all helmets equipped with MIPS were among the best performing helmets. Our comparison of three tested helmets which have MIPS and no-MIPS versions showed that MIPS reduced rotational kinematics, but not linear kinematics.

    Which is pretty in line with my expectations. They only had one Wavecel helmet to test unfortunately, but had this observation:

    Interestingly, the helmet with the Wavecel technology, designed for rotational risk mitigation, produced the lowest linear risk (0.141) in our cohort of 30 helmets, although its overall rank was #13 due to the high rotational risk (0.301)

    Which is very counterintuitive. And no Kineticore mention, though they do say

    There are several other helmet technologies that are currently available in commercially available helmets. Although these technologies were not within the helmets selected here, they warrant testing according to the protocol used in this study




  • RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre

    RTS is a very broad umbrella term. I would have thought a CoD RTS would be more along the lines of CoH in its design than WC3. Though I could see mixing the two to create a tactical RPG RTS.

    Because of the broad category that is RTS, I don’t think it’s necessarily right to characterise it as the genre needing to “redefine the genre” or have enormous innovation. AoE4 is an excellent and very successful game, but it basically only has relatively minor refinements on long-lasting staples of the classic RTS genre. And AoE2 is still enormously successful despite being 25 years old this month (with the obvious remastered graphics, newer QoL features, and new patches and expansion content along the way).

    I’m not sure I agree with the live-service complaints. Maybe there are some RTSes that went that way, but one that you mentioned was AoE3, and it certainly didn’t. It was buy-once, play forever. (There were 2 major expansions in the same vein as the expansions of earlier Age games with significant new chunks of content in each, but nothing live servicey.) So has been every one of the Definitive Editions (including Age of Mythology: Retold) and AoE4. They do put out new paid content on a regular basis, which is frankly necessary to be able to keep funding bugfixes, balance patches, and server costs. But nonetheless the content has been very well-received by the community, and is entirely optional and doesn’t lock you out of playing your old content at all if you choose not to buy it. I’m not involved in any other RTS games, so maybe they are doing more live service stuff. Shame, if so.

    RTS may just be a niche genre. It doesn’t need to change to attract a wider audience, because doing that would be to change what attracts its current audience. And that’s ok. Not everything needs to be for everyone.

    Not that there aren’t things that RTSes could do to try to maximise their audience. If the game is esport focused, a good investment in esport prize pools goes a long way, and so does making sure your game is in a high quality state before it gets released—even if that means delaying release. AoE4 is an excellent game today with a pretty solid playerbase, but it could have been in a much better state if it hadn’t turned away a large number of both pros and low-level competitive players by the terrible state of the game at release. I’m also really impressed by the work the Age franchise has done around console compatibility with their main games recently, but I think greater promotion of this fact (for example by sponsoring console & controller–only tournaments) would help in that arena. I’d also love to see a real classic RTS game developed for mobile, which is why I was initially really excited about Age of Empires: Mobile, until the leaks came out revealing that it’s yet another Chinese knock-off like the thousands of cheap mobile games that have come before…only this one tarnishes the brand not just by indirect association/ripping off its assets in ads, but because it’s officially allowed to use the Age of Empires brand. Mobile is never going to have the high level of competition we see on PC, but I think if they put the same level of love and care into a mobile game (designed from the ground-up to be a mobile RTS) that they put into the console ports of their core games, it could be a great experience while on the go, and possibly provide an easier entry point into the genre for some newer players.

    What I don’t want to see is the kind of RTS innovation that leads to completely new genres. MOBAs are fine for what they are, but that’s what you get if you embrace the idea that RTS should completely innovate to capture audiences with wildly different tastes: an entirely different genre that no longer appeals to RTS fans.










  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlDeuces
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    5 days ago

    I’m not going to deny that that might be true in some US states’ laws. But it is not true morally or philosophically. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on wage theft:

    Wage theft is the failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law.

    Later in the same paragraph, it includes as an example:

    not paying annual leave or holiday entitlements

    It is pretty uncontroversial that not paying overtime bonus rates is wage theft, and that article goes to great lengths to describe how misclassification (e.g. classing someone as a contractor when they are in fact a direct employee) is wage theft not just philosophically, but at times in the US legally.

    Here in Australia, a classic example of wage theft that we hear about companies getting fined for a lot is failure to pay superannuation. A US equivalent to that might be if they failed to pay into a 401k contribution match when their employment contract stated they would. It’s not “wage” per se, but it is part of the agreed compensation for work.

    Leave entitlements are no different. Whether the law recognises it correctly or not, taking away people’s annual leave is wage theft.