EnglishMobster
EnglishMobster avatar

EnglishMobster

@EnglishMobster@kbin.social

Hello!

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.

Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!

As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.

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  • Disneyland's parking structures (highlighted in red) (programming.dev)

    I haven’t done any technical calculations. On a quick glance I’d say all of this parking is about half the size of the park itself. Very little parking inside the main park boundaries, which is mostly for service vehicles (these spaces aren’t highlighted)....

    EnglishMobster, (edited )
    EnglishMobster avatar

    You're missing 2 more lots!

    On the opposite side of the Harbor and Ball Rd. intersection there's another parking lot. This is "Ball Lot" and is used by employees. Employees need a shuttle to get to work.

    Further down Katella, across the street from the convention center, there's Toy Story/"K Lot", which is a combination parking lot for guests and more employee parking. This is the largest parking lot of them all, taking up an entire city block.

    The lot you've marked across from House of Blues is indeed a Disney lot but it is rarely used. Additionally, the "lot" you've marked inside California Adventure isn't a "real" parking lot - just a place for storage of maintenance trucks and stuff that rarely leaves the bounds of the park. If you're counting those, there's a lot more area you should count (all of the outside of Indiana Jones/Haunted Mansion, everything from the backside of Space Mountain to Main Street). There's also a parking garage just below the spot you've marked in Team Disney Anaheim - that gray structure to the south of the parking lot is a parking garage for corporate folks that have their office behind the park.

    (I used to work at Disneyland.)

    Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls - The Verge (www.theverge.com)

    Last night, at approximately 2AM ET, a former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, accusing Linus Media Group of cultivating a toxic work environment and encouraging a work culture that was detrimental to her health as well as sexual harassment directed at her by Linus Media...

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    Here's a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

    The following is a transcript if you'd rather avoid Reddit:

    (speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it's come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won't be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

    Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what's right. We're only a team as long as we're all working together and working for each other. That's the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

    Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don't solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they're having a conflict with, we have a chain that they're supposed to follow.

    So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we're here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won't tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

    If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I'm not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

    Um, some of you know us very well, I've been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you've been here for nine years or nine days, you're here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

    Um, We can't solve problems we don't know about though, so on that note, I'd like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

    It's the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you're not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren't aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There's an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you're not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that's okay, that's fine, we understand, that's why we have these options - Yvonne's gonna post it in the general chat.

    It's a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you're consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

    Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

    (speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

    (speaker 1, Linus) That's it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

    (speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

    (speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    To be fair, you don't get to be an expert at something by just reading about it. You become an expert by immersing yourself in it and knowing all the nuanced details of what you specialize in.

    For example, I'm a AAA gamedev programmer. My specialty is the Unreal Engine. I know tons of little quirks about the engine that many of my coworkers don't - but that's because I've been using the engine for over a decade at this point.

    I don't devote every waking moment to learning about Unreal - I used to spend a lot of free time researching it before I got hired, but now I leave gaming stuff at work to avoid burnout.

    You don't need to like hyperfixate on something to become good at it. You just need to work on it for long enough - and if it's literally your job, you'll spend 40+ hours/week engrossed in it, for years.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    Oh, for the love of- fuck off.

    Nobody asked for your blatant transphobia here. The fact that that's the first place your head went shows you have some deep-seated issues you need to work out.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    Hey, how about reading the article before regurgitating your shit (wrong) opinions?

    Here, I'll help.

    At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

    Balthrop told Regina that the closest abortion provider for Ashley would be in Chicago. At first, Regina thought she and Ashley could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and Regina would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says.

    So Ashley did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing.

    This is what the policies you support cause. I hope you'll do some research and reconsider.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

    Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power's sake. "Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others" sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn't agree with them the barrel of a gun.

    The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

    Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

    The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

    Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

    Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don't let them trick you into thinking they're the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they're told. The lower class are the people they don't like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

    Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy's founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

    I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don't mind communists - I'm pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    I use Flatpak all the time. It works a lot better than native apps very often.

    Also it's a lot easier than fussing with PPAs or whatever. I'm on KDE Neon and wanted to run something through Wine. The Wine in the stock PPAs was an older version with a known bug that wouldn't let me install the .NET Framework 4.8. I tried fetching the Wine PPA directly, but then I was getting issues about system packages not being compatible with newer versions of Wine.

