codeflo (u/codeflo) - Readit News

codeflo commented on Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse garbagecollected.dev/p/va... · Posted by u/ee64a4a

kemayo · a day ago

I'm not sure they've got Apple targeted so much, because Apple has been so thoroughly not-invested in gaming. The place they're closest to colliding is VR, but Apple's Vision headset is doing something really different from Valve's VR products, which are far more directly lined up against Meta's Oculus.

Valve could branch into Apple's areas, but they don't seem particularly interested in doing so yet.

EDIT: rather, Apple cares a lot about phone gaming, but that's an area that Valve has shown few signs of moving in on.

codeflo · 20 hours ago

> Apple cares a lot about phone gaming

The kind of gacha games that dominate the in-app sales charts, sure. Actual gaming, they don't care about or even understand.

codeflo commented on GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions twitter.com/jaredpalmer/s... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

codeflo · a day ago

My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching.

This fails for several reasons that someone who actually uses the product might have intuited:

(a) For some use-cases, you can't switch to GitHub's runners. For us, it's a no-go for anything that touches our infrastructure.

(b) Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally.

(c) GitHub Actions doesn't get the amount of love you'd expect from something billed as a "premium service". In fact, it often feels quite abandoned, barely kept working. Who knows what they're brewing internally, but they didn't coordinate this with a major feature announcement, and didn't rush to announce anything now that they got backlash, which leads me to believe they don't have anything major planned.

(d) Paying someone -- by the minute, no less -- to use my own infrastructure feels strange and greedy. GitHub has always had per-user pricing, which feels fair and predictable. If for some reason they need more money, they can always increase that price. The fact that they didn't do that leads me to believe this wasn't about cost per se. Hence the KPI theory I mentioned above: this wasn't well-coordinated with any bigger strategy.

codeflo commented on GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions twitter.com/jaredpalmer/s... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

Narretz · a day ago

They are talking about the cost to run the Actions control plane and the scheduler that is not executed on the runner itself.

codeflo · a day ago

They have all kinds of costs hosting GitHub, which is why there's per seat pricing for companies. If those prices are too low, they can always increase them. Charging on top of that per minute of using your own infrastructure felt greedy to me. And the fact that this was supposed to be tied to one of the lesser-maintained features of GitHub raised eyebrows on top of that.

codeflo commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david

mfcl · 3 days ago

They still run the whole orchestration.

If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.

codeflo · 3 days ago

One problem is that GitHub Actions isn't good. It's not like you're happily paying for some top tier "orchestration". It's there and integrated, which does make it convenient, but any price on this piece of garbage makes switching/self-hosting something to seriously consider.

codeflo commented on Bonsai: A Voxel Engine, from scratch github.com/scallyw4g/bons... · Posted by u/jesse__

Zambyte · 3 days ago

In what sense is the MIT license "unrestricted"?

codeflo · 3 days ago

In the sense that when people want to use a piece of MIT-licensed software in another piece of software, they don't in practice find themselves restricted from doing so by the conditions of the license. "Permissive" might be a word I should rather have used.

codeflo commented on “Are you the one?” is free money blog.owenlacey.dev/posts/... · Posted by u/samwho

akoboldfrying · 4 days ago

If the goal is to find the perfect matching in some maximum number of turns or less, it's possible to do even better by using a full game tree that minimises the maximum height of the tree ( = number of turns required), instead of using information/entropy as done here.

Basically, using the entropy produces a game tree that minimises the number of steps needed in expectation -- but that tree could be quite unbalanced, having one or more low-probability leaves (perfect matchings) many turns away from the root. Such a leaf will randomly occur some small fraction of the time, meaning those games will be lost.

For concreteness, a game requiring 6 bits of information to identify the perfect matching will take 6 steps on average, and may sometimes require many more; a minimax tree of height 7 will always be solved in at most 7 steps. So if you're only allowed 7 steps, it's the safer choice.

codeflo · 3 days ago

That's a good point, entropy is only a heuristic for the thing you actually want to optimize, worst-case guesses (though it's probably a very good heuristic).

> Basically, using the entropy produces a game tree that minimises the number of steps needed in expectation

It might be even worse than that for problems of this kind in general. You're essentially using a greedy strategy: you optimize early information gain.

It's clear that this doesn't optimize the worst-case, but it might not optimize the expected number of steps either.

I don't see why it couldn't be the case that an expected-steps-optimal strategy gains less information early on, and thus produces larger sets of possible solutions, but through some quirk those larger sets are easier to separate later.

codeflo commented on “Are you the one?” is free money blog.owenlacey.dev/posts/... · Posted by u/samwho

CmdDot · 3 days ago

In addition to Mastermind, Wordle also falls into the same category.

Optimal play to reduce the search space in both follow the same general pattern - the next check should satisfy all previous feedback, and included entries should be the most probable ones, both of those previously tested, and those not. If entries are equally probable, include the one which eliminates the largest number of remaining possibilities if it is correct.

For wordle, «most probable» is mostly determined by letter frequency - while in Mastermind, it’s pure probability based on previous guesses. For instance, if you play a Mastermind variant with 8 pegs, and get a 2/8 in the first test - each of your 8 pegs had a 1/4 chance of being correct. So you select 2 at random to include in the next guess.

If you then get a 2/8 from the second - you would include 4 previous entries in the next guess, 2 entries from the first that was not used in the second, as well as 2 entries from the 2nd - because the chance you chose the correct entries twice, is less than the chance the two hits are from the 6 you changed.

codeflo · 3 days ago

> For wordle, «most probable» is mostly determined by letter frequency

I don't think that's a justified assumption. I wouldn't be surprised if wordle puzzles intentionally don't follow common letter frequency to be more interesting to guess. That's certainly true for people casually playing hangman.

codeflo commented on Bonsai: A Voxel Engine, from scratch github.com/scallyw4g/bons... · Posted by u/jesse__

swiftcoder · 3 days ago

> Surely the warranty and liability disclaimer found in licenses like MIT exists for a reason

Obviously IANAL, but I entirely don't see how the WTFPL (which does not ask the consumer to accept any restrictions) would create an implied contract (which would seem to be a necessary precondition for a warranty obligation)?

codeflo · 3 days ago

IANAL either, so my own legal theories are as creative as yours, but I'd like to offer the following data point: All unrestricted open-source licenses that were written by actual lawyers, from MIT to CC0, have found it necessary to include such a liability clause.

codeflo commented on Bonsai: A Voxel Engine, from scratch github.com/scallyw4g/bons... · Posted by u/jesse__

ghc · 3 days ago

I've always wondered why voxel engines tend to produce output that looks so blocky. I didn't realize it was a performance issue.

Still, games like "C&C: Red Alert" used voxels, but with a normal mapping that resulted in a much less blocky appearance. Are normal maps also a performance bottleneck?

codeflo · 3 days ago

Before Minecraft, basically all voxel engines used some form of non-axis-aligned normals to hide the sharp blocks. Those engines did this either through explicit normal mapping, or at the very least, by deriving intermediate angles from the Marching Cubes algorithm. Nowadays, the blocky look has become stylish, and I don't think it really even occurs to people that they could try to make the voxels smooth.

codeflo commented on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me marcusolang.substack.com/... · Posted by u/florian_s

codeflo · 4 days ago

To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.

Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:

> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.

And ChatGPT's "improvement":

> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.

Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.