Ben Lubar (any pronouns)

https://mastodon.lubar.me/@ben

I (along with a bunch of other people) make Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop and DFHack.

It would be cool if you could play Spy Cards with other people online.

Birthday: OJ Simpson white Bronco
Pronouns: any/all
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/benlubar
Goddamnit: Blergo

Public Key

npub1yq4ljwhqj9unxqpmdfgdq3gpgjj0f4edyd3s0zckpv9quxffhrgs2jmwzc

NIP-05 Address

ben_at_mastodon.lubar.me@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszq2le8tsfz7fnqqak55xsg5q5ff856ukjxcc83vtqkzswry5m35gprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqy8hwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnwdamsmawfwx

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

nostr.now

relay.primal.net

Author Public Key

npub1yq4ljwhqj9unxqpmdfgdq3gpgjj0f4edyd3s0zckpv9quxffhrgs2jmwzc

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Last Notes

2026-09-21 04:05:03 UTC

story about a bunch of furries wishing to become their fursonas to a genie and the genie just does it because it sounds like a good idea and there's no need for pranks and the remainder of the story is just them hanging out with the cool genie

2026-09-09 16:47:16 UTC

company that could have dropped seven figures on some nazi's personal project but instead decides to pick 10,000 random queer people and drop three figures on each

2026-09-05 13:19:35 UTC

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megabits per per second

2026-09-05 13:19:25 UTC

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mega british petroleums per second

2026-09-05 13:19:10 UTC

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macbook pros per second

2026-09-05 13:19:02 UTC

someone is asking why they're getting only one eighth of the "Mbp/s" when downloading stuff on Steam

2026-09-03 04:00:10 UTC

social network where you can only post names of things you're eating or fucking
nouns only

2026-08-09 02:05:00 UTC

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hi this is Dylan's Yoghurt-Free Hot Frozen Yoghurt
that's nothing Dylan
you're describing nothing

2026-08-09 02:04:03 UTC

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like you've defined a gender that's "transgender woman but not a woman and not transgender"
that's literally nothing

2026-08-09 02:02:30 UTC

can anyone explain why "femboy" is a distinct gender from "boy who wears whatever the fuck he wants because there aren't actually fashion police"
https://mastodon.lubar.me/system/media_attachments/files/117/063/083/122/722/561/original/717d7bdf4744b28c.png

2026-07-25 01:58:23 UTC

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of course, this is just me being autistic and using words that mean the thing that is being said
which is apparently a negative trait of autistic people

2026-07-25 01:57:54 UTC

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the premise of a "bad smell" is that it's not something that's good to experience
that's what "bad" means
if you define "doesn't like bad things" as a neurodivergence then you've classified every living being that has ever existed as neurodivergent

2026-07-25 01:56:29 UTC

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"some neurodivergent people don't like bad smells or uncomfortable touching or too-loud noises"
are there people who DO like things that are being described as "the thing that nobody likes"? is that what a neurotypical is? a walking contradiction?

2026-07-25 01:49:29 UTC

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can you imagine if there was an article that said the opposite
that neurotypical people lie and cheat and steal for no reason and that that's a good thing

2026-07-25 01:45:47 UTC

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a lot of literature about autistic people has something like "autistic people will say words that form sentences that mean the thing they're trying to say" and "autistic people try to do the right thing even if nobody is policing them" as if those are negative qualities

2026-07-25 01:43:44 UTC

there's this weird mythos about neurodivergent people not understanding figures of speech but what's really going on is that when that happens a neurotypical person will make fun of them rather than telling them what the fuck they meant

2026-07-11 02:38:58 UTC

hey let's roleplay as Warframe 1999 instant messaging
I'll start
**Soldja1Shot1kil:** gotta b a trip when u change genders lol

2026-07-02 16:01:59 UTC

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Tarn Adams had played a secret prerelease of Minecraft back when he released Dwarf Fortress in 2002

2026-07-02 11:14:06 UTC

I should do a "we made Dwarf Fortress but with a difficulty selector and in SPACE" compare-and-contrast blog post
what games are in that genre
so far I've got<li>RimWorld (although I haven't played it recently and for the most part until the most recent expansion it was only in space for lore purposes unless you had a mod that made the game actually good)</li><li>Stardeus (basically that mod for RimWorld as a standalone game except you also play as the Space Station 13 AI)</li><li>The Last Starship (made by the people who made the original Prison Architect; probably my favorite among this list)</li><li>Maybe Factorio and its official and unofficial Space expansions? Kind of straying beyond what could be accurately called "Dwarf Fortress but with a difficulty selector".</li><li>Space Haven (which I just finished last night and is basically The Last Starship but with some parts better and some parts worse)</li>
are there others I should look into before making the post
**Thanks for your reminders:**<li>Oxygen Not Included (although I don't know if it counts as a Dwarf Fortress-like given the side-view camera, but also Dwarf Fortress has a 3D play area and none of these other games do so come on in and join the party Klei I guess)</li><li>Does Two Point Campus's "Cheesy Heap: Delta-Rye" campus count???</li><li>InfraSpace (it's a traffic jam simulator set in a space city you get to build)</li>

2026-06-08 16:16:27 UTC

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too many beginner game developers played minecraft and just assume that every video game has to have exactly the same inventory management system as minecraft regardless of genre

2026-06-08 13:15:28 UTC

important knowledge for beginner game developers: you can make the player *character* do the boring stuff rather than having the player do it

2026-05-22 13:43:05 UTC

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4495510/Plantation_Simulator/
oh this is hilarious
the racist game removed the game and now all the bigots who bought it because they wanted a racist game are review bombing it

2026-05-09 03:15:31 UTC

love to look at a different social media website and see people talking about the fediverse and 100% of the time they say some shit like "I would join mastadon but it sucks because your only choice is to join a server for nazis or a server that bans nazis"
and like
IS THAT A HARD PROBLEM FOR YOU TO SOLVE?

