BougieBirdie

3 hours of debugging can save you 30 minutes of reading the documentation

I suppose people will always do what they think is easiest

It wouldn’t surprise me if reviewers have the budget for top of the line computers. Sadly, that does little to soothe my frustration that my computer - which meets the advertised recommended specs - falls short

Frickin Dead Space remake. I’m playing through it now and even on the lowest settings it was pretty bad. My computer crashed while the shuttle was crashing, which honestly felt kind of apt

I’ve never beat the original, but my wife wanted to see the game and has never played it. Even after tweaking things to get them running on my computer it’s still not super stable. We might have to switch to 2008

The game looks super tense, gross, and scary. Personally, I think it’d be scarier if it was buttery smooth, but I guess there’s a certain amount of anxiety to be had wondering if walking through a door is going to freeze the game while I’m being chased by xeno horrors

Well of course the victim is going to play the victim. That’s just good marketing - and what is marketing if not propaganda?

Your comment reads as though the invading state’s actions aren’t propaganda. This is the whole reason why I came here to warn people to be skeptical of what they read online.

In an ironic twist, here’s an online source about the Russian disinformation campaign telling citizens that if you play Stalker 2 you’ll be drafted to fight in Ukraine against Russia.

Again, you should be skeptical of what you read online. In a vacuum, I’m inclined to believe the victim of invasion. In reality, I know that the situation is more nuanced - although the credibility of the aggressor is extremely suspect.

For what it’s worth, my impression on the game is that it’s yet another over-hyped game that couldn’t possibly live up to its expectations. The developers are financially incentivized to deflect that criticism through any means available to them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that malicious actors are also trying to discredit the game.

I haven’t played Stalker 2 so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but it’s very politically charged and has Russian state sponsored disinformation campaigns running against it. I’m not sure that you can get a truly accurate read of it online.

The developers are Ukrainian, and development had to be paused because their office literally turned into a warzone. The fact that the game came out at all is extremely based, and that certainly adds to the mythology around the game. But again, I haven’t played it, and gameplay-wise that doesn’t actually indicate anything about the game.

I want the game to succeed because of the developers’ existential struggle. The people causing that existential struggle want the game to fail. Neither of us have actually played the game, so again, there’s all this bias around it and we haven’t even looked at gameplay yet.

Be skeptical of anything you read online

That’s crazy, how can somebody not know what brand of laptop they…

HOLY SHIT ME TOO

Often times, people learn that the stove is hot by touching it.

It’s easier to blame the stove than the person who touched it. But if you laugh when you watch it happen, you’re probably not laughing at the stove.

Pepe has been sensationalized for a while now in the media as being a hate symbol. I think it’s because you see it largely on 4chan which traditional media demonizes.

I’m not on 4chan, but it seems like it has similar problems to Steam: a large userbase and poor content moderation gives insufferable people a platform to spread hate from. These problems aren’t unique to either platform, but the news likes to latch on to them.

I hate that some people consider Pepe to be a hate symbol. He’s just an expressive frog, dang it

I haven’t played the game, so I’m not sure how accurate my help would be. It would be helpful to be able to look at some tooltips from these skills. But to my eye this looks like a talent / build system that’s fairly common in ARPGS.

My most basic assumption is that every so often you’ll level up and be able to pick one of these skills. They’ll provide some kind of effect which is tied to an active skill (Red, Blue, and Purple appear to be likely), or a passive bonus (Orange, Yellow, and Green I’d guesss).

The arrows are throwing me off a little bit because sometimes they point in both directions, and other times they appear to loop. Usually these might mark a pre-requisite skill, so if it shows [A] <-- [B] then that implies that before you can acquire A you must first acquire B.

If I had to guess, [A] <–> [B] implies either you can freely choose between A and B, or perhaps once you select A you must select B before you can select A again.

The loops feel weird though (notably in the yellow block). I guess that means that whatever skill you start with, you must then select clockwise from there.

There’s a great variety in how games will implement this sort of thing, but in general there’s usually a way to get a tooltip with a more complete description of what each thing does. Usually that would be by hovering over the icon, but some games include an encyclopedia of effects if they’re particularly involved.

The order in which you acquire these skills often influences your playstyle. Some people are going to prefer to get abilities that seem powerful quickly, and other people like to strategically synergize their build. For my part, I tend to prefer acquiring passive bonuses that increase my experience/luck/currency to more easily game the system.

I’m old enough to remember the chainsaw controller

The caption is mislabeled, but don’t worry, I’ve got your back:

Left: Biology majors looking at Computer Science majors all day

Right: Bugs looking at bugs all day

I wasn’t aware my mediocrity was on display. 😅

Honestly, I liked the professor. When he had time to teach something he was clearly interested in, he did a great job of connecting. He didn’t get to teach us OOP though because there was a staffing emergency. The person we did get normally taught Hardware, so he was basically just reading aloud the textbook. Poor guy.

