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2 yr. ago

  • 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.

  • Cool. Looks fun, although a bit awkward. Looks really difficult mechanically, though - a motorbike arrangement gives you a lot more space to play with, and the chassis is much simpler.

    The speed record on one of those is nearly 100 km/h, although balance is complicated by the enormous set of balls you require to attempt it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowheel

  • Good name, though - I like it.

  • Yeah, that's UK. We've a million streets like that, those trees in the park-looking bit opposite. I'd imagine the house with the bins is a hotel or a B&B, something like that, because otherwise it would be odd to have so many the same colour - green is compostable and black is 'bottles and cans' where I live, and you normally just get one of each.

    Don't know what the green stripe on the road is. Our cycle lanes don't look like that, aren't that colour. I'm guessing it's some "who's allowed to park where in London" thing, residents-only or something like that. They're a strange bunch, Londoners.

  • 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.

  • Opposite experience for me on Qobuz. Start it off on some Dillinger Escape Plan, it'll be playing Judas Priest within about five songs. No no, I'm here for the screaming.

    Assigning a genre to a band is fine for those that 'stay in their lanes', but for bands that are a bit borderline genre, experiment a bit or get more (or less) hardcore over time, one label maybe isn't appropriate. I'd like to see something more like "Steam community tagging", where us users can put appropriate tags against each song / album / artist, and then be able to search based on tags. Takes some work to set up, but once it's going it should be relatively low effort for the platform, and lets the metalheads argue amongst themselves who belongs in exactly which genre.

  • Alonne runback is some bullshit. I reckon bed of chaos, magic smelter demon, darklurker, and (especially) the reindeer run to the twin pets are all much worse, though. DS3 doesn't have any that are particularly bad, and ER generally has stakes near bosses - they've mostly learned their design lesson.

    If you start at the firelink bonfire, you can travel down to Londo, and at the place where the first ghosts appear, drop down to the "square pool of water" in the lower ruins. Beat up one darkwraith, put on your 4K gear, and run through to the spiral staircase. Not terrible.

    Can't imagine your 4K gear being anything other than Havel's, the stamina shield, and your highest DPS weapon, and your tactics r1-r1-r1-r1-r1-estus-repeat, of course. Even on an SL1 run, they're not exactly a 'strategy' boss.

  • So does the presence of autistic women imply the existence of the 'lady foreskin'?

    Mysteries of the female anatomy never cease to amaze.

  • 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.

  • Can't agree with those things being sandwiches.

    Hotdogs are encased on three sides, and are therefore tacos, but poptarts and ravioli encase their fillings on all sides - that makes them calzones.

    https://cuberule.com/ has the details.

  • 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.

  • In Java, all objects are passed to methods 'by reference', and there is no way to mark them as immutable. So strictly speaking, they're all 'out variables'. This is the cause of a lot of mistakes in Java, where you eg. pass a list to a method, which then mutates it in some way. That will change the original that the caller passed in, which is normally unintended and may break class invariants. So Java tends to have an absurd number of 'safety copies' and immutable wrappers of collections.

    I'd probably describe the inability to mark things immutable as the main problem with Java. The golden rule of concurrency is that if you share mutable state, you must use an appropriate synchronisation primitive. It's not easy to mark things immutable (final doesn't do what const does in C++) and although you can make class internals private if you like, the junior devs at my work will come along and add accessor methods.

    tl:dr; yes it does. Passing an AtomicBoolean as a method argument will do as a built-in 'mutable object that holds a boolean and can be checked by caller', although it'll be slower than your own custom object since it does sync you won't need.

  • 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.