The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren’t skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.

Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus “live services games” were born.

It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It’s a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.

That’s because the first one was inspired by a Baldur’s gate game (they were working in localization). But it got canceled because interplay was on the brink of bankruptcy. So CDPR repurposed all the work done thus far, including most of the script, with a new license they had just bought.

Funnily enough, the mild success of the writing convinced CDPR to port the game to consoles and that also almost bankrupted them.

The problem is that on Linux it competes with bash and dozens of way better terminals.

People are using NAS for things they aren’t meant to do. They are a storage service and aren’t supposed to be anything else. In a typical data center model, NAS servers are intermediate storage. Meant for fast data transfers, massive storage capabilities and redundant disk fault tolerance. We are talking hundreds of hard drives and hundred gigabit connection speeds inside the data center. This is expensive to run, so they are also very energy efficient, meant to keep the least amount of required disks spinning at any given moment.

They are not for video rendering, data wrangling, calculations or hosting dozens of docker containers. That’s what servers are for.

Servers have the processing power and host the actual services. They then request data from a NAS as needed. For example, a web service with tons of images and video will only have the site logic and UI images on the server itself. The content, video and images, will be on the NAS. The server will have a temporary cache where it will copy the most frequently accessed content and new content on demand. Any format conversion, video encoding, etc. Will be done by the server, not the NAS.

Now, on self-hosting of course, anything goes and they are just computers at the end of the day. But if a machine was purpose made for being a NAS server, it won’t have the most powerful processor, and that’s by design. They will have, however, an insane amount of sata, PCI-e channels and drive bays. And a ton of sophisticated hardware for data redundancy, hotswap capacity and high speed networks that is less frequent in servers.

Beware, Gnucash is meant to be pro level accounting software. Is not a simple ledger or a tech/crypto gateway. I also use it for my personal life, but there’s like 30% of features I don’t use because they’re business accounting stuff I don’t need. It predates the cloud, it cares not for the latest trends, it crunches numbers and spits out reports. That’s part of what I like about it. It is not simple but it also isn’t bloated.

On the contrary. It relies on the premise of segregating binaries, config and data. But since it is only running one app, then it is a bare minimum version of it. Most containers systems include elements that also deduplicate common required binaries. So, the containers are usually very small and efficient. While a traditional system’s libraries could balloon to dozens of gigabytes, pieces of which are only used at a time by different software. Containers can be made headless and barebones very easily. Cutting the fat, and leaving only the most essential libraries. Fitting in very tiny and underpowered hardware applications without losing functionality or performance.

Don’t be afraid of it, it’s like Lego but for software.

Immutables are absolutely viable for tinkering. The most customized system I’ve ever had was an immutable distro, and I could tinker with 100% confidence that I would never lose the system.

Depends on the country the computer is being sold in. Microsoft has different pricing structures per country and the OEM selling the computer pays down the line based on sales numbers. That’s the main way MS Windows makes money. The price of Windows has always been part of the computer’s price. It’s a tiny minority of users who pay directly to MS for a windows license. Even businesses prefer the computer to come preinstalled with the OS.

No, you don’t get a cheaper computer if windows is cheaper in your country, final numbers are decided at the accounting level, not the point of sale. But, if they don’t have to pay MS anything, they can offer a cheaper laptop for you, the end user.

We should just rewrite it on Rust. We can start with writing a graphics renderer from scratch.

This is one of those games that I love the description, love the sales pitches, streamers do a good job of promoting it. In paper I should love this game, but it just doesn’t gel with me. There’s something about video games that just cannot be conveyed through video or text.

If all you need is mail, Tuta.

I’ve tried it. I like that they’re carrying the torch of OpenBoard, but I don’t like that swipe typing requires manually downloading a third party library.

My only gripe with the Samsung keyboard is that their only alternative distribution is Dvorak, and by now I’m 100% a colemak user even on touch screens. So I use open board with swipe typing.

I was never on Proton. Back when I decided to degoogle my digital life I landed on a short list between proton and tutamail. So I deep dive into both. When I researched Proton it stank of corporate technobro culture. The crypto wallet, trying to be an everything platform/brand, style over functionality programming, the communications. It all reeked of corpo bs.

Their only pro was operating from Swiss legal protections. So I landed on Tuta. Not because they were any particularly better, but because they were focused on doing one thing and one thing only at a time. They were also more focused on features over marketing buzzwords which I liked.

If encryption is a must, then use Tuta. German company, privacy focused, open source all around, no surveillance, free tier with encryption available, encrypted calendars, accessible paid subscriptions with actually useful services.

I’m not attacking your experience. Good for you, keep enjoying it. I’m just saying that it is not universally good for everyone, it would do us all good to avoid erasing other’s experiences or invalidating their emotions.

I also didn’t say it is creepy to see what your friends post. I’m saying that it is creepy that Facebook gets to see everything you do in your personal life. Remember that meta trains AI on what you post. At least with messaging you can use end to end encryption if you want to.

Maybe it’s just me, but that always struck me as a theater of connection, not actual connection. I know all my friends kids, even those who live abroad. Not because of an internet social network, but because we actually talk to each other on the regular, and share pictures and video calls, directly, personally. Not informally and creepily through a capricious algorithm. My good wishes to my friends and family on special occasions go directly to them, we don’t need a middle man to choose when and where they are going to see those things, and I don’t need to perform connection for people I barely talk to. Remember that the flip side of the coin is that social networks cause isolation by making all interactions feel impersonal and distant. Facebook literally caused a loneliness crisis amongst young people, who felt compelled to compete for attention and approval, distorting their expectations, altering their sense of self-worth, exposing them to abuse. Internet social networks have a very dark side.

From kids perspectives it is different. For young people anyone over 25 is old, solidly adult, not “with it”, washed, etc. Contrasts that with almost 70% of tiktok users are under 24, with over 50% of creators in the 18 to 24 range. That’s solidly a young people social network. Facebook is in comparison made of old people. Most young people who engage with Meta do so through Instagram, and have a Facebook account because IG nags them to create one. But they aren’t going there or spending any significant amount of time engaging with Facebook itself. Facebook follows the global age distribution more closely, but users and active users engaging are entirely different things.

Oh god, I refuse to play monopoly altogether unless it is strictly by vanilla rules. As soon as someone mentions free money if you fall on free parking I sarcastically claim “but that’s socialism!” and demand we switch to Catan instead.

It makes the game exciting for the first two or three times the strategic thing happens. Then it is extremely tedious and boring. I once witnessed a game with all the house rules at a party. People just started to look around for someone to give their hand to, as they were missing the rest of the party. The game went on for over two hours at which point none of the players left had started the game. Eventually everyone just placed the cards on the table and walked away. It got just too mind numbly dull and mechanic. There’s videos online of uno games that lasted over 6 hours because of these rules, and they’re absolute torture.

I have nothing against house rules, as long as they are balanced and fun for all players. But the typical house rules are created by overtly competitive players who want to optimize the fun out of games and maximize their potential for being cruel towards other players.