Abstraction is not very compatible with concurrency, so as well as your your beautiful abstract API, you also need some ‘cut through the layers’ functions to return the underlying classes you need to synchronise on. Now you have a right mess that’s incredibly hard to understand, infuriating to debug, and impossible to refactor. Best you can do is put another layer of abstraction on top. Repeat every six months.

If you think you might want to leave early, more polite not to disturb the other patrons. If there were any other patrons, of course.

100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it’s more widely used at home than on business machines.

The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.

As a “caps lock is another control” enjoyer, I know that pain. Don’t need to take your fingers off the home keys to type ^[ , whereas the proper escape key is a bit of a stretch.

Well, having not played the Xbox version… ;-) Once you’ve got it running, it remains one of the finest games of all time.

Getting it running is the real sands of time, tho. It has a particular hatred of multi-core CPUs, requires a graphics card that supports both hardware transform & lighting but also truly ancient versions of DirectX, and is obstinately not-widescreen. You’ll be wanting a fan patch; last time I tried one, it was a bit of a crash-fest (it wasn’t, back in the day) and some of the SFX looked plain wrong.

Graphics still held up perfectly - the art style is very strong - and the story remains charming. All I wanted from a remake was the damned thing to start up in a modern screen resolution, and it seems they’ve managed to spend years on it without even managing that.

What is my cat doing on your mat, when she has a perfectly good beanbag to stretch out on? At least I know what she’s up to when she sneaks outside, now…

Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You’ve got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it’s a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.

Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You’re limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you’re limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you’ll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.

Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you’re a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you’re good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.

Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can’t rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you’ll have most certainly earned it.

Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just “DPS race” them like you do normally.

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.

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.

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.

I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I’d like to add some more ‘robust and flexible’ algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it’s written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.

I’ve spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it’s not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.

Reasonable for a lightly-loaded home server, however. I’ve got Arch Linux ARM (btw) running as my home Forgejo / Transmission / DHCP / NAS, and it just sits and sips power while providing all those services 24/7 like a champ.

Shout out to ALARM for having basically the entire Arch ecosystem (including 99% of AUR) all working and ready-to-go.

The industrial design has improved enormously since then, as well. The days of using the same connector for different voltages, or connectors which can be rotated are gone. Everything has a keyed connector or similar pokayoke that means it only fits to the correct place, and only one way around. CPUs don’t suicide if you forget to attach their system cooler, they just throttle. Much better, and obvious in retrospect that it should always have been that way.

Apart from the front panel connectors on a motherboard, of course. Those fiddly little bastards can get straight to hell.

Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.

Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.

especially if you have the infrastructure in place

I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

A fine question. But alas, my PC was only up to emulating it at ‘PS4 native res’, so don’t know.

Well, an increase from (60 to 70) fps to (85 to 87) fps is nothing to complain about. It was obviously completely playable when it was managing “a bit over 30” since it was designed that way, but I’ve no problem with more.

Apparently they have fixed the “vertex explosion” bug as well, where your face would occasionally turn into a mass of spikes that obscured what you were doing so much it was unplayable - needed a quit out and restart, and was the major interruption to the game.

Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.

True, but network effects are important to that.

There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.

There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.

Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.

Listen, there’s dozens of Linux users on Void, Slackware and Gentoo. Dozens! Especially the ones wanting to run the latest games. Can’t just leave all of them out.