    The more I dug, the more issues popped up (typical Linux). So I gave up and decided to install Lutris and try it through there, since Lutris has a workaround for those Wine issues. The Lutris in the stock PPAs also was an old version with a known bug where it just... wouldn't work. You'd click a button and nothing would happen because of an HTTP bug. Rather than fuss around with that, I gave up and installed the Lutris Flatpak.

    30 seconds later, my program was installed and running. No nonsense in the command line, no fussing around with packages. Just open and go.

    A majority of the programs I have are Flatpak now. I have Flatpak for Zoom to let me take work meetings from my Linux partition; I have Flatpak for Parsec to let me remote in to my work desktop from my Linux partition. Blender, Calibre, Chrome, Discord, Thunderbird, PrusaSlicer, Slack, Rider, VS Code... all Flatpak.

    They all work great. I get prompt updates to stay on the bleeding edge. No more dependency hell. I now actively search for Flatpaks before I fall back to apt.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    I'm also in Vulkan on Linux with an AMD card. I don't get those black boxes.

    The main menu has terrible framerate, but everywhere else is acceptable through Proton (45-50). DX11 has great framerate on the main menu, but like 8-10 FPS ingame (my Windows partition can hold a steady 60).

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    People don't want to sell their personal data for currency.

    People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

    People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don't see billionaires lining up for this.

    It's exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there's the systemic problem - that there shouldn't be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn't being solved anytime soon.

    But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data... that's immoral. It's immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

    Why do you think you're hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?

    EnglishMobster, (edited )
    EnglishMobster avatar

    The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that's where Google got the idea from.

    Basically, this is the way it works:

    • You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the "attester". Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can't patch the binary).

    • A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a "good" attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can't just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn't work when you get a different request.

    • The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - "this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits," etc.

    • If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can't patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

    • The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

    • The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

    They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many ("low entropy"). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that "Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.")

    That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn't want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they're pushing "low-entropy" under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    That's because they check your user agent.

    This API aims to break those kinds of extensions, making it impossible to spoof a user agent or certain kind of machine.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    I'd love to see more races and classes. Artificers, Tortles, Warforged, Tabaxi, etc. There's a bunch of missing subclasses too, like Storm Barbarian or Swashbuckler Rogue.

    Maybe mod tools would allow that, but at the same time I'm not convinced. It just seems like easy territory for an expansion, sort of like Tasha's or Eberron... but for the video game.

    EnglishMobster, (edited )
    EnglishMobster avatar

    There's a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

    Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it's a pyramid. Fascism is when these "some people are better" is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn't touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where "some people are better" because they know the party leaders or they're technocrats. It's a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)

    Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn't have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn't be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things ("always a bigger fish").

    Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can't have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as "apolitical", even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    Lmao, from

    A lot of these are not exactly clear threats. If you used the same standards I’m sure you could come up with a similar list from the US.

    to

    Generating such a biased, exaggerated list for the US would be a waste of time

    Aka "I'm having trouble sourcing my own claim so just trust me bro"

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    You're not incorrect, and even "he was a product of his time" isn't an excuse: when he was alive, even other racists thought that Lovecraft was a bit too racist.

    However, at the same time - you have to look at what impact reading his work has.

    He's dead. He doesn't get money from it. The works are public domain. His estate doesn't get money from it. Further, the language used is striking, influencing a century of other work.

    Does that language come from a place of racism? Yes. But it the work itself isn't overly racist - or at least, it doesn't make it more racist than Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four is used in college classes today to teach Orientalism, yet largely people accept such a thing as okay because it doesn't radicalize new people into the subject.

    If you reject every artistic work because the creators had questionable views, then you begin forcing yourself into strange choices. If the artist doesn't gain benefit from you reading it - then logically, it doesn't matter if you read something they made or not (contrast this to Harry Potter, where consuming said media gives money to a TERF). When the artist is out of the picture, the only thing that matters is what the work means to you.

    You have the right to say "the work is abhorrent because of XYZ", but said things should be things you can point to within the work itself. If the artist isn't gaining benefit and their views aren't the focus of the work - why does it matter?

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.

    Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They're also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don't care what others think).

    Combine the two and you get this.

    EnglishMobster,
    EnglishMobster avatar

    Yes, and if you wind up moving to a console (once console versions come out) it will support those saves on console as well - if the launcher is to be believed.

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