It might get a little simpler to host and busier to play again in the not too distant future if the announced free fanmade re-release works out!

I think Isaac is a great game but it’s also right around the time when one of my greatest gaming pet peeves began - merging the concept of a roguelite and a roguelike to call them all the latter.

Roguelite was such a linguistic stroke of genius as it both differentiated them from the classic genre - turnbased top-down movement, no-knowledge procedural levels, permadeath, craft fight plunder core loop - while still being self-describing as something which keeps some of those elements though being more light to digest.

…and then we just discarded the term and chose to call them all roguelike with, for me, no discernible advantage.

As far as I know that’s generally what is often done, but it’s a surprisingly hard problem to solve ‘completely’ for two reasons:

1. The more obvious one - how do you define quality? When you’re working with the amount of data LLMs require as input and need to be checked for on output you’re going to have to automate these quality checks, and in one way or another it comes back around to some system having to define and judge against this score.

   There’s many different benchmarks out there nowadays, but it’s still virtually impossible to just have ‘a’ quality score for such a complex task.

2. Perhaps the less obvious one - you generally don’t want to ‘overfit’ your model to whatever quality scoring system you set up. If you get too close to it, your model typically won’t be generally useful anymore, rather just always outputting things which exactly satisfy the scoring principle, nothing else.

   If it reaches a theoretical perfect score, it would just end up being a replication of the quality score itself.

I can’t believe you’ve mastered German in just 3 months

Luanti and Minecraft are two distinct, if similar-looking things.

Luanti is an open-source voxel game engine implementation which allows running a wide variety of different ‘games’ on it (including two which mimic Minecraft very closely, like the above-mentioned Mineclonia).

Minecraft is the closed-source game owned by Mojang.

The two don’t interact and servers for the one are completely unrelated to the other as well.

So, to answer the question - yes, they still need a Minecraft license if they want to play Minecraft. But this is disconnected from having a Luanti server, for which you don’t need any licenses but which will in turn also only allow you to play Luanti stuff, not Minecraft.

It’s good but it’s also been bought out by, at least to me, an ‘unknown’ early this year. Since then, there’s been a couple outages though nothing too drastic. New owner also promised to only make changes that are ‘thoughtful and focused on making your experience better’ but I am still cautiously eyeing other options since then - I’ve learned never to trust those words by new owners.

Yeah I think that’s a more reasonable assumption. Presumably the new page template comes with the steam info pre-filled and has to be confirmed manually before someone then can correct the entry.
Still love that they even have this info nicely organized at all!

That’s so cool! UT2k3 and 2k4 were absolute staples of our childhood LAN parties. Would be so nice to have a ‘modern’ Linux-supporting version.

Perhaps we could even organize a community event or two for the fediverse crowd? Surely there’s enough cranky old people here willing to feel 16 again for a few hours :)

Don’t read this as a general defence of steam but I do want to correct a factual mistake: there is no forced DRM on steam.

Plenty of games are released on steam which do not rely on the steam client to be started and are in fact DRM-free. They can be backed up, and played on any machine without steam installed.

Some examples are Cyberpunk2077, the System Shock remake, Shadow tactics, and most of the devolver digital catalogue. The issue I personally have is that steam itself does not declare the difference anywhere in the store front, but at least it is always accurately catalogued on the lovely pcgamingwiki.

On ios I use Unwatched and it is fantastic, almost as good as tubular, freetube et al on other platforms. It allows you to curate a nice upcoming ‘diet’ of just the videos you intentionally want to watch, nothing else.

Don’t know how long it will survive on the AppStore but it’s been there for a little while now.

As do, funnily enough, Simon and Garfunkel

‘Nerds should stick to building computers’ but not the software computers are running is honestly one of the more harebrained takes I’ve read.

It might turn out to be something different - but just in case it does log you out after a system restart (but maybe not after network disconnect) it would probably have something to do with kwallet (the key ring which has your credentials) not unlocking correctly.

If that’s the case this or this might be further pointers to look into.

But that ‘brick’ of the posted text is just the article that is linked. So if we are commenting under a post dedicated to the article it would stand to reason that we read the article itself, would you not agree?

I think you really nailed the crux of the matter.

With the ‘autocomplete-like’ nature of current LLMs the issue is precisely that you can never be sure of any answer’s validity. Some approaches try by giving ‘sources’ next to it, but that doesn’t mean those sources’ findings actually match the text output and it’s not a given that the sources themselves are reputable - thus you’re back to perusing those to make sure anyway.

If there was a meter of certainty next to the answers this would be much more meaningful for serious use-cases, but of course by design such a thing seems impossible to implement with the current approaches.

I will say that in my personal (hobby) projects I have found a few good use cases of letting the models spit out some guesses, e.g. for the causes of a programming bug or proposing directions to research in, but I am just not sold that the heaviness of all the costs (cognitive, social, and of course environmental) is worth it for that alone.

If it feels good for you, it is probably good.

(For the record, I do think it’s really good advice but that instantly came to mind) :)

Holyy, thanks for this. I can finally put a name to it. Was wondering with my partner for ages what sometimes suddenly befalls us, especially if we’re lying in a weird position.

I’ve been exclusively reading my fiction books (all epubs) on Readest and absolutely love it. Recently I also started using it for my nonfiction books and articles (mostly pdf) as an experiment, and it’s workable but a little more rough around the edges still.

You can highlight and annotate, and export all annotations for a book once you are done, for which I have set up a small pipeline to directly import them into my reference management software.

It works pretty well with local storage (though I don’t believe it does ‘auto-imports’ of new files by default) and I’ve additionally been using their free hosted offering to sync my book progress. It’s neat and free up to 500mb of books, but you’re right that I would also prefer a byo storage solution, perhaps in the future.

The paid upgrades are mostly for AI stuff and translations which I don’t really concern myself with.

Been seeing the posts pop up recently and I really like the look of your software, bookmarked for future jrnl integration possibilities.

But what a missed opportunity to not have a Journiv Ahead in your second headline :)

Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data.

I feel it is important to make a distinction here, though:

GitHub, the for-profit, non-FOSS, Microsoft-owned platform keeps track of the ‘stars of a repo’, not the open-source self-host projects themselves. Somebody hosts their repo forge on Codeberg, sr.ht, their own infrastructure or even GitLab? There’s generally very little to no algorithmic number-crunching involved. Same for MR/PRs.

Additionally - from my knowledge - very few fully FOSS programs have extensive usage/install telemetry, and even fewer opt-out versions. Tracking which couldn’t be disabled I’ve essentially never heard of in that space, because every time someone does go in that direction the public reaction is usually very strong (see e.g. Audacity).