And you’re right, the professor did let us know that there was going to be a change of requirements partway through. But it wouldn’t be a good lesson if he told us what was going to change, although he did give some examples from previous times he’d taught the course.

A lot of people got burned when the change came. For my part I thought I did pretty okay, the refactor didn’t go perfectly but it was better than if I hadn’t been prepared. But I’ve also written a bunch of really gross objects that served no purpose just because they might change later. As anything is, it’s all about finding that happy medium

That’s a fair assessment. It’s kind of like the rule for premature optimization: don’t.

With experience you might get some intuition about when it’s good to lean into inheritance. We were definitely lacking experience at that point though.

OOP is a pretty powerful paradigm, which means it’s also easy to provide enough rope to hang yourself with. See also just about any other meme here about OOP

Most of my college coursework was around OOP. That said, they actually did a pretty lousy job of explaining it in a practical sense, so since we were left to figure it out ourselves a lot of our assignments ended up looking like this.

At the end of the program, our capstone project was to build a full stack app. They did a pretty good job simulating a real professional experience: we all worked together on requirements gathering and database design, then were expected to build our own app.

To really drive home the real world experience, the professor would change the requirements partway through the project. Which is a total dick move, but actually a good lesson on its own.

Anyway, this app was mostly about rendering a bunch of different views, and something subtly would change that ended up affecting all views. After the fact, the professor would say something to the effect of “If you used good objects, you’ll only have to make the change in one place.”

This of course is only helpful if you really appreciated the power of OOP and planned it from the start. Most of us were flying by the seat of our pants, so it was usually a ton of work to get those changes in

Who’s at index zero?

The friggin’ dogs in Resident Evil.

I have a kind of funny story about that. I was too young to be playing RE when it came out, but that didn’t stop me from sneaking it out of my dad’s collection of grownup games to try it anyway.

So there’s this well known jump scare, probably in the first fifteen minutes as you say where you’re running down a hallway and suddenly some dogs jump through these glass windows. I screamed, fumbled the controller, and was eaten by dogs. Might have been the first jump scare of my life.

So I hadn’t hit a save point, so you have to start the game over. So I decide to just leave the mansion through the front door instead of going out that way. And you get a cutscene where a dog jumps through the door and you have to wrestle it away.

I still haven’t played the game since.

But my wife and I are a big fan of the series, so eventually we decided to marathon them on the condition that she plays RE1. She’s playing the remake and goes into the room where the dogs jump through the windows and I’m holding my breath waiting for it to happen. Only it doesn’t.

So I’m a little disappointed, but I figure it’s a remake so maybe they’re switching things up a bit and going to put the jump scare somewhere else in the mansion.

Sooner or later you have to backtrack through that corridor though, and on like the third time going through this “safe” corridor the dogs jump through the window. She screams, fumbles the controller, and is eaten by dogs.

Seven-year-old me was vindicated that my adult wife also got punked and I’m not alone.

A hammer is beginner friendly, but learning to use a hammer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to build a house with it.

Well, I’m not a psychologist, so I suppose my interpretation might not be correct - the irony mounts.

But from the graphs you shared, it looks to me like the only people who underestimated themselves were the top performers. And from what I know firsthand with imposter syndrome, a competent person underestimates themselves.

I used hyperbole for effect, so I don’t think that if you believe you have zero competence in something because you actually have zero competence means that you’re secretly good at something. If you know nothing about plumbing, don’t try to install a toilet.

But if you’re working in the software factory then you don’t actually have zero competence, you probably have formal education and some experience. Having that feeling that you might not be good enough is a sign that you’re on the right track.

I felt like that early in my career. I used to think that being a rockstar developer was a good thing, and I’d be happy to describe myself as one.

The thing is, a lot of rockstars are really just churning out heaps of unmaintainable code. They think they have a high degree of proficiency, they’re confident in their competence, but there’s a disconnect between what they think and what they produce.

It can be a sign of personal improvement to question yourself when you think you’re doing great. We owe it to ourselves to ask ourselves critically if we can be doing better. Because if we don’t, and we just assume we’re awesome, then we’ll happily churn out sub-awesome cruft.

The insidious thing is that self-criticism leads to self-doubt, and imposter syndrome can be quite paralyzing. But if you learn to control your criticism instead of allowing your criticism to control you, you can achieve higher heights than rockstardom.

Based on what I know of Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems you’re at your most competent when you feel like you’re at your least.

So if you’re feeling badly because you feel like you don’t know enough to do your job, take some time to remind yourself that other people who appear to be confident have no idea what they’re doing.

It’s fake-it-till-you-make-it all the way down.