With what has happened around the studio, I’d say it’s good that DE2 was canceled. It was to be made by a ruins of a studio that was stolen along with it’s IP from the original developers and artists, who didn’t manage to navigate the landmine of for-profit gamedev industry, and got basically scammed by investors, who robbed them of their IP and studio through various loopholes and bullshit of shares-based companies. (It’s a pretty nuanced story, and I’m not really sure how it ended up, so it’s better to watch the documentary about it if you’re interrested, rather than take my conclusion from it. I also haven’t followed recent developement, so if anyone knows how that turned out, let me know)

It’s quite a sad and infuriating story, especially since ZAUM was IIRC originally a pretty wholesome art collective of punks and anarchists from squats. It must have been devastating to enter the market with such ideals, only to be scammed of your art by the first investor you encounter, who you might’ve even considered a friend.

There’s quite a few ex-Disco Elysium studios popping out. My favorite so far is the Summer Eternal. It feels like they didn’t want to announce it this early, but because two other studios (Longude, and Dark Math Games) got announced few days ago, they did the same.

Summer Eternal feels the most radical out of the three studios, I really like their manifesto and how they are attempting to mix art-collective with market-based development. And they have some amazing writers.

Here are few bits and pieces of the manifesto from their website, I really recommend reading it. Also, the website linked above is just stunning.

…

As creators and game makers, we have too long been led away from the truth, away from the right to define ourselves as artists in service of the definitive art form of the future, one that has made us dream since we were children.

Instead, the disposability culture operating at the ruthless core of this industry wants us to think of ourselves as cogs in the machine: rudimentary craftsmen, disposable career workers, inert producers of made-to-order marketing-driven “content” — empty calories leaving the soul hungry.

The Profiteer knows that by keeping your dignity low, he will keep you crawling on the treadmill of passion until he lays you off for the sake of the red number in his book.

…

Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art is in its core a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across worlds and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality. There is no one to connect to in a large language model. The phone line is open but there’s no one on the other side.

I can’t recommend Maldev Academy enough. It has been an amazing resource, to get into malware development. Keep in mind, however, that malware development is pretty difficult topic. You will have to eventually use WinAPI and syscalls, so learning about that even outside of malware development will help you a lot.

For example, try looking into how to execute a shellcode in memory - allocate memory as RWX, copy some data and then execute it. Try executing it in a different process, or in a different thread of another process. That’s the core of malware development you’ll probably eventually have to do anyway. Manually calling syscalls is also a skill that you’ll need, if you want to get into EDR avoidance.

Also, look into IoCs and what kind of different stuff can be used to detect the malware. Syscall hooks, signatures, AMSI, and syslog are all things that are being watched and analyze to detect malware, and knowing what exactly is your program logging and where is one of the most important and difficult skills you can get.

There probably are a lot resources for these two skills, and they are an important foundation for malware developemnt, so I’d suggest researching that. You’ll probably not get much from looking at other malware, because it tends to be really low-level, and obfuscated, exactly to avoid the IoCs I’ve mentioned above. Implementing the malware behavior after that is the easier part.

Another good resource to look into are C2s and communication, for example Mythic C2 has some interresting stuff.

And I really recommend joining the Bloodhound slack. Throughout my cybersecurity carreer as a Red Teamer, the community has helped me a lot and I’ve learned amazing stuff just by lurking.

I’d recommend Half Life: Alyx.

Or, you can probably make an absolute beast of Skyrim through mods.

It’s best to have a local copy of package repos with whitelisted libraries, or so I’ve heard. But containers are fine, too. Especially with VSCode .devcointainers, it’s super easy to setup and distribute with the repo, there’s really no reason not to do that.

The biggest issue here that a lot people don’t realize is Bing AI, it’s insanely easy to poison it’s results, since it summarizes search results. It’s only a matter of time before someone convinces it to start using or adding a typosquatted/malicious library to answers to a common programming question, and it will be a fun times ahead.

it’s also important to keep in mind that the cybersecurity field has adbanced tremendously, with cloidfare, EDRs, and in general it is now way harder to do anything anonymously without getting caught, quickly. This also males the field of hacking way more difficult to get in, which combined with reduced attention span of younger generations probably means there’s not that many bored teens willing to put the time in, and as an adult you have way much more to loose, so for hose who had the skills it would be a lot greater risk.

As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.

