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What are your programming hot takes?
  • I agree, strong typing is for weak minds. I work with a weak mind so I want strong typing.

    There's no difference in speed between typing disciplines. In point of fact, there cannot be. You must know the structure of your data to program against it. Whether you write it down explicitly or implicitly changes nothing but the location you wrote it down.

  • Most and Least Verbose Programming Languages
  • My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.

  • Todd Howard wants Elder Scrolls 6 to be ‘the ultimate fantasy-world simulator’
  • Even Skyrim wasn't bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It's just not exactly what I'd call "ultimate".

    Oblivion was good. It's dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.

  • Todd Howard wants Elder Scrolls 6 to be ‘the ultimate fantasy-world simulator’
  • Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.

    Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.

  • Todd Howard wants Elder Scrolls 6 to be ‘the ultimate fantasy-world simulator’
  • Unless they've made some major engine changes... I feel like it's going to be hard to top games like BG3, Elden Ring, or even Breath of the Wild.

    BG3 has the deep story and npcs. Elden Ring has the emphasis on combat. Breath of the Wild freeform exploration.

    Yes, I want a game that combines all of those and in the ES series the closest was probably Morrowind (combat being perhaps the most notable lack.)

  • What game mechanics do you love and hate?
  • I don't mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it's just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it's optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I'd rather not do again.

  • What game mechanics do you love and hate?
  • I think it's fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.

  • What would your perfect system look like?
  • Provided that I must work to feed myself, to shelter myself from the elements, and to receive routine medical care: I cannot be described as consenting to work. I am coerced. In an ideal system, I would not be coerced to work as my access to basic necessities would not be predicated upon my employment.

    In nature, survival makes certain demands of us but as intelligent creatures capable of automating most work there is simply no need. People who wish to do more deserve more but no one should have to work to be alive. Without life you cannot have liberty and without liberty you cannot find happiness. The goal of any society should be equity of happiness. This implies sustainability as consuming resources leaves none for those who come later and thus deprives them of opportunity.

    More concretely, I find it difficult to believe that those in entirely different environments can have great insights into the challenges faced by others. Thus smaller societies should be preferred to larger ones. Outside of crisis, any decision should be unanimous among representatives. Locally, provided the capacity to re-home each community should decide how it runs for itself. This is effectively an initial pure democracy with majority rule which may then evolve in any direction. It's fine for local groups to be disfunctional as society as a whole relies on social experiments to determine what works best in any given environment.

  • [Roll of Law] The ORC License: Worse than the OGL
  • My understanding of their desire is to be able to hold onto rights related to their settings and characters (and by extension you hold onto your own settings and characters) while forcibly sharing (SA) mechanics and to do this in a single license.

    This is a goal that CC (BY) (SA) can't solve simply due to the one license requirement. The intent was (though the execution failed) that you'd say ORC everything but <these names> and the result would be people could borrow the ORC mechanics and any improvements could be backported if it was good.

    That said, I haven't been following ORC very hard as I have no real interest in it. My own work I'm perfectly happy with CC-BY-SA on everything.

  • What type of game do you want to play that doesn't really exist?
  • Polynesian for the original source of mana as a loan word would be cool. I also find stuff like Aztec would work really well for an RPG.

    If I had a wish though, it would probably be to make a scaled down world that samples most of the historical cultures of each continent. Then do something where quests need you to do a bit of syncretism to solve them.

  • 87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games
  • I've always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

    We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

  • The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
  • Even that definition is myopic. The Dems only want to return to 2016 in the same way I want to return to 1933 when minimum wage was actually valuable. It's not a focus on the past when your actions wouldn't change even if the past wasn't there.

  • I know I should... but I just really don't wanna
  • It's not the worst thing. Like any other test there are more and less valuable methods. Imo, the hardest part is not coupling yourself to the incidental. All tests have that issue but UIs are almost entirely incidental. Styles, layout, and even data and function can be incidental and thus likely to change.

  • I know I should... but I just really don't wanna
  • So so many unit tests I see don't meaningfully test anything. It would be faster to just read the unit under test because the test itself presents nothing that you wouldn't instantly recognize. Or the test is so tightly coupled to some arbitrary property that of course the test fails whenever you change something. UI tests at my current place are terrible for this, as they're just comparing DOM structures so any change breaks it.

  • fediverse as a file system?

    This is closer to a shower thought, given I don't really know much about how ActivityPub works. Has anyone, or is it even possible to, made an instance designed to work as say a FUSE file system?

    I was mostly just thinking about how hard UIs are to make and thought "what if the content was the UI".

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    Tabletop: world building, homebrew, and design

    Just wondering if enough people are here for posts and discussion about what people are creating for their table top games. If you are and want to share a snippet about what you're working on, that would be great!

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MO
    Mot @beehaw.org
    Posts 2
    Comments 48