robrtsql

My father-in-law (who is about to retire) tells a story about his former boss who retired and then died less than a year afterwards (the boss was in his 60's and thought to be healthy so this was a shock). The lesson he apparently took from this was to live frugally and retire ASAP. Weirdly enough, my takeaway from the anecdote was the opposite: having a long and healthy retirement isn't a guarantee, so I would much rather delay my retirement by either taking sabbaticals when I am younger and healthier, or by increasing spending and hopefully enjoying a higher quality-of-life.

I used to feel that way. I recently (well, 2 or 3 years ago..) started playing Final Fantasy XIV. I think a lot of MMOs these days have quality-of-life improvements so that you no longer have to “nolife” the game if you don’t want to.

For example, I knew people who played WoW who joined a guild and then had to keep their weekend evenings open so they could raid with the guild. Nowadays, these games come with matchmaking so you can find a group of players to complete a dungeon with (the only exception is the hardest content, where you are unlikely to find 7 other random players who are prepared enough to play them). It turns out playing an MMO is a lot more manageable now.

I've never tried it, but my impression from other people is that it's unreliable and maybe doesn't even work at all for the newest versions of Microsoft Office.

Is the question about Linux in general or about Pop_OS specifically? I've used it--the differences are going to increase once their new desktop environment releases, but right now it's comparable to Ubuntu except with some nice-to-haves (proprietary NVIDIA drivers are installed automatically, no software is delivered via Canonical's 'snaps' which are almost universally hated). I enjoyed it, but in my opinion, popular distros are more similar than they are different.

If you mean just replacing Windows with Linux in general: it's great, unless you need to run, say, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, or Fortnite.

Where can I find information about “silent cornermen”? I can’t picture them, and the only relevant result when googling the phrase is your post.

Depending on how the law is implemented, I can think of a number of ways that studios would try to get around it:

- If the law says it only applies to games which are purchased for an up-front cost, then make the game free-to-play but with microtransactions

- Include a single-player campaign, which will remain playable even when the multiplayer or game-as-a-service part of the game goes offline

- Just don't allow EU players to buy or play the game

If this were to become law, I expect that it would result in many more games with offline solo play, rather than resulting in more games where the tools to host your own server are provided. That's still probably a victory for players, though.

Given that you mentioned the 3rd party software, you probably know this, but I think even the 2019 MacBook Pro supported working with the laptop closed--but it requires the laptop to be charging, otherwise it will just go to sleep.

I, too, downloaded the 3rd party app ("Amphetamine"?) to allow it to stay on when closed and unplugged. As far as I can tell, it doesn't work at all.

The app is monetized by limiting the number of “runs” you can do per month. Based on iOS limitations I think we can assume this means the compilation is done on a remote server.

EDIT: nevermind! I tried running a program with airplane mode on and it still worked. Now I’m really interested to hear how this was accomplished.

Same—unfortunately most of the content that other players produce is either impossible to lose or is specifically designed to be as hard as possible. You can still find levels which are suitable for your skill level, but the “10 mario mode” or whatever is specifically built around selecting the next level FOR you, so that entire game mode is basically a waste.

> Though reading all those devs tweeting that they were switching to Godot and tweeting 5 minutes later, "Oh no! How do I get Godot to do [thing Godot absolutely can't do and never will]." was marvelous entertainment.

I’m curious what Unity can do that Godot “never will” be able to.

This famous writeup quickly convinced me that this wouldn't work very well:

https://qntm.org/abolish

Which open source version of an MMORPG was that? If you don't mind me asking.

I have a Librem 5. It's currently collecting dust in my closet.

I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it at 1% battery, with a notification saying "Your laptop will shut down if you don't plug it in soon". Typically, I'm used to mobile devices using extremely low amounts of power when you're not using them for anything at all.

It's also extremely slow--I figured that it wouldn't be as snappy as a flagship phone but I was surprised to find out that video playback (or, at least, YouTube in Firefox) is basically unusable. That's basically a non-starter for me.

I'm hoping to find something fun to do with it (I don't expect to get refunded, nor do I think anyone else will or should pay $600 for this thing) but haven't come up with anything yet.

> Here's another activity that will probably never exist again: Law running. I remember both being a runner and a crafter.

I'm out of the loop (I tried 2007scape but don't play it enough to be in the know). Is it because some other faster way of leveling Runecrafting has become available?

I did the exact same thing you did, except with cold brew concentrate, when I wanted to quit caffeine one time (in preparation for a dental surgery, where I decided I would rather not be taking caffeine while recovering). Would recommend for anyone who is trying to 'kick the habit'.

> Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par.

