Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 5

For the bedroom I’ve forgone buying 2 extra physical buttons on the bedside tables in favour of adding a shortcut to our phone lock screens, which are on the bedside anyway. This is how I discovered how bad the Shortcuts app is in iOS - you *can* make it do what you want (like use a nightlight setting when you ask for light at 3am rather than 8am) but man is that shit unintuitive, and in a programmer for fecks sake. Really terrible, from the company supposedly all about user friendliness

I’m a skeptic on smart home stuff, I like to keep things simple, but I have been convinced to install smart lighting in the living room and bedroom. The benefits of variable mood lighting and a bedroom light that automatically doesn’t blind you when you switch it on in the middle of the night is too useful.

I still use physical buttons though. I’ve been to people’s houses where they shout at privacy nightmare Alexa 3 times when they could have just hit a button in a tenth of the time, so daft

Jedi Survivor is quite buggy but I’m still enjoying the hell out of it. It saves some of its best stuff for the mid game, and I’ve had a few unexpected genuine belly laughs out of it. Rick the Door Technician was great and the folks who modelled, animated, wrote and voiced Skooma Stev (an inexplicably Glaswegian moustachioed slug in a diving suit) were doing some of their best work

As someone who lost a good 18 months of productivity (and life in general) to chair-lifestyle related back problems I advocate for the Hag Capisco all the time; I’ve had one for 15 years and I genuinely credit it with having saved my programming career. I consider all other chairs to be junk in comparison.

After years of being the only person I know with one, quite a few people I know have converted to one recently, and it’s great when they report improvements in their back health too 🤘

#introductions
I'm Steve, I'm a coder who wrote their first line 40 years ago.

Past:
- Founded Ogre3D
- Made OG SourceTree
- Worked on early Git-LFS
- Washed Up! a cosy environmentalism-themed pentomino puzzler https://store.steampowered.com/app/854830/Washed_Up/

Present:
- Tech @ indie couple, unannounced co-op game w/ UE5
- Dialogue plugin for UE5: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/suds-pro-dialogue-system
- Open source UE5 tools: https://github.com/sinbad

Future:
- 👀🔮 🤷♂️

@eniko Yeaah 😄 It was a very long time ago

@eniko 😛

“Vetting” can mean delegating due diligence to the publisher (or repackager) rather than personally reading the source, but that means vetting the publisher instead. And there is a finite number of those that you can maintain vetted trust in at any one time. You can’t just assume that the “community” somehow automatically protects you against bad actors. It might, but it’s been shown many times that it might not; sometimes everyone thinks someone else would have spotted a problem and no-one does

It makes me laugh when I see programmers harping on about their memory safe languages and how they’re not subject to buffer overruns like the old man languages, while auto-pulling 500 dependencies from randos on the Internet into their projects without even looking at them

Every week there’s an article about the high vulnerability of package managers to supply chain attacks and I’m just amazed it’s taken this long for people to figure out that routinely auto-pulling 500 disparate third party libraries unseen into your project is a terrible idea

I remember back in my MacOS dev days being told that I should be using CocoaPods and when I told them that was a stupid idea (I had like 3 dependencies and regularly poked around in the source for all of them) I was the old fashioned old man. “But it automates all the updates!”. So what? There’s 3. a) I don’t need it, it’s super easy to pull changes from source and b) when I do it manually I actually *look* at the updates like a sane person would https://arstechnica.com/?p=2034866

Of course there’s no reason you can’t use automated package managers *and* do the kind of due diligence a responsible developer would do when pulling code from third parties into their project, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this. Instead it seems normal to implicitly trust anything that comes out of a package management system no matter who controls it and that’s always been wild to me.

And the thing is, the number of external dependencies (and their update volume) that you can realistically, properly vet for inclusion in your project, is inherently small enough that you don’t need a package manager. And if you need a package manager to handle it all, you can’t be checking what you’re pulling in and so you’re definitely vulnerable.

Corporate dudes are so full of it - they’ve spent every year since the magical 90s this idiot is citing chasing maximal IP enforcement of anything *they* own, but now they want to nick everyone else’s content, it’s all fair use apparently. Absolutely full of it.

I think it would be totally fair to pirate anything you want from any company that trains AI on other people’s content. Fair use https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/28/24188391/microsoft-ai-suleyman-social-contract-freeware

I have to grit my teeth every time a PC builder points with glee at their above-1KW PSU

A PC shouldn’t need to suck that many watts, at the end of the day it’s just dumping the equivalent heat into your room, it’s not a flex

@HauntedOwlbear ok that’s useful, thanks. May noodle about a bit more of an evening to see

Got PopOS installed on the old workstation last night, was very easy and the base setup runs very well, nippy and nice looking. Fractional scaling even works fairly well. I missed Directory Opus immediately, Double Commander is quite good but isn’t quite as nice. I haven’t tried running Affinity under Bottles/Wine yet. But by far the main problem is that UE runs terribly, about 30% slower than the same hardware in Windows 😕 Not sure why, AMD GPU perhaps

This is an older GPU and I’m running 4K so I’m careful about the size of the viewport, but I used to get 60fps on the same size viewport in Windows and it struggles to hit more than 40 here. That’s with all the Lumen stuff turned off in the super basic FPS example.

Actually now I think I forgot to turn off virtual shadow maps. Will have to try it without that

Nah that didn’t help. As well as the frame rate being low generally, it spikes down to the 20s every couple of seconds. To repeat this is the same hardware I was using on Windows until recently so I know it can do better, solid 60 with these settings / viewport sizes. It lags the whole UE UI.

I’ve checked and it’s running the Vulkan backend and my drivers are up to date (AFAICT). It’s not very usable; if you put a beastier GPU in you could maybe hide it but ugh - and those spikes are not great

Oh and it crashed in the Vulkan renderer when I closed the window 🙄