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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • It absolutely should not have been named zeroth() because the reasoning for that is purely pedantic and ignores WHY arrays are 0 indexed. It’s not like the people in the early days of writing programming languages were saying “the zeroth item in the array” - they would refer to it using human language because they are humans, not machines. Arrays are 0 indexed because it’s more efficient for address location. To get the location in memory of an array item, it’s startingAddress + (objectSize * index). If they were 1 indexed, the machine would have to reverse the offset.
    Function/Method names, on the other hand, should be written so as to make the most sense to the humans reading and writing the code, because the humans are the only ones that care what the name is. When you have an array or list, it’s intuitive to think “I want the first thing in the array” or “I want the last thing in the array),” so it makes sense to use first and last. That also makes them intuitive counterparts (what would be the intuitive counterpart to “zeroth”?).







  • I think some portions of the company do want to buy these studios to make games. Mostly because they need a regular funnel of titles to put on Game Pass, and the best way to do that is small- to mid-budget games that can generate hype. But then other portions of the company want to chase that big AAA paycheck because big numbers look good, even if ROI isn’t as good for that one game versus 3 or 4 smaller titles. And others still only care about what will make the balance sheet look the best for the quarter.
    Even smaller companies end up with various “factions” within the org as far as vision and how to best create success (or even how to define success); a company like Microsoft is so fractured that different divisions are unaware of each other’s goals and have competing interests.
    I’m not trying to defend Microsoft here, I just think this is a consequence of an overly large organization that doesn’t have unified goals.




  • I have a minor conspiracy theory about the Game Pass launch: it almost seems like they made the game pass version intentionally worse/buggier. Still had fun gameplay but lacking features that a lot of people want, some odd oversights (e.g. no menu to quit the game in the PC game pass build, have to alt+F4) and more stability issues. That gives people a chance to try it, find out they like the game, learn it’s better on steam, and then buy it there.
    That’s exactly what happened with my entire friend group (we also wanted a Private server for more people and persistent world regardless of who is online, which GP version can’t do currently).
    Rationally, I recognize that it’s probably a matter of the build being different, limitations when running in the Microsoft ecosystem (though other games are about to connect to private servers, even if it’s less straightforward) and the GP version is primarily for console (runs on PC as well, but the menu screens feel like console ones). But it certainly didn’t hurt their sales that the Steam version was clearly better.



  • JustAnotherRando@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlba dum tss
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    1 year ago

    Again, that’s incorrect. Pounds (Lbs) are the US measurement for mass. Feel free to provide a source to the contrary. I specified pounds mass vs pounds force because in an engineering space, it’s worthwhile to be specific, but the Pound (lb) is all that is specified in any documentation as the unit for mass in the US system.



  • JustAnotherRando@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlba dum tss
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    1 year ago

    It’s just a pun. They’re both units of mass, hence there would be mass confusion.

    It doesn’t work with the pun, but the more confusing part for people would probably be the fact that pounds are used for both mass and force, but in SI, the units are different (kilograms for mass vs newtons for force), though that doesn’t really matter for most people.