2026-04-30 12:24:08 UTC

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my "two office computer towers" comparison was mainly about physical footprint size.
I don't know the specifics of what hardware giant commercial LLMs like ChatGPT run on, but I would assume that the type of hardware is similar because the math being done is basically the same for any deep learning system (it's weighted sums all the way down).
In the video, John McDonald talks about how these servers are *only* used for the inferencing step. The training is (or at least was at the time of this video) done locally on his work computer.

2026-04-29 23:22:45 UTC

thinking about how this was all it took for Valve to run 2.4 million minutes of computations per day and have a robot check every counter-strike: global offensive match for potential cheating forever
like, two office computer towers sitting next to each other takes the same amount of physical space
and meanwhile generative AI needs an entire mall-sized building full of servers and an entire river it can boil because it's just so wildly inefficient
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
https://mastodon.lubar.me/system/media_attachments/files/116/490/551/169/396/577/original/0ee226cb8155c0a7.png

2025-12-25 04:27:31 UTC

video game magazine reviewer who gives a subscore for how good the pornography people have made about the game is

2025-12-03 18:32:39 UTC

SPOTIFY WRAPPED
You listened to 0 songs. That's 0 seconds of music! You don't have a Spotify account.

2025-11-23 04:12:54 UTC

I very much believe that if capitalism hadn't tried to turn large language models into infinite money and they were strictly in computer science land, people would find them really cool
the idea that weighted sums can independently figure out relative meanings of words via context clues is genuinely really cool
the algorithm isn't even all that complicated! it just works with very long lists of numbers

2025-11-05 00:15:10 UTC

the steam forums are a place where you can see assholes being assholes to each other
why are people so angry about literally everything
https://mastodon.lubar.me/system/media_attachments/files/115/494/199/824/865/690/original/51cfccff1c607817.png

2025-09-03 08:51:48 UTC

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when dwarf fortress had money for a very brief period (this was before I started playing it and back when you couldn't dig down at all), players ran into a problem: a functioning society does not require 100% of its members to be productive.
so you would end up with dwarves for whom there was no work available, but because there was no work available, they could not afford any of the abundant high quality food and clothing and other goods.
and from this starting scenario and essentially physics-mandated capitalism comes a logical solution found by players.
if dwarves *must* complete jobs in order to earn money that they can use to purchase comfort, but comfort is extremely abundant, the solution is to *create jobs that don't produce anything*
and because of how Dwarf Fortress works, "pull the lever" *is a job*.
so players found they could build a room full of levers, not attached to anything, and assign the task of pulling each lever on repeat to whoever was available.
dwarves who could not find work otherwise would walk into the room and flip their lever from side to side, accomplishing literally nothing, until they got bored or hungry or tired and left to use the money they had "earned" to rectify that.
Tarn Adams found it was a better solution to simply delete capitalism.
and that's the story of why Dwarf Fortress no longer has an economy.

2025-09-03 08:44:55 UTC

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does anyone remember what a "welfare lever" is from when I last explained it

2025-09-03 05:42:55 UTC

I love how every video game either doesn't simulate an economy or has some kind of way of cheating at economics
really makes you think

2025-08-25 16:15:19 UTC

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"oh this village is 1000 blocks in this direction" WHY NOT JUST CALL IT A KILOMETER

2025-08-25 16:11:46 UTC

why do minecraft mods not use SI units if the world they take place in is made of unit meter cubes

2025-08-03 23:28:38 UTC

seeing people on Steam say things like "nobody should look at pornography you should just get a real woman"
do... do they think heterosexual men are the only humans who exist

2024-11-05 06:05:16 UTC

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A lot of the time, the word doesn't even mean a bad thing. I've had people call me autistic in a video game argument and then get really upset and apologetic when I inform them that I am indeed autistic as if they somehow hurt my feelings and also didn't think that was a possible outcome of something they were trying to use as an insult.

2024-11-05 06:03:14 UTC

I love how people who have no idea what they're talking about will often latch onto one word that they know means a bad thing but they aren't quite sure what bad thing it means.
I've been called a "corporate bootlicker" for understanding how the Steamworks API works.

2024-08-26 16:32:14 UTC

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#pissing

2024-08-11 14:34:08 UTC

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https://mastodon.lubar.me/system/media_attachments/files/112/943/879/350/685/559/original/97727ba185181b89.png

2024-08-11 14:14:23 UTC

https://mastodon.lubar.me/system/media_attachments/files/112/943/802/549/578/439/original/0a653d3df2301d16.png

2024-08-03 15:58:46 UTC

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the trumpet player is actually really tiny and in the foreground