Heroic get a referral link if you buy games from GOG via their launcher, which I always make sure to do. The fact that Heroic has ‘first class’ integration with Glorious Eggroll, and in fact updates GE for Steam for you as well, means that it’s damn good for Linux gaming. If you don’t need Steam’s workshop or social factors for a game, there’s no reason not to buy through it.

If GOG could collaborate with Heroic on their API integration, then that would be perfection - could retire Galaxy in that case.

https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate

If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.

3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.

In which case, I’ll set aside a very good bottle of whisky for that day.

I bought Subnautica on Steam when I wanted to replay it, despite having it free on Epic, just because it was easier than dealing with their trash.

Proving a thing that’s only known empirically is extremely valuable, too. We’ve an enormous amount of evidence that the Riemann hypothesis is correct - we can produce an infinite amount of points on the line, in fact - but proving it is a different matter.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

It’s the Witcher 1 but redone in the Witcher 3 engine. They’ve reimplemented the combat rhythm minigame and the ‘sex cards’ are all in HD.

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Considering the random branches of science that have gone into making better hard drives, I’d be willing to put money on ‘understanding dark energy’ => ‘higher density data storage’ as one benefit of the tech.

But yeah, we understand more things, we’re in a better position to understand even more things, and some have applications you benefit from every day.

Here in the UK, we usually end up with Aldis and Lidls very near to each other. It makes sense, since they occupy the same kind of ‘big warehouse locations in customer shopping estates’, although it would be nice to have them a bit more spread out.

That does mean you can get the best of both very easily - Lidl for bread and cooked meat, Aldi for smoked mackerel and potato salad - and have two different ‘middle of Lidl’ selections of random goods. Absolute result…

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

The Centos “eight pointed star”?

I write Jira tickets with what needs to be achieved and why, and usually my preferred method of doing it and if there’s any constraints. I usually don’t much care exactly how it’s done, as long as it works, but sometimes it needs to fit into the bigger picture in a way that might not be obvious. My team have different strengths, and I’m more than happy for them to do what they do best. Most of my tickets range from two to six sentences in length - some are longer if it’s complicated, but most things aren’t.

My managers don’t think that’s enough for a ticket, and have been using LLMs to boost them up to several pages. That obviously requires making up tonnes of shit and overspecifying shit that doesn’t need specifying. We have to waste time verifying that we’ve not now got requirements that make no sense, and now have pages of test notes of things that don’t need testing, which means tickets now take days rather than hours to complete.

No-one can read these multi-page monstrosities, and are using LLMs to compact them down to a few sentences again.

I can’t believe that we’re boiling the oceans for this shit.

The actual fix is probably ‘enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions’, when some strings have different codepages to others’, or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

There’s no committee that approves words being added to the English language. Anything that’s understood by the group that uses it is a real word. We make up new words and change the definition of old ones all the time; dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.

That doesn’t stop the concept of ‘agentic AI’ being a pile of bullshit being peddled by snake-oil salesmen, of course, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be permitted to make up new words.