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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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

    The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

    Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

    Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

    So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

    Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

    Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

    I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

    The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It’s also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

    I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I’m thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they’ve simply not been the best stewards of the project - it’s succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

    That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).



  • 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.




  • 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.


  • 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?