Whi getting through college, I was always bummed that we have to learn a lot of stuff that seemed super irelevant to my future carreer, while also being annoying. Stuff like prolog, Phyro, Lisp, Assembly, or bunch of obscure math.

It was only years later when I finally realized why it was important - the school wasn’t for teaching me to be the C#/Java programmer, but it taught me to be A programmer. I can pick up and start successfully writing anything I need, in any language, relatively quickly and without issues, nonmatter whether it’s functional, objective, or wharever style of language, because I’ve very probably already had to deal with, learn, understand and pass exams in language that is similar to it, since college made me learn a language from almost every style or flavor of languages there are.

I was surprised when I first saw colleagues struggle with picking up languages other than the ones they work in, and that was when I finally realized why and how sneakily did the college make me a universal programmer without me noticing it. And that’s something that’s harder to get when self-taught, because you don’t get exams and it’s easier to miss the point and just skip courses on lisp, prolog or lambda calculus, because it seems irrelevant, but the different point of view and approach used when writing in those languahes is what will teach you the most.

Yeah, I know and that’s what I’m afraid of. I guess I’ll just have to come to terms with most websites not working in some obscure web browser that’s not feature-complete. Would actually help with my addiction, so it won’t be so bad, I guess.

You are right, it was unfairly harsh wording, I apologize for that. Most of those products are super cool and important, I’ve kind of extrapolated it from what I’ve read in other posts about them spending too much on stuff like events and other, non-developemnt, related stuff that I actually never checked, while also not realizing that they also have a ton of other projects, which mixed with the dissapointment with the recent development about the Meta partnership led to me choosing that wording unfairly.

I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

So I asked him in english.

I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.

If it keeps going on like this, it won’t be long before I’ll just say fuck it and switch to elinks…

Hmm, on that note - is there any CLI web browser that can do javascript and css? Because iirc, elinks doesn’t, though I havent used it in years.

IIRC, only like 2% of Mozilla spending goes towards FF (I may be misinterpreting something, but I remember 2% being thrown around), so funding FF without rest of Mozilla bullshit shouldn’t be that hard. Of course, since Mozilla did spend so little on FF, it’s a question how much they actually care about FF and what would happen if they lost access to their golden goose. They shouldn’t have problem funding FF, but they probably have other bullshit they don’t want to let go and that has more priority for them.

I’m not sure what Mullvad is based on - i think it’s on Tor, which is Firefox based?

I do use mostly LibreWolf, but if FF also went to shit, I wonder if Tor, and thus Mullvad, would keep on going or not. Because I suppose LibreWolf would have troubles with keeping up, if Mozilla would enshitify FF, since they would probably have to fork and continue development on their own.

How I understand it is that the admired language is one of those “I’ll start learning it tommorow” languages, that you however already talk about how great it is wherever you can, i.e see Rust on Lemmy.

I also find it funny (and relatable) how neovim is the most admired IDE. I totally relate to that, I’ve been telling myself “I’ll learn and switch to Helix tommorrow” for the past two years.

76% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year, an increase from last year (70%). Many more developers are currently using AI tools this year, too (62% vs. 44%).

What the fuck. That’s horrifying. I also though that every sensible workplace bans the use of AI.

A friend was telling me about a discussion between CTO’s at a conference, where they were talking about whether it’s even worth it to hire junior developers anymore, since there’s a high risk of them just being “AI-raised”, without much (or any) experience of coding without AI. And, this survey result… I can see where they are coming from. The future of programming looks pretty bleak - our job will not be replaced. It will just get worse, with good developers being more of a rarity.

And the amount of people who use vim or neovim as their IDE is surprisingly high. Is it skewed by sysadmins?

That’s a good question, and I never through about it like that. I think that the lack of documentation isn’t that much of a problem, rather that the code stands out in the project in that it is complex to understand and requires some more though, effort and imagination to grasp, since it’s generic with lot of interfaces and polymorphism.

Now, that usually wouldn’t be much of an issue, however - the project is a game we’ve been actively working on in our spare time in a team of 2 programmers for the last 6 years, and we are all fed up with it and just want it to end. Most of the (pretty large by now) codebase is kind of simple - it’s a game code, after all, and since we started it when we were 20, there aren’t many overenginered ideas or systems, but everything is mostly written in the ugly, but simple and direct way, so if we had wanted to change something, we may have had to rewrite a part of it, but it never really needed much effort to understand what’s going on.

