Ah, so they actually got that implemented. Nice.

Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It’s a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.

Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.

For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn’t even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can’t talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you’re SOL.

Or Garuda. Sure, the theme it applies to KDE by default is pretty garish but nothing keeps you from just going to System Settings and seeing a different theme. Other than that it’s basically just Arch with a bunch of stuff preinstalled and some convenience scripts.

Pool toy transformation is a whole thing. I don’t quite see the appeal either, although I can see it as a hybrid between latex kink (via the shiny and smooth “skin”) and doll kink (which in turn is related to D/s). It seems to be mostly a furry thing.

To be fair, it had its moments. Windows 95 was a pretty big step forwards and the alternative was OS/2 Warp, which has some nice features but was from IBM, who were still dreaming of replacing the PC with a vertically-integrated home computer again.

Windows 2000 (or XP starting with SP2) was also solid. 7 was alright. None of those had too much bullshit bundled with them.

Everything since Windows 8 has been some flavor of shitty, though.

Milky oolong. It has just the right amount of sweetness and just evokes feelings of coziness for me. Sometimes I add a little bit of jasmine as well.

Especially if you didn’t have a lot of spare time. With an active community you can just dip into discussions when you have the time. With a community you’re trying to establish yourself you absolutely have to provide a steady stream of content until it (hopefully) takes off.

But you can tune the specifications of the yarn to theoretically make the socks up to 2% more comfy. In practice your tuning efforts will make the socks less comfortable and tear more easily.

Exactly. If this was “Marathon: Return to Deimos” or “Marathon: Battleroid Arena” or even “Marathon Infinity Plus One” I wouldn’t complain. Much.

But just taking the name (and logo) of the original one? The game that started Bungie’s path towards being one of the big names of the FPS genre? That’s like saying they went straight from Pathways Into Darkness to Halo. That’s not honoring Marathon, it’s a soulless recycling of an old IP.

My vent cores feel distinctly unblasted.

We know that people have different chronotypes. We even know that most people of working age aren’t really morning people. Unfortunately, our business world assumes a standard circadian rhythm and is structured around getting up early because people needed to use every bit of daylight way back when. So that sucks, especially if you’re an evening or even night person.

Man, I hate it when they make new games that have exactly the same name as an older game by the same company. And this one’s not even a remake. I have no idea if Marathon (1994) and Marathon (upcoming) even play in the same universe but they don’t seem to have much in common gameplay-wise. Ugh.

Makes me wanna install M1A1 Aleph One (didn’t know it does M1 directly these days) and shoot some Pfhor, though.

“You finished a computer game, Atticus.”

The truth was a burning green crack through my brain.

Credits scrolling by, a reminder of the talent behind a just-finished journey. The feeling of triumph, slowly replaced by the creeping grayness of ordinary life.

I had finished a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.

I’d argue that unfun design elements can be useful in games if used with care and purpose. For instance, “suddenly all of the characters you’re attached to are dead” is not exactly fun but one of the Fire Emblem games used it to great dramatic effect at the midway point.

Of course the line between an event or mechanic that players love to hate and one they just hate is thin.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Aw, c’mon! Who doesn’t enjoy piping ten megabytes of JavaScript through Webpack to achieve those crucial on-scroll effects on an otherwise static page?

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.

Speak for yourself. I’m going to migrate all of my 22-bit RSA keys to a longer key length. And not 24 bits, either, given that they’re probably working on a bigger quantum computer already. I gotta go so long that no computer can ever crack it.

64-bit RSA will surely be secure for the foreseeable future, cost be damned.

I also only used v2 but it’s the extra stuff in it that slightly annoys me. Like how turbo mode (brighter than the usual maximum but usually time-limited to avoid overheating) is only available when the full UI is unlocked. Or how there’s a stepped ramp mode that I have to remember to disable whenever I swap out the battery. Or how I can accidentally enter one of the more exotic modes of for some reason I press the button too often.