Matt Farrow

Snaaake! She's a snaaake

Got through after three dead ends in the Maze of Despair and was told to email the team

Oh and it happened again. Lovely. So yes, I have a query about a relevant option. Can you please give me the cheat code to speak to a f*cking human?

Naming and shaming Lambeth school applications helpline.

New hatred unlocked: automated help lines that unexpectedly offer you a helpful action while you are waiting for another more generic option, and when you select it, you are told no, you can't do this over the phone, before it hangs up.

Congrats on your success!

This is hilarious.

Also, completely enraging.

The Menai Strait, separating Anglesey from the mainland of Wales. Insignificant in terms of International shipping, but aesthetically pleasing in terms of neatness on a map and nice views of mountains that I believe were an inspiration for the Misty Mountains of LoTR.

I would be interested to see a proper analysis of this (I did not provide one)

Maybe I am missing something, but this feels a bit sketchy.

I am not familiar with copyright arrangements for that, but presumably the games in question already pay for use of the music, so it's an attempt to 'double dip' on the licensing. I'm not sure Steam and games is an appropriate analogue of broadcasting stuff.

That's a weird one. I haven't seen the court documents so I can only speculate. I guess the suggestion is that steam are effectively broadcasting the games, like a TV station broadcasts TV programmes.

Whatever the solution, if the answer is Toby Young and Michelle Mone et al, the question is wrong.

(Personally, fwiw, I think there should be better vetted, more independent and more representative appointments, rather than elected representatives, because you're just doubling down on the malign populist influences that are sometimes brought to bear on elected politicians.)

One of the reasons why House of Lords reform has to be done holistically rather than bit by bit is that probably the largest category of Lords besides hereditary (I am guessing) are the absolute shit-stain political appointments made by governments of the last 10+ years.

The downside is that reading his reviews will deprive you of enjoying any plot twists, as he simply can't help telling you exactly what happens. Every time.

That feels like faint praise but it's not meant to be! My games are far too horrible for music like this, but it's def AAA grade.

I visited your Bandcamp page, and I wanted to say that your Mail Time OST is very good (I haven't listened to anything else there yet). It hangs together really well as a set of music, and is very competently done.

A product description on the Fab store (viewed from the Unreal Engine 5 editor). There is a picture of a plain metal pole. Some key features from the description: "Maps: AO Diffuse Displacement Specular Gloss Metalness Normal Basecolor Roughness Bump Cavity" / "File metal_pole_ve4kaaxcw_8k.zip"

A screenshot of an essentially featureless plain grey metal pole

I love Quixel, man. Looks like they're using up to eleven 8k textures for ... a plain metal pole.

Give me one 2k noise texture and I'll sort it out. Not all of the old ways are bad. I do slightly pine for nice looking handmade stuff without bloated photogrammetry textures.

#UE5 #gamedev

Height blends look great also, so the trick is perhaps to layer non POM layers with POM layers so you can still get the height blend from the former.

Fun fact from the 'I'll write it down in case it helps anyone ever' dept...

If you use virtual textures in your landscape material (and why wouldn't you), you can't use parallax occlusion mapping (POM) for landscape layers *unless* you use a weight blend and not a height blend.

#UE5 #gamedev

You have to really make an effort to be this c*nty, and boy do they.

Like in this case is not a like. What a pain in the whatevers.

I gave you a short weight

That is not to say I haven't filed claims like those during my career as a patent attorney, but they were what I would describe as 'stunt' claims. I am not a fan. Neither are Examiners. It was not my choice to do so.

To be more specific: it presented big-picture summaries of aspects of the invention/points of novelty. As claims, they were hopelessly over-broad.

I like big buts and I cannot lie

I guess I just hope that we collectively learn what to trust and not trust in the AI outputs that we are dealing with?

I think AI can be very useful in checking things - including checking professional output. I wouldn't mind more tools to catch dumb and maybe more sophisticated errors in my claims that I'm drafting. And I don't doubt the AI agents of this type are here to stay.

Of course the document was full of disclaimers about not relying on things said in the document, but the danger with AI (LLMs especially) is that everything looks superficially plausible. Fully plausible, even, if you are not a subject-matter expert, so it's easy to just rely on it all.

You want to get everything in order in your first filing. Add what you need to at the end of the priority year. If you file a bunch of papers initially and figure you'll sort it out later, you will die in a big hole labelled 'added matter' and 'priority date issues' in Europe at least.