Disqus - Latest Comments for aiusepsi

Re: Valve's unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests

aiusepsi — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 07:16:55 -0000

Speaking as a software developer myself, I don't think this is the case at all. Fixing things is an inherently satisfying activity. Often the trickier part is resisting the urge to spend a lot of time doing an overhaul of a system to fix a bug, when a minimal fix would be uglier but conserve the finite time you have to make improvements elsewhere.

Valve's problem with maintenance of the Steam client is more that their headcount is less than you might expect, so they don't have the developer bandwidth to focus on every aspect of the Steam client and backend at once.

Re: Liberty shackled and the future blighted: RIP Europe, 312 – 2020. We had a good run

aiusepsi — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 10:47:47 -0000

The problem with saying something like: "tell us that we cannot under any circumstances torture a terrorist to save the lives of 1,000 people" is that you're implicitly assuming a situation where you can, with 100% certainty, be sure that torturing one person will save a certain number of lives. Those situations are basically just Jack Bauer Hollywood fantasies.

In the real world, torture is an unreliable method of getting information. Consider: how do you tell the difference between a terrorist who is resisting torture and lying about what he knows, and an innocent bystander who knows nothing and is saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear? Torture doesn't magically make you tell the truth. Napoleon knew this more than two hundred years ago: "It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."

Torture is mostly effective in repressive dictatorships to inflict fear and extract false confessions from political enemies.

Considering the War: back then, the Government conscripted young men to be maimed and die on beaches and in ditches to serve their country, and they did it. Now, all it asks for you do your patriotic duty and to serve your country is to cancel your social plans and stay at home, and you're incapable of making even the barest of sacrifices to do that. Using the glorification of past sacrifice as part of your argument to refuse to make sacrifices of your own is really low.

Re: Valve’s Upcoming Base Stations Won’t Work With Existing HTC Vives

aiusepsi — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 07:13:00 -0000

I wouldn't be surprised if the new base stations by themselves have a greater range; IIRC, Alan Yates said the main limiting factor on range right now is the sync blinker, which they've eliminated from the new base stations.

Re: Gabe Newell: Valve is using Source 2 for 'unannounced products' | PC Gamer

aiusepsi — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 06:43:10 -0000

The Greenlight submission fee is donated to charity. "All proceeds from this fee (minus taxes) will be donated directly to Child’s Play, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of children in over 70 hospitals worldwide." http://store.steampowered.c...

Re: Gabe Newell: Valve is using Source 2 for 'unannounced products' | PC Gamer

aiusepsi — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 06:31:58 -0000

Steam OS actually does have at least one purpose: it's a club over Microsoft's head. A former Valve dev who worked on their Linux push said this on his blog recently: "A few weeks after this post went out, some very senior developers from Microsoft came by for a discreet visit. They loved our post, because it lit a fire underneath Microsoft's executives to get their act together and keep supporting Direct3D development. " http://richg42.blogspot.com...

Having competition forces Microsoft to stay competitive. It's a bit like the situation with IE; once they killed off their competition, they let IE6 languish for years until the emergence of Firefox and then Chrome forced them to compete again.

Paid mods was a misstep, sure. But they canned the entire thing within days after clearly getting the message that the community thought it was a bad idea. That's a pretty good show of good faith.

Re: Gabe Newell: Valve is using Source 2 for 'unannounced products' | PC Gamer

aiusepsi — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 06:22:27 -0000

What about the Lab? They released that last year.

Re: Gabe Newell: Valve is using Source 2 for 'unannounced products' | PC Gamer

aiusepsi — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 06:21:33 -0000

He didn't, but someone on the TF2 team at Valve did: https://www.reddit.com/user...

Re: Steam's secret Early Access rules reveal Valve's hands-off approach

aiusepsi — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 05:51:58 -0000

Secret rules? This is just part of the docs you can read if you sign up at the Steamworks partner website, which literally anyone can do; you don't even have to pay the Greenlight access fee, never mind have a game approved. Calling it "secret" is overegging it somewhat.

Re: Reflections of a 50-ish gamer: How I rediscovered video games, and what I learned in the process

aiusepsi — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 07:00:47 -0000

Steam actually predates the Apple App Store by about 5 years.

Re: New Blizzard authenticator does away with codes

aiusepsi — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 08:03:04 -0000

Funny you should say that, it's what the company I work for does. We can read fingerprints with the rear camera on the phone too.

Re: Americans would never accept EU restrictions – so why should we?

aiusepsi — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 12:52:01 -0000

You are aware that we generally don't have health insurance policies because the entire healthcare system is owned and operated by the state, right?

