Interesting Links for 01-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Stop thinking you need to be fair to unfair voices

(tags:morality freespeech society bigotry )

2. Would you like to increase your appreciation of bagpipes?

(tags:music Scotland video )

3. Devs casually expose far-reaching loading bar conspiracy: 'People just don't trust one that's too quick'

(tags:technology fraud visualisation )

Comments

[cmcmck]

1 We tried for years to listen to transphobes.

No more- they can go and do nasty things to themselves.

Stop talking about the need for discussion. We had the discussion decades ago and you lost.

Go away!

[altamira16]

3. I participate in this conspiracy. There are all sorts of things done for psychological effects. For a test app that I created, I just have the display show you the infinite loading circle for a couple of seconds because I have no clue how long it will take for things to be fetched from the internet.

Also, skeleton loading for loads that are not too slow makes it feel like things are loading faster than they really are.

3

[channelpenguin]

I take it you all already know about car fuel gauges?

Re: 3

[andrewducker]

And speedometers!

[dewline]

1. I think we've all had enough of that.

2. I live in Ottawa. I think I show sufficient appreciation to bagpipes in the home town of the Cameron Highlanders Regiment.

3. Of course.

[simont]

"People just don't trust a loading bar that's too quick": perhaps I'm being naïve, but surely the end of the sentence ought to be "... yet"?

All that's happening here is that nobody wants to be the first to tell the truth about how quick things can be to load on modern hardware. But if everyone did it, there wouldn't be this problem with trusting it!

I've encountered a few games that had better not be being slow to load on purpose, because they're so amazingly slow and awkward. I forget which, but one of the Assassin's Creed games for PS4 takes about 7 minutes to load, which is like being back in the Spectrum days and having to play a tape into the machine for minutes at a time to load a 48K game.

Except that actually, it's worse, because unlike a Speccy tape loader, this game also stops after about half that time, presents its top-level menu, and requires you to press "Start Game" before taking just as long to load the second half. So you can't even leave it to load on its own until it's actually ready to play!

[andrewducker]

I basically stopped playing Bloodborne on PS4 because the loading screens took so long. PS4 takes *35 seconds* to load into the world. In a game where you expect to die a lot. The PS5 halves that, but even so it seems like a looooong time.