Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Elite (1984) (Score 1) 228

Before Elite most games had 3 lives, you lost them one by one and started again. Then Elite came long and you could play indefinitely, in 8 galaxies of 256 planets each ... all crammed into 32k. Space trading, combat, ship upgrades, even an alien race.
Did I forget to mention it was all rendered in 3d wireframe?
There were two sequels, and then Elite Dangerous was released in 2015, and is still actively developed.

Comment AI provides plausible answers, not accurate ones (Score 2) 179

My experience with AI so far has not been promising. For example, I asked one of them for a list of childrens' encyclopedia published in England between 1970 and 1974. It came back with an autobiography of a slave from the deep south.

I asked it to look for a title I read as a kid, which was a graphic novel about Einstein's life and discoveries, probably published around 1972-1978. It came back with a book on Einstein published in the 2000's which was written by two women who weren't even born in the 70's.

There are several similar examples where it completely ignored the parameters and just threw out any old stuff. When I pointed the errors out, it said oh yes, you're right.

If it knew I was right and it was wrong, why didn't it just say 'I DON'T KNOW' or 'I CAN'T FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR'.

Comment Re:No need (Score 1) 76

The issue for me is going to a future bookseller website and getting a list of 100 new release novels, where 99% of them are AI-generated spam. If I want a novel written by AI, for some strange masochistic reason, I'm not going to buy it - I'm going to generate it myself using my own prompt. Therefore, yes, it would be handy to filter out all the desperate cash grabs.

Comment Steam + Ubuntu works (Score 1) 104

I have 2 older Windows 10 gaming PCs which always seem to be updating something or other. One is stuck in a 'windows could not apply this update' loop, can't find anything to resolve it other than 'reformat and reinstall' which is not happening.

So now both of them dual boot Ubuntu. The game I use most (Elite Dangerous) works flawlessly. Both HOTAS work fine. My home brew button-box works fine. The systems boot faster and updates are painless.

I'm sure there are some games with anti-cheat runtimes which might not work, but if Valve leans on those publishers maybe it can happen.

One major plus with Steam gaming on linux: even the old windows XP-era titles work, which is more than I can say for Windows 10/11.

Comment Been using BASIC my whole life (Score 4, Insightful) 77

I've been writing and publishing sofware and apps written in BASIC since the late 80's (and tinkered with it before that on Sinclair and Atari ST machines). Multi-user accounting software with task switching on PC-XTs, share market software for Windows 98/XP, novel-writing software for anything up to and including Windows 11, Android and IOS apps, MacOS software, you name it.

In my (long) experience users don't give a damn what their software is written in as long as it's fast, effective and free of bugs. It's not about the programming language, it's all about the programmer(s) you hire in the first place.

Slashdot Top Deals

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously. -- Booth Tarkington

Working...