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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The main reasons why it’s Doom specifically are also because:

    • The game is open-source: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr This makes it much more doable to port it to other platforms (and to strip out anything not absolutely required to get the first level to run when you run into technological limitations) than when you have to rely on unofficial modding tools.

    • It’s nearly 30 years old and designed for computers with only a few megabytes of memory and for processors of well under 100MHz, which are specs which the majority of modern systems have, even embedded systems. It also renders fully on the CPU and doesn’t require specific hardware like a GPU or a specific graphics chip.

    • Being a first person shooter with 3D-ish visuals it looks a lot more impressive than if you show off a simple game like Pong orTetris or something like that. It has the right balance between performance requirements and impressiveness, and it’s also a game that was very popular in its time and it’s instantly recognisable to a lot of people.



  • It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.

    I’ve seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn’t actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don’t remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.

    Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.


  • There are several those keys can be obtained, and most of them don’t involve fraud:

    • Purchasing keys in a region where they’re cheaper, and reselling them in regions where the game is more expensive

    • Purchasing keys during a sale, and reselling them after the sale

    • Claiming keys from giveaways and selling those when the giveaway is over

    • Buying a bundle (such as Humble Bundle) and selling the keys you aren’t interested in or you already have

    • Buying games with stolen credit card and reselling those keys

    Only the last one is illegal and costs the developers money. Digital storefronts have made it harder to obtain raw, transferrable keys and have introduced region locks to try to combat those top 3 methods, but they all were very common in the past.

    Key resellers like G2A are pretty much just an eBay for keys. It’s not an illegal organisation, they just provide platforms on which people can sell their game keys, but they don’t know (and probably don’t care) how those keys are actually obtained. The majority of keys on those platforms are actually legit (iirc by far the biggest category is games purchased out of region).

    HOWEVER,

    The legally obtained keys sold on the platform are all obtained in such a way that the developers get little to no money from it, so chargeback fees from a few fraudulent purchases easily outweighs the small amount of money they get from the legit keys there. So even though the majority of keys sold on such platforms are not illegal, the few illegal keys that do exist are enough to make the developers still lose money on average with keys sold there.


  • That’s pretty much how it used to work.

    The main reasons why it changed are:

    • Space, as a connector is slightly bigger than a soldered connection, and the battery itself has to be slightly bigger and stronger too to be safe to transport and handle without being protected by the phone’s case.

    • Water resistance; it’s far easier to make a phone’s case waterproof by just glueing the whole thing shut than having to use seals and gaskets and such to make it possible to open and close it at will.


  • An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.

    It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn’t do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.

    I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.