I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.

goes looking

https://opengameart.org/

It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.

I haven’t looked at it over time, but I also don’t think that we’ve had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it’s not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.

I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I’ve occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.

You mean because indie games tend not to have high minimum memory requirements, like?

Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.

And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.

Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.

I think that you have two factors here. GDC isn’t specific to PC gaming, and additionally, a lot of titles will see both PC and console releases.

For a game that is intended to see only a PC release, my guess is that that that might affect system requirements of the game.

For games that see console releases, things like “will fewer people have consoles” — because current-gen consoles are very unlikely to change spec, just price, is how this manifests itself. “Is the Playstation 6 going to be postponed” is a big deal if you were going to release a game for that hardware.

The title is a little more dramatic than the body — in fact, the article is mostly more of a “yeah, this is something that we’ve seen before, more-or-less” take — but it is interesting to get some actual perspectives on impact from the developer side on what the likely changes are. It does also confirm that some studios are working on reducing the memory requirements for their upcoming games.

I bet that if someone went to The Internet Archive, they could pay them to get timestamped snapshots of professionally-spidered stuff at zero load to the websites. I’m sure that it’d cost something for all the hard drives and probably something for labor, but so does spidering the whole Internet yourself. The people running the bots clearly have the funds available to run them at massive scale.

“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so “88” is often used as a shorthand for “Heil Hitler”. It sometimes gets incorporated into usernames.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)

In neo-Nazism

Neo-Nazis use the number 88 as an abbreviation for the Nazi salute Heil Hitler.[11] The letter H is eighth in many European Latin alphabets, whereby 88 becomes HH.[12]

Often, this number is associated with the number 14, e.g. 14/88, 14-88, or 1488; this number symbolizes the Fourteen Words coined by David Lane, a prominent white supremacist.[13] Example uses of 88 include the song “88 Rock ‘n’ Roll Band” by Landser, and the organizations Column 88 and Unit 88.

The number is banned on Austrian license plates due to its association with “Heil Hitler [and] where H comes in the alphabet”.[14] In June 2023, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and the Italian government announced that the number 88 would be banned from use in Italian association football, as part of a joint initiative to combat antisemitism. This followed an incident in March of that year in which a Lazio supporter wore a club shirt bearing the name “Hitlerson” and the number 88, which led to the supporter receiving a lifetime ban from attending Lazio matches.[15]

In the US, former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi declared in 2019 that something as innocuous as raising a flag on the White House to full staff on 8 August (i.e. 8–8) is a “messaging” problem because “the numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement.”[16]

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/88

88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler. One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis. One can find it as a tattoo or graphic symbol; as part of the name of a group, publication or website; or as part of a screenname or e-mail address. It is even sometimes used as a greeting or sign-off (particularly in messages on social networking websites).

Yet using an AI is bad enough to get you called a fascist, an eugenicist and other fun things. The lack of perspective is staggering but certain section of Lemmy users have just decided that AI is evil and any nuance is wrongthink. Even just accepting the reality that AI isn’t going to go away is seen as evil comparable to murder.

I’d buy into the potential for eventual advanced AI being potentially a very serious, existential threat to humanity.

But I’m not especially worried about AI in the near term. I’m pretty sure that a substantial chunk of people upset about present-day AI systems are worried about economic shifts from AI putting their job at risk one way or another, which is something that I don’t agree much with — technological advancement has always caused changes in what people do. People in today’s society in, say, the US, do almost entirely different things than they did two hundred years ago, for example. That change is nearly always considered to be a positive in retrospect. There are very, very few people in 2026 who are going to seriously say “everyone should drop what they are doing and society should go back to farming small farms with horses and oxen the way we did around 1800”.

However, if you look at, say, the Luddites, we’ve had a history of people being worried about that change as it occurred, so I don’t much think that people will stop. It’s just human nature to fret about that sort of thing, I think. I’d be inclined to just let people have their say and move on. It’s not that I agree with the people who are yelling about it, but that I don’t realistically think that there’s going to be a world where you have technological development and don’t have people worried about how changes from that technological development might affect their place.

I also think that people who are worried about that are also a lot more likely to be vocal than people who aren’t worried about it. I mean, only stands to reason — if there’s something that you are really, really worried about, you’re probably going to talk about it. If there’s something that you don’t see as a particular concern, then you’re probably less likely to talk about it.

As it currently exists on other platforms, Gaming Copilot lets you ask guide-like questions about the game you’re currently playing. Microsoft’s official site offers an example question like “Can you remind me what materials I need to craft a sword in Minecraft?”

I haven’t used consoles for a few generations, but historically, switching between a game and a Web browser on a console wasn’t all that great, and text entry wasn’t all that great. I dunno if things have improved, but it was definitely a pain in the neck to refer to a website in-game historically.

On Linux, Wayland, I swap between fullscreen desktops when playing games, and often have a Web browser with information relevant to the game on another desktop. If it helps enable some approximation of a workflow like that for console players, that doesn’t sound unreasonable.

There are other objections I’d have, like not really wanting someone logging what my voice sounds like or giving Microsoft even more data on me to profile with via my searches. But it sounds to me like the basic functionality has a point.

looks at slides

I see where the anime catgirl logo that Anubis uses came from.

What makes this worse is that git servers are the most pathologically vulnerable to the onslaught of doom from modern internet scrapers because remember, they click on every link on every page.