But now I need to change this code, which is one of the only parts that requires some kind of imagination and actually sitting down and trying to understand it, and since my motivation about the project is so low, it’s a pretty large hurdle to cross. One that is also unnecessary, since most of the generalism isn’t needed and will never be used. But since the code is written in such extensible way, it’s hard to just hack up a simple and ugly solution somewhere into it and be done with it, without really figuring out what the hell is going on.

A documentation wouldn’t help with that - it would still take the same amount of mental effort to be able to work with that code, which we generally lack in the project. I think that if I actually took the time to properly look through the code, figuring out what’s going on wouldn’t be too hard - the naming convention is pretty ok and it’s not that difficult, it just requires some mental effort.

I’m not trying to make excuses, the code very probably has problems, I’m just trying to better sort my thoughts about why I have so much problems working on it. It probably has more to do with my motivation, rather than the code in itself, and the fact that the complexity here wasn’t required, and is now a needless hurdle that actually hinders progress. Not due to it’s quality, but do to unrelated motivation issues and us having to basically force ourselves to work on and finish the damn project.

There’s a piece of code in our hobby game project that I’ve written after attending classes in college about how to write clean and SOLID code. It’s the most overengineered piece of shit I’ve ever written. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the lectures, of course it’s on me being a little bit over zealous, but it does check all the boxes - It’s a simple “show selectable list of stuff”, follows MVC, it’s extensible without rewriting to adittional data-types and formats, extensible view that can show any part of data you need, generic, and in general it could be used anywhere we need, for any kind of data.

There’s only one place where we need and use such list in our game.

I needed to rewrite a part of it, since the UI changed drastically, to not need this kind of list, while also adding events into the process. I haven’t seen the code for almost 4 years, and it’s attrocious. Super hard to understand what’s going on, since it’s too generic, interfaces and classes all over the place, and while it probably would be possible to rewrite the views for the new features we need, it’s just so complex that I don’t have the mental capacity to again figure out how it was supposed to work and properly wire it up again.

I’m not saying it’s fault of the classes, or SOLID. It’s entirely my fault, because the classes inspired and hyped me with ideas about what a clean code should look like, that I didn’t stop and think whether it’s really needed here, and went over-the-top and overengineered the solution. That’s what I’d say is the danger of such Clean Code books and classes - it’s easy to feel clever for making something that passes SOLID to the letter, but extensibility usually comes at a complexity, and it’s super important to stop and think - do I really need it?

One night when returning from a party at work, I’ve decided to stay a while longer in the tram to escort my co-workers to the tram central hub (which was like half an hour of tram ride), instead of getting out at my home, which was only 5 minutes from our workplace.

When I got into the tram back home, there was an older guy with a carboard robot costume, who was talking to someone about his work in the theater. Because I find people like that interesting, I decided to move closer and sit next to them, so I can listen to their pretty interesting conversation. I’ve tripped and basically literally fell into their conversation, and the other guy left, so we started talking. It turned out he does a prop-guy on movies and for theater, and we hit it off pretty well. He also lived literally 3 minutes from my place, and we have decided to go have a few more beers at his home, which was basically a storage lot full of random stuff without much furniture - just random props, one bed, and a lot of beer.

I’ve messaged my GF that I’ll be late, since I’m drinking with this pretty cool old guy, and send her a picture of the place. Her reponse was “Wait, isn’t that <name>?”. Turns out, he was a prop guy on a movie they were filming a lot of years ago at their old family house when she was young, and not only he was the most fun guy to be around there, always sneaking out to drink with them, but also briefly dated her (late) mother, so he’s basically her step-dad. Since he’s pretty old-school, no social networks, internet and barely a phone, we did exchange contacts and since then have seen him a few times, and it was always a treat, like getting us to the backstage of theater production. But the way we have met is so, so random and the odds of something like that happening are mind blowing. I usually don’t follow random people home, but here we have hit it off so well that we wanted to keep talking and it didn’t even felt weird.

This is the first time ive heard about microg. How is the app support with it? Can you run every app that needs play service? I have Google Sandbox installed only on a second Graphene profile, and use it for bare minimum of apps that dont work without it, Bolt app, mostly weird MFA for work or package tracking apps i use once per month, while disabling most of their permissions. Will microg improve my situation in this case to be worth switching over? Does it work without root?