Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Oktokolo

Member
  • Posts

    852
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by Oktokolo

  1. Coders using node.js in general seem to really like to pile up a lot of dependencies - while giving a shit about devops security. Looks like shady folks stumbled upon news from 2013.
    Another bad practice: Naively downloading and executing Docker images.

    It is a bit like the big email worm epidemics - but for naive devs wich search and download the malware instead of naive users wich click on malware mailed to them.

     

    Really wonder when we will see the first realworld Meltdown and Spectre exploits though. Does not look like anybody really cares about fixing that holes on millions of old CPUs. And some of that hardware design bugs should be exploitable by tricking a user to run JavaScript embedded on a web page or injected into it by targetted advertising...

  2. I know about that correlation wich most likely is a causation too.

    My point was, that humans where willingly and knowingly poison themselves and their loved ones with lead just to get the benefit of more performant and longer living car engines. It is like "yeah, we all get slowly poisoned by the lead and my child will probably be even duller than me - but look how good my new car performs". That is a level of stupidity - i can't imagine how it would be possible to beat that.

    And we are only some decades away from that. So there surely is improvement to be seen. It is just at so low a level that it might seem as if it where just a drop in an ocean.

  3. there will be those who are informed and able to discern reliable information and think for themselves, and there will be the masses of ignorant monkeys who are pulled to any direction the populists or hate mongers want.

    So it will be the same as today?

     

    Humanity progress will continue - slowly. About thirty years ago there was no global information network. Humanity needs time to adapt to all the new tech. Always keep in mind that leaded gasoline was a common thing till 40 years ago.

     

    If the third world ware does not happen, i am pretty confident, that Humanity will someday in the future even get completely rid of greed - although that will probably take hundreds of generations...

  4. But that is how the updater works.

    For interrupting the updater to get a specific version, i would expect the following:

    All assets, that have first been updated after the desired version, are (wrongly) that of the newest version.

    Assets, that have been newly introduced after the desired version, are (wrongly) present.

    Assets, that have been updated in the desired or an earlier version, are correct for the desired version.

    Don't think, such behaviour would be a problem though. Old versions aren't of much use anyway.

  5. But for mappers/tech/devs its nice to go to a chosen version.

    Is that even fully possible?

    The pk4s are updated with each release and to be able to get an old Version installed, the version-to-version zips would have to be updated on each release to contain the old version of assets updated in any of the following releases. That is highly unlikely and the size of the first upgrade zip is not in the order of magnitude that i would expect for it in that case.

  6. at night at my parents house you can hear the pet dog walking through the downstairs rooms, the dogs been dead for ages, the sound is the same sound it used to make when it was alive.

    Sounds like positive flashbacks. Probably nothing to worry about.

     

    One day I was eating a sandwich but before I could take a second bite it slipped out of my hand. I really wanted to eat it, the first bite gave me a pretty good impression so I looked for it butttttt couldn't find it!

    I looked for it for a whole month in the apartment and guess what, I never got to eat it...

    I don't really believe in ghosts but there is no other explanation for this, it was like 10x10cm big and I should have have easilly spotted it on the empty white floor.

    Maybe, you did indeed just pick up and eat the sandwich. But you can't remember, because your neurons misfired and dropped some seconds of short term memory.

    That does happen a lot. There are countless examples of witnesses remembering wrong details or even complete scenes under oath. Human memory is absurdly lossy at times.

    • Like 1
  7. Wish: Official support for transparent editor images.

    Filters are good, but the option to see the scene with transparent monster clip (and other game-changing, non-rendering materials) would be nice.

    Maybe, supporting PNGs with alpha-channel for the editor image would do it. Mappers then could use their own materials referencing transparent editor images without adding additional geometry to the map or having to switch materials back to vanilla before dmap.

    The more comfortable option would be to make the filter feature non-binary.

