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.

SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

The sound and the video would get out of sync if you left it on long enough, like 24 hours or so, for added confusion.

I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.

That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.

Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.

From the article, sounds like the company founder is a complete bell-end, had no clear vision and kept changing his mind on everything. Half the games developers in Edinburgh probably used to work for Rockstar and will know all the ins-and-outs of developing a GTA clone, but if you keep fucking them around then you’ll end up with a mess.

From the reviews, sounds like even when it’s not being a buggy mess, it’s boring and the plot is completely stupid. You can hotfix the bugs and performance issues away, but if the underlying concept is shite then you can’t really polish that into something good.

Isn’t the default installation of Ubuntu to BTRFS? In which case, you should have an @ subvolume with Ubuntu that’s mounted to /, and an @home subvolume that’s mounted to /home.

Make a new subvolume, install a new operating system into it, and choose that subvolume in the bootloader, should be able to have Ubuntu and ‘your favourite OS’ (I use Arch btw) living side-by-side with the same home directory.

You say that, but me moving my family plan over to Qobuz barely even interrupted the album that we were listening to - just waited for the track to end, and then switched services. Much better sound quality, much better curated recommendations, no more supporting fascist arseholes. No time like the present, do it.

Good name, though - I like it.

They split up :-(

Ah, nice. I destroyed my first one playing Sekiro; the trigger buttons are really awkward to get to pieces to replace the internals, and my replacement Steam controller is almost too valuable to use, since I can’t replace it any more.

Well, there are some ‘poorly optimised’ games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I’m struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that’s the joy of Unity, though.

I think a lot of the problem is that we’re long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There’s games that cost ten times as much and which don’t really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as ‘badly optimised’ since they’re chasing the very latest graphical shinies.

I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I’m not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from ‘charmingly simple’ to ‘functionally realistic’, but I’d not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.

Mark Z. Danielewski for the win. House of Leaves is superb; 50 Year Sword is interesting, but doesn’t quite scratch the itch. I see he’s got something new out this year as well, will need to check it out.

As well as being able to ‘rent’ disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.

In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.

Yeah. Being able to ‘rent’ games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don’t need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.

Vim is my preferred ‘IDE’ for C++, Python, Bash, and general configuration file editing. It’s got some big pluses:

• its text editing is superb once you’ve mastered it, but that’s a small part of its benefits when used as an IDE, and ‘Vim mode’ in other environments kind of undersells what else it can do

• Vim has some great plugins for development. YouCompleteMe is awesome for predictive completion and showing docs, but NerdTree for file management and TagBar for showing structure are amazing as well. They’re all very configurable and they get out of your way.

• Vim lives in your terminal window, so you can do splits and tabs using whichever terminal you like. Kitty is very fast and configurable and keeps out your way. Being able to have multiple tabs of Vim open, a tab for compilation, a tab for debugging, a tab for version control, a tab for man pages, and being able to flip between them without taking your fingers off the keyboard makes for a very fast workflow

• Vim makes it very easy to edit binary files and be precise about whitespace changes, so it’s easy to make a minimal change for raising a PR.

If you assign a hotkey to run a macro in Vim, then that can be made very flexible - saving and formatting all open windows, then invoking CMake to do a build and CTest to run all your unit tests can be put on a function key if you like. Trying to tell Eclipse to “just run CMake to do the build” seems to be an exercise in frustration; so many IDEs are terrible at “just getting out of the way”.

Work pays for an IntelliJ licence for using Java. Java is so unwieldy without a proper IDE that it’s hard to code in it without it. I certainly don’t love it, though, and they seem determined to make every new version worse with bizarre new features. Flexible minimalist editing with configurable plugins is all that you really need, and on that basis Geany looks pretty good - will give it a try.

Allows the very important ‘overwrite files while they’re open’ functionality used during update. Write all the new files for a service then restart it. No need to reboot the whole machine for that.

Looking at you, Windows, and your bullshit scheduled reboots.

I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The ‘fix’ was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.

Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.

InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.

Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.

In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.

Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.

Don’t you mean a jift?

Also no way that they’re going to build that thing for $200M. That won’t even cover the first round of grifting before a spade hits the ground.

Can’t help but laugh at all the steps in front of it too, when that fat fuck was complaining about the escalator at the UN being broken. How you going to get into that building, Taco? Someone have to carry you?