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.

I wish I was in that position. I never want to hear “good code is its own documentation” ever again.

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.

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.

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.

Anduril is way overengineered. I like this UI that some of my lights have:

While off:

• One push: Turn on at the last used brightness.
• Two pushes: Turn on at maximum brightness.
• Three pushes: That strobe mode that you don’t need but seems to be obligatory.
• Hold: Turn on at the lowest brightness (or moonlight mode if the light has one).

While on:

• One push to turn off.
• Two pushes to toggle between maximum brightness and the last used “regular” brightness.
• Three: That strobe mode that someone has to have some use for.
• Hold: Alternately increase or decrease the brightness.

That’s pretty easy to learn and gives you all the functions you’d reasonably need (plus that strobe) without a lot of clutter.

We used to have one: “Solang das deutsche Reich besteht wird jede Schraube rechts gedreht.” (“As long as the German Empire persists every screw is turned right.”)

Given that the German Empire failed spectacularly, this sentence isn’t very popular anymore.

True, although that has happened with F/OSS as well (like with xz or the couple times people put Bitcoin miners into npm packages). In either case it’s a lot less likely than the software simply ceasing to be supported, becoming gradually incompatible with newer systems, and rotting away.

Except, of course, that I can pick up the decade-old corpse of an open source project and try to make it work on modern systems, despite how painful it is to try to get a JavaFX application written for Java 7 and an ancient version of Gradle to even compile with a recent JDK. (And then finally give up and just run the last Windows release with its bundled JRE in Wine. But in theory I could’ve made it work!)

Note that this specifically talks about proprietary platforms. Locally-run proprietary freeware has entirely different potential issues, mostly centered around the developer stopping to maintain it. Locally-run F/OSS has similar issues, actually, but lessened by the fact that someone might later pick up the project and continue it.

Admittedly, platforms are very common these days because the web is an easily accessible cross-platform GUI toolkit SaaS is more easily monetized.

And this is why stuff should be defined in terms of day’s earnings to provide scaling. If an ultra-rich person gets jailed and has to post 20 billion dollars in bail, they can’t treat jail as a minor inconvenience.

The main issue was that Vista asked for admin rights all the time. One of the first things they addressed with SP1 was to require admin privileges for fewer operations, cutting down on the number of UAC prompts.

Or the dock randomly decides it doesn’t like one specific computer anymore and falls back to being a USB3 hub. Thunderbolt docks are really cool but I’ve had tons of reliability issues with them over the years.

I still use one but it’s been relieved from display duty because it didn’t always play nice.

True. Just this weekend I spent far too much time trying to get a printer to work again on Windows after its IP address got changed. In the end Windows refused to talk to the printer unless I removed and then readded the device from the Settings app, which prompted a reinstallation of the device driver. No, just changing the IP address in the device settings wasn’t enough; Windows insisted on the driver being reinstalled.

Linux didn’t need reconfiguration; it just autodetected that the printer had moved.

I’m not saying that Linux is without issues, not by far. But Windows has never been terribly “it just works” for me either. The closest to “it just works” was (aptly) OS X somewhere around Snow Leopard.