Re: Julian Assange’s 3.5 Year Detainment in Embassy Ruled Unlawful

aiusepsi — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 11:06:34 -0000

The UK Supreme Court disagrees with your interpretation of the law. http://www.bailii.org/uk/ca...

Re: Julian Assange’s 3.5 Year Detainment in Embassy Ruled Unlawful

aiusepsi — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 04:57:11 -0000

The person who has interrupted due process is Assange himself. He was given every opportunity to contest the extradition in the UK courts, all the way up to the UK Supreme Court.

When his legal avenues were exhausted, he absconded and became a fugitive from justice.

The really simple and obvious solution to this would be for Assange to leave the embassy and surrender himself to the police as he was legally required to by his bail conditions.

Any other option, and we're seriously entertaining the notion that a fugitive should be able to negotiate the terms of their interaction with the legal system, as long as they manage to stay on the run long enough. It's absurd.

Re: Images of the HTC Vive headset and controllers leak

aiusepsi — Sun, 20 Dec 2015 15:19:33 -0000

Yes it does. The thing they call a "sensor" is an IR camera. See here: https://www.oculus.com/en-u...

Re: How to install two WhatsApp on iOS/iPhone without Jailbreak

aiusepsi — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 04:17:01 -0000

This is incredibly irresponsible as a recommendation; you have absolutely no way of knowing if the app has been tampered with, e.g. to steal your Whatsapp credentials or to spy on your communications.

Apple ought to revoke this developer's certificate immediately.

Re: Russo Brothers To Direct 'Avengers: Infinity War Parts 1 and 2' - /Film

aiusepsi — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:23:21 -0000

In the case of Whedon, he's also a comic book writer. He did a run on X-Men as well as on his own stuff (Buffy, Fray, etc.)

Re: Gabe Newell: PC gaming communities are keeping games alive

aiusepsi — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 06:47:18 -0000

Unless you mean something like Chrome's Courgette (which Steam doesn't do) they do support delta updates for games and have for a while.

Re: Gabe Newell: PC gaming communities are keeping games alive

aiusepsi — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 06:45:42 -0000

By the IP expiring, you mean the copyright, presumably? Mickey Mouse isn't even in the public domain yet, Half-Life is not going to be in the public domain in our lifetimes.

Re: Let’s face it, we need to introduce minimum pricing on alcohol — and legalise other drugs

aiusepsi — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 04:41:47 -0000

Teens will always have a pursuit of oblivion, for goodness' sake. That's why they get drunk!

The point here is this: we should compare drugs like alcohol and MDMA on an objective basis, rather than insisting a priori that alcohol is fine because it's legal, and MDMA is bad because it's illegal.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 09:29:26 -0000

Yeah, so tweaking the precise amount of debt that isn't going to be paid off isn't a useful policy. It's just punting the issue up the road, while wooing students and the upper middle class just before the election. Or wooing students and members of the middle class who haven't bothered to actually analyse the details, anyway.

For what it's worth, I think that higher education should either be funded as a public good out of progressive taxation (i.e. by increases in progressive taxes like income tax, not e.g. increases in VAT) or with an honest-to-goodness graduate tax.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 09:19:21 -0000

http://www.studentloanrepay...

You're still supposed to repay as a percentage of your income above a threshold that's adjusted for the living costs of the country that you're in.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 15:38:08 -0000

Will do. I do know plenty of undergraduates at my old university.

Personally I find a bigger issue is postgraduate fees, because unlike undergraduate fees you can't get funding for them. That puts students not from wealthy families off from doing a master's degree.

Personally I jumped right to a PhD because I could get funding for that from EPSRC. A master's was totally unaffordable.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 14:20:15 -0000

No, I just have a functional grasp of mathematics. Fact is, I would be £45 a month better off if I was one of the £9k-payers.

The fact is, this policy does nothing to improve access, especially to postgraduate study for which funding is extremely hard to obtain, and only helps those who are comfortably middle class.

If you did want to target access you'd at least go for maintenance loans and bursaries. The tutition fees themselves are irrelevant.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 14:02:08 -0000

I paid £3000 a year; I would have rather paid the £9000 the current students are paying. They raised the repayment threshold to £21k rather than £15k, so I'd be better off each month I had the deal current students are getting.

As it is, I don't expect to pay off my debt before it's written off anyway, so the total repayment is irrelevant. Reducing the total amount just has he effect of helping out the people who are so eye-wateringly well-paid that they will pay it off.

We'd be better just dropping the fig-leaf that this is a loan and just have a real graduate tax.

Re: Labour's tuition fee policy: not awful, but still pretty bad

aiusepsi — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 13:26:14 -0000

It's a lot of money, yes. Which the government will give to the university on your behalf, up-front no questions asked. It's not a cost of living issue. At all.