That’s pretty damn cool, to be fair.

The Borg have spheres too, to be fair.

I don’t personally like Nintendo’s actions, but I’m not sure why this article is trying to imply Nintendo miscalculated and don’t know what they’re doing - as if bricking consoles will somehow lose them money.

From Nintendo’s perspective, turning the used market into a minefield of bricked consoles can only be a good thing, because it encourages people to buy new, and buying new is money in Nintendo’s pocket.

And the conclusion that people won’t buy the console for their kids because of this? “Sorry kids, but Nintendo are bad so we cant play your favourite Mario - you’re getting a steam deck instead!” Like heck! A small minority maybe, but people will generally buy their kids what the kids ask for.

Nintendo know what they are doing.

These categories of geometric problem are ridiculously difficult to find the definitive perfect solution for, which is exactly why people have been grinding on them for decades, and mathematicians can’t say any more than “it’s the best one found so far”

For this particular problem the diagram isn’t answering “the most efficient way to pack some particular square” but “what is the smallest square that can fit 17 unit-sized (1x1) squares inside it” - with the answer here being 4.675 unit length per side.

Trivially for 16 squares they would fit inside a grid of 4x4 perfectly, with four squares on each row, nice and tidy. To fit just one more square we could size the container up to 5x5, and it would remain nice and tidy, but there is then obviously a lot of empty space, which suggests the solution must be in-between. But if the solution is in between, then some squares must start going slanted to enable the outer square to reduce in size, as it is only by doing this we can utilise unfilled gaps to save space by poking the corners of other squares into them.

So, we can’t answer what the optimal solution exactly is, or prove none is better than this, but we can certainly demonstrate that the solution is going to be very ugly and messy.

Another similar (but less ugly) geometric problem is the moving sofa problem which has again seen small iterations over a long period of time.

It’s true.

Rules are meant to be broken - apart from when they aren’t.

You can change any aspect of the world any way you like, but only if doing that is critical to your universe and story.

Messing up without reason conventions that are well established is a dick move, unless the whole point of your work is to screw with people.

Nah this one is easy.

If it’s green and sparkly, it’s a good thing. If it’s green and bubbly, it’s a bad thing.

Also it’s an autumn day and the office heating is just a little hot and stuffy

Seems like you’re in the UK too.

Yeah, this was never a thing until Amazon made it one.

Thankfully, the law is very unambiguous about this, and if a parcel is left outside and then stolen before it gets into your hands (unless you specifically asked for it to be left outside) then you are entitled to a refund or replacement.

Amazon play the numbers game and figure that replacing x number of packages costs less than needing their drivers to bring all the undeliverable packages back and try again a different day.

It’s not a cool precedent though and I very much dislike it being normalised.

I’m glad I’m one of those people who can’t seem to percieve any difference above 60Hz

Having low standards is pretty convenient

The beginning of this headline had me mislead.

I read ‘creepiest publisher’, and with the state of the industry these days I immediately thought it was going to be some exposé piece on a toxic culture of workplace misogyny, and sexual harassment.

Glad it’s actually a cool studio doing interesting things!

I don’t think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.

And after the apocalypse is finished there’s probably gonna be Iike, jobs available, and plenty of empty real estate. Opportunities!

Viewers have literally zero attention span, so if the talking isn’t super high speed back to back without even a single second to pause for breath, people click off or scroll past.

Same with subtitles that flash up rapidly, a single word at at time.

That’s the sorry state of affairs we are now living with.

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

The coffee story is quite a long way in, but it was an interesting read, thanks.

I guess the message is, things aren’t always good because they are objectively good. Sometimes things are good because of when we had them, and who we enjoyed them with. And that’s definitely true.

I’m two ways about this.

In recent years I’ve become quite a coffee lover. I’ve experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)

At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that’s what I’ll get, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it’s got that taste of nostalgia lol.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:

Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.

Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.