  8. Seen any ghosts? :blink:

    Of course. Everyone sees them once in a while. Probability of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling or even just knowing their presence is higher if you are tired, stressed or drugged. But they can and do occur in all states of mind and some meditate to increase the probability of perceiving one.

    They most often disappear if you concentrate on them because then the complex neuronal network, that is your brain, autocorrects them away.

     

    Funnily, when researchers play with artificial neuronal networks (ANNs) used for image recognition, they can make them see ghosts too (well, they did not try to make them literally see ghosts, because image recognition does not get trained to see ghosts and therefore can't ever cklassify something as a ghost - so they have chosen to let them see weapons instead).

     

    Humans do much more processing and compare input to much more prelearned data weighted by context and consider more state than current artificial neuronal networks used for computer vision can do now.

    So we rarely seee ghosts and when we do, they get autocorrect away immediately most of the time. We only perceive them consciously after multiple recalculations with fresh input data failed in a row. That makes it so uncommen to see a ghost for us.

     

    Maybe, the people training ANNs for image recognition should train their ANNs to also recognize ghosts. As they will probably never see a real ghost you would at least know, that the ANN fucked up when it does see one... ;)

    • Like 1
  9. A small workaround is to downloading the update packages mannually.

    Get them from moddb.

    See http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19683-mac-problems-launching-tdm/?do=findComment&comment=428698

    That incremental updating process looked odd to me, so i did "strings | grep http" on the unzipped updater executable and got the URL http://mirrors.thedarkmod.com/ . The mirrors should hold all files needed by TDM - but only one of them lets you list directory content and therefore gives me a chance to see, where stuff is actually supposed to be.

    I grabbed all but the tdm_update_*_to_*.zip files (guess i don't need them for a fresh install) from http://mirror.helium.in-berlin.de/thedarkmod/release/ and found the executables in tdm_shared_stuff.zip .

    After setting u+x and installing the OpenAL libs from my distro's repo, i was able to start it, download a mission and walk around a bit .

     

    I noticed two issues, i did not experience on Windows 7:

    Alt-Tab taskswitching does not work inside the game (but i can switch to a virtual terminal and back to TDM with alt-F*).

    When playing with another resolution than the desktop (like when first starting the game), TDM does not switch back to original desktop resolution on exit.

  10. I'm stuck

     

     

    I get all the pumpkins. I go through the portal. The master comes out and he just stands there next to the king pumpkin. The master doesn't stand in front of the portal. If I start the ritual, it's mission fail. If I jump up and down in the portal to get him to come out there, it's mission fail. What am I suppose to do?

     

     

     

    I just replayed the mission and the master failed to pathfind to his ritual position (ran in circles behind the King for a while, then just stand there).

    I solved that problem by broadheading the master and then carrying the still warm corpse to his ritual position. Worked fine.

    The trigger does not care, whether the AI is dead or alive. Also, killing him does not count as a killing regarding the mission objectives (same as the spiders).

     

  11. And that's why it looks pretty mundane and boring. What's the purpose of simulating thief's life, without using it in some interesting, subversive manner, like Thief series did?

    It is like with the trucker and farming simulators. People exist who like playing such games. I know someone who memorized a 300 page manual to be able to fly a jumbo in a flight simulator.

    A burglar simulator would not be that odd a game - but probably a bit too casual for the regular TDM player...

  12. I don't know, how to get to a more trustworthy society, but i would start by banning ads. Ads teach us from early on, that lying is okay and has to be done to sell anything.

     

    But of course it is much harder than that. Our current economy is basically based on lies and bragging. The incentives are huge. You get better job chances if you brag and lie a lot as long as it is not too obvious. You sell more products (although most often not twice to the same customer), if you present them outright lies.

    And there are no repercussions, as you just can move on and try on the next. Most of us live in cities containing millions of people and as long as others are not able to prove that you broke a law, nothing bad will actually happen most of the time. The social selfcleaning system, that worked well in a tribe is not working well for herds of millions of people.

