Nuclear Monster

  • The freenode internet relay chat network has been a staple of open-source and free software projects for decades and it has been taken over:

    Developers of the open source organization Freenode are quitting en masse after Andrew Lee, a tech entrepreneur and the Crown Prince of Korea, has taken control of the network in what developers are describing as an “hostile takeover.”

    I’m attempting to move my projects off of the dying service already, it is incredible how much time so many people spent on this one network. It was the place to put a channel about your software or technology project and now it looks like people are moving to a new network called Libera.

    Update: As pointed out by The Internet’s Basscomm The Chairman of Freenode, Andrew Lee, has responded on the freenode website, and linked to a Paul Graham post in the response which really tells you everything you need to know about the Chairman of Freenode.

  • Earlier this year I managed to find elusive computer components and build a Ryzen 5600x-based computer to upgrade from the one I built back in 2016. Reviews are just now coming out for the new 2021 iPad Pro and the M1 system inside of it is benchmarking higher in Geekbench than my desktop gaming computer.

    The results reported in the MacStories review for the M1-powered 2021 iPad Pro by Federico Viticci (a fantastic review you should read just to hear from what an iPad Pro power user thinks of this upgrade) are 1716 single-core, 7143 multi-core, and results are similar across all the M1-powered Apple computers. This was also for a model with 16GB of RAM, the 1 and 2TB storage configuration options for the new iPad Pro both have 16GB of RAM. iPad Pros with less storage have 8GB of RAM.

    My desktop with an AMD Ryzen 5600x and 32GB of DDR4 3600 RAM gets 1609 single-core, 7557 multi-core. Both numbers fluctuate a bit for each run, but the higher single-core score and comparable multi-core score is very impressive and absolutely wild for a battery-powered and passively-cooled mobile tablet device versus a desktop system that’s plugged into the wall and has active cooling. It also makes me very curious what the sequel to the M1 will look like, and what Apple will do with updates to iPadOS now that it has access to so much more power. I’m hoping for Xcode.

  •  Nathan Grayson for Kotaku talking about how much Epic paid for both games from big and small games to give out for free on the Epic Games Store:

    It’s not hard to trace a general trend: Major publishers got a lot, while indies only got a little. Admittedly, some smaller games went free long after their figurative sell-by dates, but those are still some pretty paltry prices.

    The real winner here is Epic. As many industry figures pointed out on Twitter, those user acquisition cost numbers are awfully low, with Epic picking up nearly five million new users for dollars or cents per person. It is not easy to attract new users to a barebones store when a veritable monopoly like Steam is sitting just across the way—with everybody’s friends also on it—but Epic’s spend-to-win strategy appears to have paid off. Now it can boast a large user base to both publishers and players. Many other stores have failed where Epic is now improbably succeeding.

    Epic has been offering different free games to users daily or weekly in order to get more people to sign up for the Epic Game Store and the loser in this is absolutely smaller developers. One look at the numbers makes it clear that the developers got absolutely ripped off as Epic got their users for pennies and then the developers of these games may have missed out on actual sales.

    I can’t believe Epic isn’t more embarrassed by these numbers, I wonder if the free games experiment is done now that it has been running for years and they don’t mind giving it up or they may feel that the developers won’t have a choice but to ship with their store now because the deal is still slightly better than you get with Valve.

    Some part of Epic’s sentiment isn’t wrong: Apple screws developers over just like every rent-seeking business that isn’t big enough to earn a special deal, it’s just that Epic is at least as awful as the facts the lawsuit reveals over and over again, Epic is just less successful and wishes they could put their own app store out on iOS so that Epic could be the ones taking rent even if it is at a more reasonable 15%.

    For example, this lawsuit also revealed that Epic would have stopped campaigning against Apple if Epic had gotten a special deal like other businesses have on iOS. And of course Epic doesn’t sue Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo, because they do get special deals on consoles there and you’ll even see Fortnite editions of consoles.

    I hope that in some way Apple is forced to make some of their platforms more open, because that would enable great things to be done there, but it’s clear that there’s nothing good natured in this fight between two large companies. We don’t win in the end and these numbers made it clear that small developers certainly aren’t getting enough out of it.

  • Nintendo announced their Game Builder Garage today, this is really a game development tool to teach people how to make games using a visual programming system that lets people connect different elements like actions on the controllers to character movement in the game.

    Sony and Media Molecule have a similar idea with Dreams, another game creation toolkit for the PlayStation 4. The 400 lb gorilla in this genre is Roblox which not only lets people make games but has monetization built-in so that kids can help exploit other children and the company gets a cut of that which created a pretty gross system all the way down.

    Like Dreams, it appears that you’ll only be able to distribute games made in Game Builder Garage to others who have Game Builder Garage, which rules out selling the games or porting them to other platforms.

    There’s also a way to view the guts of other people’s games developed inside Game Builder Garage to learn from them, somebody at Nintendo recognizes the value of open source.

    Game Builder Garage is $30 and out on June 11th for both the Nintendo Switch and the Lite. Regular Nintendo Switch users can optionally plug a USB mouse in to the dock to make it easier to use.

  • The Angry Miao company has priced a new keyboard at $1600, it’s called the Am Hatsu. I am not a manufacturing expert, but this price is very unusual. If there is something that makes it reasonable to charge $1600 for that keyboard and you don’t work for Angry Miao and aren’t invested in any form of Cryptocurrency or NFT please get in touch.

    The store page for the Am Hatsu when it initially went up for sale was charging a $320 “deposit” with no information about what the final amount required for the purchase is. The only way to know the full purchase price was to calculate it from a separate product page which indicated that this deposit was 20% of the final purchase price though there was also a 20% discount available if people bought it before a certain day which may make the total cost $1280.

    The store page was later updated with the actual price, but pre-orders are urged on through the NFT scam. The first 100 people to pre-order the keyboard would get access to an “NFT Trading Card.” The text of the offer is difficult to parse, but it is clear that Angry Miao bought into the climate destroying scam and wanted to use it to entice sales of the overpriced keyboard. Here is the text of the scam from the product page:

    As the world’s first brand to release a physical product as NFT, Angry Miao will release exclusive NFT on the OpenSea platform, one of the largest NFT trading platforms on the Ethereum network. After placing a deposit for the corresponding NFT and paying the remaining balance, users can obtain a physical copy of the AM HATSU keyboard in 1:1 form through Angry Miao’s official website. Holders of NFT have the full rights to collect or resell their NFTs.

    At the same time, users can make a reservation for AM HATSU on the official website of Angry Miao. After paying the remaining balance, they can obtain a corresponding NFT Trading Card. In addition, the 1st to 100th users who made a reservation are eligible for the NFT Trading Card Redemption. An exclusive serial number can be selected in sequence of the order payment time.

    Other keyboards do go out for high prices new, but the price is typically under a thousand dollars, and the market for them is growing but still supposedly small enough that it is difficult to make some designs available continuously. 

    Angry Miao had already tainted their first keyboard project. That was last year’s Cyberboard, a typical TKL layout keyboard with a unique array of slightly diffused lights that most users would never see because the light array faces at an angle, away from the person using the keyboard. Fun idea, unfortunately the users of the board are still complaining that the software to control the keyboard isn’t functional.

    Note: All product and store links in this article point to archive.org to not encourage anyone to get in on the scam and contribute to accelerating the collapse of the climate we need to survive.