> “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”

At the risk of being a 'typical HN commenter', I wonder why not? Obviously there would be a learning curve but I feel like all students would need is a Linux operating system and a web browser.

Thanks. I was going to point out that this was an existing problem in the Fediverse (there are instances that are 'unsafe' because they are either explicitly _for_ hate speech or just don't do enough to moderate it) and that the standard approach is to not federate with those instances, nor with any instance that chooses to federate with them. It's not universally popular (some people don't like the idea of 'guilt by federation') but it's necessary if your goal is to prevent your users from coming into contact with nazis.

Switch's sleep is probably a little better. I think waking up is slightly faster, and it discharges less battery while it's asleep.

The difference is not huge. The big one is that, to be "Verified", there are some usability criteria that need to be met (the game's text needs to be legible on the Steam Deck screen, you need to be able to launch the game without any hacky tweaks like clicking around in a launcher using the touch-screen or something, the game needs to basically work out-of-the-box with the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, etc) and if those aren't met then they will provide a 'blurb' which explains which ones are missing.

Other than that, I have found that lots of games which aren't "Verified" play perfectly, and some games which are "Verified" don't launch at all (because Valve said 'hey! it works!', gave it the Verified badge, and then a month later the developers pushed out an update for the game which broke something for Steam Deck users).

> Like are there any objective news sources to rank these services and what internet comments to trust at face value?

This might be useful:

https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/

> It was discarded bc you never know where that would actually run

Yep, I considered that switching to GitHub Actions would _theoretically_ eliminate the need for disaster recovery for CI/CD (since the handling of disasters is out of your hands) but in practice their SLA is far worse than just running CodePipeline in a single region.

> No, they say to use AZ's

Using 3 AZs in us-east-1 won't save you.

I guess a demanding customer would have said 'you should have implemented disaster recovery so you could failover to us-east-2' but that's easier said than done. The more regional AWS services you adopt, the bigger the impact is. How does one recover from a regional outage if their pipeline is in that region?

How did Apache Maven make it onto this list? Seems like Maven is a build tool that one would invoke _from_ Jenkins or Drone.

“cour” in anime can be distinct from “season” because it sometimes refers specifically to a 13-episode run which airs weekly over the spring/summer/fall/winter, even if two or more cours get logically grouped into a single “season” according to the episode titles.

Intuit Quickbooks is another service that gets used like this. My mom received some fraudulent invoice from an Intuit Quickbooks user, which was from the legit Intuit domain since it was sent by the service, which claimed that she owed "PayPal, Inc" $600 for something or other. I told her to delete the email and reported the activity to Intuit but never heard back.

> Physics interpolation in 3D

This is huge. Initially, Godot didn't support any interpolation, which meant you either ignore fps altogether (and your game literally plays slower, and therefore differently, if the game slows down from 60 to 30 fps), or you move physics code to the _physics_process() and suffer from stutter/jitter because the physics code and the rendering code slowly drift out of sync. Amazing!

EDIT: I forgot to mention the _third_ possiblity, which is that you write a bunch of custom code in GDScript or C++ which attempts to do the interpolation.

One reason (probably the main reason) to use Deluge, with its client-server stack, is you can run the server on a “seed box” which will allow you to manage your torrents on a server which is always up (and always seeding, when needed) from a client which is not always online (your laptop, for example). This is extremely useful if you are part of a private tracker community where users are required to seed the things that they leech.

In my opinion, the difference between Mastodon/ActivityPub/the fediverse and email is adoption. If Mastodon was more popular:

- A handful of instances provided by large companies would probably crop up and end up hosting the majority of users

- Spammers would notice that they could reach a large number of people via Mastodon, and start spamming

- The providers of these large instances would moderate heavily to prevent their own instances being used for spam, and begin blocking / not federating with small instances

I should add that spam is probably _already_ a problem on Mastodon, but perhaps not to the extent that it is for email since the average Mastodon user is (for now!) way less likely to fall for a scam and therefore a much less valuable target.

I don't know if I would say it 'romanticizes' alcoholism but this passage definitely raises my eyebrow:

> When we talk about the drinking, Amy says, “That’s why we live on the edge out here.” The edge is familiar. The edge feels right. We have found places where the depths are close, within view, and there, with spirits near, we’ve tried to build calm lives for our own children.

I'm not exactly sure what is meant here, but as someone who is experiencing alcoholism in the family right now it's not really resonating.

My thoughts too. The examples given have certainly convinced me that women have increased financial burdens (given the pay gap, being socialized to not invest, paying more for goods marketed towards women, etc) but this article doesn't propose how UX could help solve that. I don't think auditing a banking app for gendered language is going to help someone who can't afford a surprise emergency expense.