     

    Honesty has no value and the winner takes it all. If you trust people, most of them immediately take advantage as they are trained to do so from early on. They often do not even have to consciously decide to do so - as it seems to have become a reflex.

    It is not possible to change such a culture in the timeframe of a generation. You can only try to act honest yourself and hope, that it sticks in your private life.

    On the job, most of the time everyone will just assume it to be part of a strategy to get something in the long run though - especially the sales and marketing departments.

    • Like 2
  13. I've heard the balance of buildup vs. payoff referred to as "sizzle and steak." You can tease the sizzle all day, but sooner or later you're gonna have to serve up that steak.

    That actually is true for shooters and when players demand their boss fights. For horror, it is often said, that the monster may never be fully visible to not spoil the experience of the terror of the unknown.

  14. The problem with the robin hood effect (besides its relation to the misconception that he stole from the rich to give to the poor) is that it's based off of a mindset that neglects to see that the rich already redistribute their wealth on their own (think how many people get paid and how many businesses flourish each time they buy a yacht, or when Elon Musk makes silly absurdly expensive experiments), and in doing so they give a serious push to keep the economic gears turning, which is ultimately what actually keeps raising the living standards of everyone else including the poorest.

    Guess i have to be happy that you did not call it communism. It has nothing to do with Robin Hood.

    It is just a subsidy like every other. The state as a whole decides that no one should die of starvation or because he can't afford healthcare - and spends tax money to make that sure.

    It is not about whether the rich are good or bad or whether it is okay to hoard ridiculous amounts of money. That just doesn't matter. Welfare expenses in the end are just expenses and have to be paid somehow. You can't take the money from the poor, because they don't have it. So obviously you have to take it from the rich.

     

    The concept of the consumerism and entrepreneurship of the rich fixing the poorness problem is called Trickle-down economics and works as well as communism with real humans...

     

    The robin hood mindset also tends to upset the rich, who, if they can afford to move away (if they're not stuck to localized business infrastructures or something), will then look for tax havens and take their wealth with them and invest and pay salaries elsewhere, in turn raising the living standards of other nations and lowering those of their own. Or they find ways to build their infrastructure in other countries and transport the goods from overseas (f. ex. China) if it turns out to be cheaper and less of a hassle.

    Let them go - and exspell them from the country so they aren't able to come back.

    Beeing a citizen of a welfare state does not only mean that you get help if you need it - it also means, that you have to pay for others getting that help if you can afford it.

    People who decide to not beeing part of that state should not be part of that state.

    They should have to get citizenship somewhere else or buy themselves an island where they could declare their own state and wich they would have to protect with their own military. Should not be a problem for the filthy rich wich also like to be hermits (hint: Most humans don't like to be alone)...

     

    Minimum wage, among other problems it creates, removes the competitive aspect of the lowest wages, though, which would otherwise make them tend to rise over time as low wage workers became more demanding in accordance to their growing experience and skills.

    The market for low wage labour is driven by an oversupply of humans that are not skilled enough for the higher tier jobs. Some of them fled from the countries we destabilized or helped to destabilize.

    That is why we have seen a race to the bottom in the low wage sector in the last decades.

    Basically, the low wage labour market seems to be broken beyond repair (well, a pandemic could fix it, but we hopefully don't get one soon) in the USA and most (if not all) of the EU.

     

    And yet, the gov doesn't provide dentistry, and, I don't know about you, but I never heard anyone complaining they couldn't afford their dental treatment or that there was no affordable way for them to pay for it.

    Some states do provide dentistry, some do not. And i heared even Germans complaining about the costs of dentistry (Germany is considered a welfare state by the way)...

     

    You can't look at the costs of a highly regulated, highly bureaucratic, centrally planned public healthcare (with the added cost of the salaries and subsidies of hundreds of bureaucrats) and conclude that's what people would have to pay for if it was private.

    The current competitive economic also comes with high overhead costs. Advertising, multiplied company structures / production facilities, Salesmen...

