• 0 Posts
  • 434 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • But what is a trusted provider? How can you trust it? How sure are you that you’re not being MitM? Have you fully manually verified that there’s no funky flags in curl like -k, that the url is using SSL, that it’s a correct url and not pointing at something malicious, etc, etc, etc. There are a lot of manual steps you must verify using this approach, whereas using a package manager all of them get checked automatically, plus some extra checks like hundreds of people validating the content is secure.

    To do apt get from an unknown repo, you first need to convince the person to execute root commands they don’t understand on their machine to add that unknown repo, if you can convice someone to run an unsafe command with root credentials then the machine is already compromised.

    I get your point, random internet scripts are dangerous but random internet packages can also dangerous. But that’s a false equivalence because there are lots of safeguards to the packages in the usual way people install them, but less than 0 safeguards to the curl|bash. In a similar manner, if this was a post talking about the dangers of fireworks and how you can blow yourself up using them your answer is “but someone can plant a bomb in the mall I go to, or steal the codes for a nuclear missile and blow me up anyways”.


  • But those are two very different things, I can very easily give you a one liner using curl|bash that will compromise your system, to get the same level of compromise through a proper authenticated channel such as apt/pacman/etc you would need to compromise either their private keys and attack before they notice and change them or stick malicious code in an official package, either of those is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing a simple bash script.









  • While I understand what you’re talking about, I would argue it’s bad metaprogression that you dislike. I liked Rogue Legacy when I first played, but didn’t enjoy the second one even though it’s essentially the same. Let me give you an example of good metaprogression: Dead Cells.

    There’s the metaprogression that allows you access to new areas and new mechanics, but that’s fairly quick compared to the length of the rest of the progression, and I would argue it’s not the sort of thing you’re complaining about.

    What could be similar is the way you unlock equipment, although you don’t become stronger with each run, you unlock more weapons. This gives you variety, but the vast majority of the progression happens in your head. If you have enough hours in Dead Cells and think the metaprogression is what made you so good at the game that you couldn’t finish one level when you started and now you play for hours, do me a favor and start a new save. After being on the second cell I bought the game for a different platform, on my first run I got to the first cell.

    Which brings me to the second metaprogression in the game, cells. They make the game harder, not easier, and it’s the way to progress, you have to purposefully make the game harder to progress. IMO this is how metaprogression is supposed to be done, you need to be better, and when you think you’re good enough to beat the game it lets you know “you’ve only just started”.








  • All of my systems are Linux, launching Windows games on Linux is not trivial, Steam takes away almost all of that complication. It also provides an excellent ten foot interface for me to use on my TV and buy/install/launch games from my couch without any hassle. Speaking of controller usage, Steam provides excellent support to remap controllers even if a game doesn’t support it, and provide amazing features at that (for example multiple layers, gyroscopic mouse)

    Games getting updated automatically is a great feature, I still remember having to download patches and applying them one by one after a fresh install. Similarly Steam also provides a workshop that allows you to install mods and keep them synced across different systems automatically.

    Finally, the convenience of cloud saves for someone with multiple systems or who uninstalls a game and reinstalls it later is not easy to achieve without a launcher (I still have a saves folder backed up somewhere from before).

    Besides all of that Achievement and other social features are important for some people. And for some games being able to easily play online with friends is amazing (if you’re not old enough to know what GameSpy is you don’t know what it was back then), although I don’t play too many online games so this one is not that important for me, but when I need that feature it is very handy.

    In short there are many reasons, but if you’re playing old single-player games with mouse+keyboard on only one windows PC, then none of my reasons apply to you. Still I would argue that buying games on steam is easier than pirating them, so there’s the convenience factor still (e.g. at a friend’s house and they mention a game, open my phone, and in 5 min with a very intuitive flow I have the game downloading on my home PC so when I come back it’s ready to play).



  • The solution I’m talking about should already be the standard by most devs (especially small studios), even before LLM was a thing. See, small teams can’t afford QA, at least not to the same extent as big studis, so they need to add checks to stuff in a way that catches large problems, and a placeholder making it into the final game is a big problem. Even before generated images were a thing devs would just use any random image they had that more or less worked, and those images could have copyright or be problematic in any other way, so ensuring none of that made it into the final release has always been important.