I’m not very familiar with TotK and I’m not sure how familiar you are with game development, but just in case you’re not very:

When making something like a shadow puzzle it is very unlikely they’re actually checking shadow conditions, and if they are it’s probably very sparse/only a couple of pixels.

For instance, if you know the position of the light source, the position of the shadow catcher and the position of the shadow receiver you could approximate the shadow casting with much simpler geometry. If Link is just treated as a box then you only need to check where each corner would cast a shadow and see if that overlaps the area you care about.

When done correctly the player would think it’s link’s shadow that’s being tested but in reality it’s nothing to do with the shadow, it’s just a much simpler estimation of a shadow that works well enough to trick players.

Game development is all smoke and mirrors. Tell the players one thing such as “This NPC is always at this location” then unload them when the player isn’t looking. It’s all sweet lies and I love it.

Balders Gate 2 was developed by Bioware and published by Interplay. That’s not to say Larian couldn’t have learned from it anyway, but it’s not a lesson they would have learned from experience.

I agree wholeheartedly. My point was more that if you’re making execution into a pseudo-medical event (For example with lethal injections) then you’re going to have more botched executions since the people performing them aren’t medical personnel.

While I don’t believe we should have executions a gun is designed to be used with little training, but syringes and medical gas supply masks (Don’t know the actual name for them) are meant to be used with training. If executions are going to happen surely we should consider the aptitude of those administering them?

At least it was painless /s

I do agree the death penalty should be abolished, by the way

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alabama-execution-nitrogen-kenneth-smith-updates-b2485208.html

There’s a great Jacob Geller video about how methods of execution have evolved and why they’ve evolved.

I wouldn’t do it justice but it points out how every time we make a ‘more humane’ way of killing it often just reduces the person’s ability to show suffering, rather than reducing the suffering itself. In many cases the suffering is increased as we say the method is less barbaric; a firing squad has the highest success rate and likely the fastest death.

I can’t recommend this enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY Piped bot do your thing

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘vise’ written down before, I always just assumed it was spelled ‘vice’! You learn something new every day

Whoever put so many pizza tables in the box needs more praise! No excuse for a cheesy lid

Also no here :(

This sounds like how you get a resonance cascade… Experiments so powerful they make the sky glow as only our star can!

I enjoyed the back and forth over the topic, personally, but that initial video of his felt… weak. I didn’t hate it but it did make me want to unsubscribe. It felt like a technicality and like a trick more than anything, to me.

The practicalities of how two nearby parallel wires work versus one big loop wasn’t the question posed, it was based on length (As I remember from watching it once). Felt like a ‘gotcha’ moment with no gotcha.

Ah, a common mistake to make. It’s not ‘re-ddit,’ Im pretty sure it comes from ‘reddi-t’ as in “Ready Tea” but like many early 2000s websites they tried to make it sound more approachable, so it’s just ‘reddi-t’ as your cup of tea will be cool enough to drink by the time it’s transmitted all your data.

Oh no :( Now the game is even more emotionally charged, I suppose.

One I’ve not seen mentioned but made me bawl my eyes out is ‘Presentable Liberty’ Im not sure about the remake, but the original was pretty short and was gripping, despite the low level of action.

From experience, female clothes aren’t proportioned to fit trans women as well as cis women. While in your other comment you make a good point about some cis women also being outside the ‘conventional’ physical expectations for women in western society, that doesn’t also mean that trans people don’t face the same issues. We talk about these problems from a trans perspective because trans people are often targeted with legislation and rules from people who don’t understand, and are blocked from being treated as their preferred gender. A bulky cis woman might share physical characteristics with a trans woman, but their existence is also significantly less opposed.

Edit: to my first point there are a number of biological size/proportion differences between cis men and cis women that can be seen here: https://ehs.oregonstate.edu/sites/ehs.oregonstate.edu/files/pdf/ergo/ergonomicsanddesignreferenceguidewhitepaper.pdf

I’m trans and I actually agree with you. I don’t know the solution to make things fair, but I wouldn’t want to use a strong biological advantage over someone else.

I see it like if I’d been born with some identifiable and categorised physical advantage then I shouldn’t be competing against people without that advantage.

It’s debatable how big the difference is, however, and whether it’s a gap easily closed or not. My thoughts are that there could be an open category where anyone could compete on the understanding that there may be severe biological differences. There’s no easy solution :(

Edit: thinking about it, sporting competitions are more sex-catagorised than gender-categorised. I don’t think someone identifying as female with no physical/medical alterations from a biological male form should compete with biological females and I don’t think that should be controversial since the gender isn’t what people care about there. It’s the physical characteristics. In some sports that might provide an advantage, in some a disadvantage, but I do this it’s important to discuss! At that point, however, you’d be better ignoring gender and sex entirely and only categorising sports like ‘feather weight’ or ‘strong muscular development’ or something

Just noticed this, fair play to you! Sorry for the misunderstanding :)

If you’re talking about FaceTime and iMessage… They might technically not cost any money, but if I wanted to use them I’d first have to pay for an overpriced badly designed phone, which means they’re debatably free. They’re used to enrich the iPhone- just look at the whole blue/green text bubble thing. ‘If you don’t also have an iPhone you get treated differently’ hardly sounds like something a totally ‘free’ software would include. It just feeds into their ‘exclusivity’ bubble.

I recently learned that one method for companies to get around data selling laws is to give the data away for free in order to attract certain types of advertisers, then, they sell ad slots for people with specific demographics or interests.

They don’t sell the data because that is harder to do with laws restricting it, so they just use it as advertiser bait in ways that bypass the law.

Further reading: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and

As a female tech lead, its comforting to know I don’t exist!

Which nation, out of interest?