• 5 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 29th, 2023

help-circle








  • I don’t get wolfire’s point here. Yes steam takes a hefty 30% cut but game developers are free to sell directly if they want to. Unlike apple who have completely locked down the iOS app ecosystem or Google who allow sideloading but scares and warns people against downloading apps from non Play Store sources, steam does nothing to hinder games not sold through it. If there was a competitor who was as good as steam but took a smaller cut, then that competitor would have been the market leader in place of steam.


  • I think people on this site are a bit too used to open source projects you can just fork and use based on their license. This is not the case here.

    But the voyager dev has not seen or used apollo’s code to build voyager. He has done everything from scratch only taking heavy inspiration from Apollo. Christian has helped indirectly by being the one to develop the UI which serves as inspiration but considering that voyager is not a competitor to apollo, in my opinion he has no right to be outraged at the fact that it is a looklike. He is free to not contribute to voyager and it is true that he has already contributed a lot indirectly but him getting angry or upset at the fact that the UI is pretty similar makes no sense to me.


  • RevenueCat used for in-app tipping is quite a heavy sdk. I’ve switched to a custom-built, lightweight solution.

    Slightly off topic but have you seen an increase in donations since the introduction of in-app tipping¿? If yes, then other open source apps could also implement this. The current funding and donations space of the open source community is in a poor state. I try to help by donating but I am from a developing country with a low cost of living so my donations are usually small amounts. Hopefully with in app tipping non tech oriented people who moved to lemmy are also donating.







  • First of all, talking about a photon’s experience is weird because when moving at the the speed of light, the transformation equations associated with changing the frame of reference start having infinities appearing within them which makes it impossible to mathematically define things like time elapsed or distance travelled.

    Secondly it is a little confusing to talk about of frames of reference but I will try my best to explain.

    Assume there are two balls(A and B) in an empty region of spacing moving away from each other at speed of 1m/s. Since there are refrences in the background, we have no idea of both the balls are moving or ball A is the only one moving or ball B is the only one moving. From ball A’s perspective, it would seem like ball B is moving away from it while it is stationary. Vice versa for ball B which thinks A is moving while it is stationary. Now let us say that the balls have a way to measure the time elapsed and distance travelled. Now when ball A sees that 10 seconds have passed and that ball B has travelled 10m. To verify this it measures the reading shown by ball B. To its surprise it finds out the reading from B’s instruments show that only 8 seconds have and that B travelled only 8m. This is the time dialation and length contraction that happens in special relativity. Till now everything is fine but interesting things start to happen when you switch perspectives. In the frame of reference of B, it measures that 10 seconds has passed and that A has moved 10m in that duration. When it tries to verify these measurements from A’s instruments, it finds out that they show that only 8sec have passed and that A has only travelled 8m. Now we are in trouble as these measurements seem incompatible. Not only are the instruments not agreeing with each, other, the instruments don’t even agree with themselves depending on the frame. This is eventually resolved by the realisation that the order of events is not the same for all frames. In A’s, frame, it seems to B that started measuring late by 2s while from B’s frame it seems A started measurements later. Adding this 2 second delay in both frames solves all the measurement inconsistency issues.(The numbers used are random. If you actually calculate the difference in measurements coming from a relative velocity of 1m/s, the differences will be exceeding small)

    Now that a basic understanding is out of the way, let us discuss the case of the photon. From our frame of reference, the photon is moving at the speed of light, we can measure with our instruments for how long the photon moved and what was the distance it moved but when we measure using the photon’s instruments we see that the clock always shows the same time and no time has lapsed. From the photon’s frame, it seems like it is stationary and everything else is moving at the speed of(which is obviously not true. Weird things happen when we try talk of moving at the speed of light beacuse of the infinities I aluded to before) and so while it clock is ticking, the clocks of the world around it seem stopped. So in conclusion while it valid to say that photons experience no time, it is only because we can’t go to the photon’s frame of reference because physics and math fail us that point.

    Sorry for the incredibly long reply.


  • Actually light does experience time in its own frame of reference. For somebody observing(us in this example) the light or any object that moves at the speed of light in vacuum, it would seem that object is not experiencing time at all, that is, if there was clock on the object and we tried to measure the time that clock reads, it would give the same number as the result of the reading irrespective of when or where we measure it in our frame of reference.