The especially disappointing thing is that, for the specific case that Xe was running into, a better-written scraper could just recognize that this is a public git repository and just git clone the thing and get all the useful code without the overhead. Like, it’s not even “this scraper is scraping data that I don’t want it to have”, but “this scraper is too dumb to just scrape the thing efficiently and is blowing both the scraper’s resources and the server’s resources downloading innumerable redundant copies of the data”.

It’s probably just as well, since the protection is relevant for other websites, and he probably wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been getting his git repo hammered, but…

EDIT: Plus, I bet that the scraper was requesting a ton of files at once from the server, since he said that it was unusable. Like, you have a zillion servers to parallelize requests over. You could write a scraper that requested one file at once per server, which is common courtesy, and you’re still going to be bandwidth constrained if you’re schlorping up the whole Internet. Xe probably wouldn’t have even noticed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, was a strategic reserve of the United States, which once held over 1 billion cubic meters (about 170,000,000 kg)[a] of helium gas.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) transferred the reserve to the General Services Administration (GSA) as surplus property, but a 2022 auction[10] failed to finalize a sale.[11] On June 22, 2023, the GSA announced a new auction of the facilities and remaining helium.[12] The auction of the last helium assets was due to take place in November, 2023.[13] Though the last of the Cliffside reserve was to be sold by November 2023, more natural gas was discovered at the site than was previously known, and the Bureau of Land Management extended the auction to January 25, 2024 to allow for increased bids.[14] In 2024 the remaining reserve was sold to the highest bidder, Messer Group.[15]

Arguably not the best timing on that.

Sure. What that guy is using is actually not the most-interesting diagram style, IMHO, for automatic layout of network maps, if you want large-scale stuff, which is where the automatic layout gets more interesting. I have some scripts floating around somewhere that will generate very large network maps — run a bunch of traceroutes, geolocate IPs, dump the results into an sqlite database, and then generate an automatically laid-out Internet network map. I don’t want to go to the trouble of anonymizing the addresses and locations right now, but if you have a graphviz graph and want to try playing with it, I used:

goes looking

Ugh, it’s Python 2, a decade-and-a-half old, and never got ported to Python 3. Lemme gin up an example for the non-hierarchical graphviz stuff:

graph.dot:

graph foo {
    a--b
    a--d
    b--c
    d--e
    c--e
    e--f
    b--d
}

Processed with:

$ sfdp -Goverlap=prism -Gsep=+5 -Gesep=+4 -Gremincross -Gpack -Gsplines=true -Tpdf -o graph.pdf graph.dot

Generates something like this:

That’ll take a ton of graphviz edges and nicely lay them out while trying to avoid crossing edges and stuff, in a non-hierarchical map. Get more complicated maps that it can’t use direct lines on, it’ll use splines to curve lines around nodes. You can create massive network maps like this. Note that I was last looking at graphviz’s automated layout stuff about 15 years ago, so it’s possible that they have better layout algorithms now, but this can deal with enormous numbers of nodes and will do reasonable things with them.

I just grabbed his example because it was the first graphviz network map example that came up on a Web search.

We faced an unprecedented bot problem

When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

It’s a social media problem. It’s going to be hard to provide pseudonymity, low-cost accounts relatively freely, and counter bots spamming the system to manipulate it. The model worked well in an era before there were very human-like bots that were easy to produce.

It might be possible to build webs of trust with pseudonyms. You can make a new pseudonym, but the influence and visibility gets tied to, for example, what users or curators that you trust trust, so the pseudonym has less weight until it acquires reputation. I do not think that a single global trust “score” will work, because you can always have bot webs of trust.

Unfortunately, the tools to unmask pseudonyms are also getting better, and throwing away pseudonyms occasionally or using more of them is one of the reasonable counters to unmasking, and that doesn’t play well with relying more on reputation.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/linux-takes-476-days-to-boot-on-an-ancient-intel-4004-cpu-cpu-precedes-the-os-by-20-years

Linux takes 4.76 days to boot on an ancient Intel 4004 CPU — CPU precedes the OS by 20 years

In essence, to bridge the hardware/software divide, the enthusiast emulated the more capable MIPS R3000 processor, which boasts the required C compiler support.

As long as they can talk to external storage, which I expect all of them can, all of them can probably emulate each other, so all of them can probably boot Linux.

So that when setting up a new system, you can migrate all your user configuration easily, while also version-controlling it.

The old lighting wasn’t that great anyway. If I were to just put lighting on a DMX512-controlled network, then all of it could be synchronized to whole-house audio…

It seems like a good time to learn graphviz’s dot format for the network layout diagrams, with automated layout.

https://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2015/08/20/graphviz-dot-erds-network-diagrams/

Probably a good idea to switch over to WPA-Enterprise using Authentik’s RADIUS server support and let all of the users of your wireless access point log in with their own network credentials, while you’re at it.

You have all your devices attached to a console server with a serial port console set up on the serial port, and if they support accessing the BIOS via a serial console, that enabled so that you can access that remotely, right? Either a dedicated hardware console server, or some server on your network with a multiport serial card or a USB to multiport serial adapter or something like that, right? So that if networking fails on one of those other devices, you can fire up minicom or similar on the serial console server and get into the device and fix whatever’s broken?

Oh, you don’t. Well, that’s probably okay. I mean, you probably won’t lose networking on those devices.