    Whatever economic system you chose, it will not be free. Humans are greedy and as long as they are, we will spend at least twice the amount of resources (and produce twice the amount of pollution) on everything than we would have to spend if greed would not be a thing. We would not even need the concepts of money or "buying something" without it.

    So it is not about overhead but about whether it works or not. If people starve or can't afford healthcare, that means to me, that the system is failing for them. For me, that is a bug that has to be fixed. Whether that also is a bug for you, depends on your ethics (for a social darwinist it would be a feature).

     

    • Like 1
  15. They're really awesome looking weapon models for the Doomsday Engine.

    Wow, that contrast between the weapon and the map. As if the weapon is sucking up the geometric and texture complexity of the map - when it is done, there will only be a grey box design left.

    Like a vampire sucking out the life of his victim...

  16. Poor people are paying too. Which is what makes all of this stuff ironic. In some places perhaps there's a flat tax, or maybe they don't pay income tax or something of the sort, but they're still paying all the other taxes. Like I said before, those who can't afford college educations are still paying for the college educations of those who can, and they're still paying for the schools they're never gonna use again, and they're still potentially being payed less wherever companies have to cover half of people's social security (because costs (and taxes) imposed on companies are always reflected on prices, worker wages or on market shares), etc, etc.

    There are a lot of ways how a government can implement a welfare state. The poor may have to pay less or profit from lower/no income tax or get state aid... Some of that ways involve giving money to the poor, others are based on giving directly what is needed. The first type is way easier to implement. So most often you see people paying taxes (at least consumer taxes) while also getting state aid.

    Governments are bureaucratic monsters even without having to come up with a way to exempt people from consumer taxes (wich, by the way is pretty hard to pull off without creating a lot of exploit potential in practice). So they just calculate minimum living wage and try to get everyone above that. That works more or less well - but in general it works.

    So yes, the poor pay their consumer taxes as everyone else - and get state aid to still have enough to pay the bills.

     

    Whether income tax and social security contributions should exist or whether everything should be covered by consumer tax and other taxes (property tax, corporate tax, capital yields tax, inheritance tax... there are a lot of taxes out there), is highly controversial. I tend to like the no-income-tax concept more because i then does not have to fill out tax forms anymore. But redistribution should be easier when having a (most often progressive) income tax...

    At the end it does not really matter, how the money is redistributed between the rich, the not so rich and the poor as long as all people can eat, pay their bills and get good medical care when they need it.

    Redistribution is the point here. At the end, the entirety of all people pays for everything (assuming that there is no free lunch *g*).

     

    So the art of building a welfare state is to get the rich pay for the poor. High or low prices do not matter at all. The median living standard matters. Whether there is enough wealth to be redistributed matters (and there is plenty). Redistribution overhead does matter too - wich might be something to consider in the next debate about tax fairness and basic income... ;)

    • Like 1
  17. But the concern is not even that superficial. The concern could be better phrased as "why should I be paying for the health issues of some person that didn't take care of their health in the first place?" Most medical issues are related to things they could've controlled, like smoking or eating crap, etc.

    Insurances in general work by collecting the (financial) risks of many and let everyone only pay for the average of that risks. That way, you can protect yourself against the biggest insured risks without having to have a reserve that would actually cover it. You pay a relatively small (compared to the insured risk) fee and can use the rest of the money for something else instead of needing a huge sum lying around with a low probability to ever getting used.

     

    The next step after defining the existance of human rights, is to make sure, that such rights are not only a piece of worthless paper but actually ensure the wellfare of all people (well, only citizen for now, because we are not that advanced as a society just yet). That includes a lot of poor people.

    So the government applies the principles behind insurances on its governed population (for now; it will be the entire world after enough of the population reached a higher humanity level). As someone has to pay for it and the poor can't, the people who actually have money are paying for themselves and the poor. That concept is called "welfare state".

×
×
  • Create New...