95
Deluded or in bad faith for sharing official news?
8
[Silksong] This is my Path of Pain
(lemmy.nz)
Anybody else getting wrecked in this part of the game? This boss runback is so damn difficult.
75
I just finished Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
(programming.dev)
I never got around to playing the DS Castlevania games since I never owned a DS, and the emulators aren't the best experience because of its awkward portrait mode and touch controls. Recently though, I picked up the Castlevania Dominus Collection on my Switch and wanted to gush about it a little.
Order of Ecclesia is fantastic. Almost 20 years later, it aged incredibly well even compared to modern Metroidvanias. You could say the same for any RPG Castlevania game, but still. It's a great take on the Castlevania formula but manages to be unique enough to feel fresh.
For one, this doesn't take place in one big map. It's split up into multiple smaller areas connected with a world map, which is pretty different compared to entirely taking place in one castle. Areas can still be massive and have a lot to explore though, and there's a lot of side-quests you can finish to help the villagers across many areas.
Also, Shanoa's playstyle is heavily magic-based. At the start you can conjure up weapons to attack normally, but over the course of the game you'll be exclusively using spells and exploiting elemental weaknesses on enemies. Similar to Dawn of Sorrow and the newer Bloodstained, you gain new spells from enemies you kill which is a great mechanic.
Side note, I'm in love with Shanoa's design in this game. It's a shame it had to be a DS game because it doesn't quite show in the pixel art, but she's probably the coolest MC in any Castlevania game. Very different to your typical "Die Monster!" protagonist.
Order of Ecclesia is also notably really tough. I was having a much harder time compared to Symphony of the Night or Dawn of Sorrow. Checkpoints are few and far between, and bosses can be such a pain in the ass with really high HP and enough damage to kill you in 3 hits. The game is also very stingy on money so you can't just keep buying potions to use in hard fights, I was constantly broke and had to manage my resources well.
Overall, fantastic game. Highly recommended if you're into Metroidvanias or never got around to playing it. It's an S tier Castlevania game.
I also want to give a shoutout to Konami. I hate their business practices and pachinko machines, but I have to give credit where due, this is the best retro collection of games I've ever bought. It has everything. Built-in achievements, a music player for each track in every game, hundreds of high quality concept arts, scanned user manuals for each language, high quality versions of covers and promotional material... You can even switch each game's region between US and EU for its subtle differences.
Like, you can even choose tracks you like in the main menu and place them in a playlist, then shuffle it. They put so much effort into this and it really shows. It's a game preservation miracle. Serious props to the creators.
Boy oh boy, what a post. Somehow they managed to make it less clear than ever what they even want to do with the platform, here are my favorite highlights:
With the use of AI now ubiquitous and ‘AI slop’ rapidly replacing the content we see online, this trust gap is where we think Stack Overflow can play a role. Our renewed vision and purpose moving forward is to be the world’s most vital source for technologists. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe we can serve technologists with our mission to cultivate community, power learning, and unlock growth.
That's some advanced corpo-speak, doubling down on AI but also acknowledging that people don't like AI-generated answers and providing a "human intelligence layer" to "unlock growth". Did an AI write this? Lol.
As AI becomes more pervasive, the efficacy of AI systems will increasingly depend on access to verifiable and accurate knowledge. That will extend to job opportunities too as people look for guidance on exciting career prospects, and this is why we aim to Unlock growth for those who come to Stack Overflow or use our products.
I can feel the growth unlocking the more of this I read.
Knowledge Ingestion converts high-value content from tools like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and others into structured, trusted knowledge inside a Stack Internal instance. It’s designed to eliminate silos, accelerate onboarding, and scale institutional wisdom.
I wasn't sure I wanted to ingest knowledge, but now that I can eliminate all these silos, I'm sure that my team can finally gain some institutional wisdom. Also I'm having a stroke. Help-
Oh! I didn't expect it to get suddenly shadowdropped. It looks pretty clean, and it's neat that assets can have direct links to donate on the side. It's going to take at least a few months until it gets integrated with the editor though, since 4.5 is already in feature freeze.
I guess it just wasn't in my circle because I haven't heard much about it since release, but good to know it's more popular than I thought
inexperienced big brain developer see nested loop and often say "O(n^2)? Not on my watch!"
complexity demon spirit smile
This hits too close to home.
There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn't corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I've heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don't sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.
Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there's no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren't allowed to do). If it's on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn't much you can do about it. That shouldn't stop you from writing or blogging, just don't post very personal data.
Also, feel free to join us on !blogging@programming.dev!
Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It's open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don't use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren't many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you're looking for.
Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it'll show the equation.
I still can't understand why Google keeps hyping up Bard and then releasing it at a poor state just to ruin their reputation. First, we had:
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Bard 1, which was hyped up to be the ChatGPT successor. It turned out to be really bad.
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Bard 2.0, a massive update that was hyped up to make Bard so much better. It turned out to still be pretty bad (but in fairness it was a minor improvement).
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Google Gemini, their massive response to GPT 4 that was, on paper, the best LLM in the world. They finally integrated it into Bard last month and... It's still not great. I could not tell an immediate difference between this and the old Bard. Oh, and the videos they used to advertise Gemini Ultra were fake.
I'm not going to armchair analyze a hugely successful company, but from my point of view it really shows how mismanaged Google has been in the past decade. Failed projects upon cancelled projects upon increasingly frustrated employees.
/rant. Anyways, you should consider using Perplexity if you want something with search capabilities, I've had decent success there. Claude is also significantly better than Bard, but they made free usage very limited lately. Might be a good option if you're willing to pay.
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can't even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera's website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
Sure, but keep in mind this is a casual survey. Don't take the results too seriously. Have fun: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MkuZG2MiGj-77PGkuCAM3Btb1_Lb4TFEx8tTZKiOoYI
Do give some credit if you can.
The goal isn't really to be a quiz, but rather just to see how susceptible people are to AI generated art. Many of the images I chose are intentionally vague, 80% of people so far got the line art sketch wrong, and that's with knowing that many of these are AI generated. The results are definitely interesting to see.
A "don't know" option would ruin the point since most people would just choose that. I want to see where people lean towards.
Control node offset transforms is finally in, I almost shed a tear reading this. I've been following the PR for the longest time and even upgraded some projects to 4.7 beta specifically to make animating UI not a pain in the ass. Now it's finally in stable. THE WAIT FOR GODOT IS FINALLY OVER.