Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.

Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.

So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…

Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.

It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(

Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.

I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.

Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.

Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.

They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.

Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.

Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.

There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.

https://lochnits.com/aopid/

You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)

I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.

Think there should be an ‘accessibility’ option in the settings menu? I remember it being pretty decent - god mode, slow down, item highlighting, and the ‘half damage’ option were in there.

Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.

Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.

Enough of that crazy talk - plainly WheeledDeviceServiceFactoryBeanImpl is where the dependency injection annotations are placed. If you can decide what the code does without stepping through it with a debugger, and any backtrace doesn’t have at least two hundred lines of Spring boot, then plainly it isn’t enterprise enough.

Fair enough, though. You can write stupid overly-abstract shit in any language, but Java does encourage it.

Succinctly and well put.

Well now. My primary exposure to Go would be using it to take first place in my company’s ‘Advent of Code’ several years ago, in order to see what it was like, after which I’ve been pleased never to have to use it again. Some of our teams have used it to provide microservices - REST APIs that do database queries, some lightweight logic, and conversion to and from JSON - and my experience of working with that is that they’ve inexplicably managed to scatter all the logic among dozens of files, for what might be done with 80 lines of Python. I suspect the problem in that case is the developers, though.

It has some good aspects - I like how easy it is to do a static build that can be deployed in a container.

The actual language itself I find fairly abominable. The lack of exceptions means that error handling is all through everything, and not necessarily any better than other modern languages. The lack of overloads means that you’ll have multiple definitions of eg. Math.min cluttering things up. I don’t think the container classes are particularly good. The implementation of pointers seems solely implemented to let you have null pointer exceptions, it’s a pointless wart.

If what you’re wanting to code is the kind of thing that Google do, in the exact same way that Google do it, and you have a team of hipsters who all know how it works, then it may be a fine choice. Otherwise I would probably recommend using something else.

I feel that Python is a bit of a ‘Microsoft Word’ of languages. Your own scripts are obviously completely fine, using a sensible and pragmatic selection of the language features in a robust fashion, but everyone else’s are absurd collections of hacks that fall to pieces at the first modification.

To an extent, ‘other people’s C++ / Bash scripts’ have the same problem. I’m usually okay with ‘other people’s Java’, which to me is one of the big selling points of the language - the slight wordiness and lack of ‘really stupid shit’ makes collaboration easier.

Now, a Python script that’s more than about two pages long? That makes me question its utility. The ‘duck typing’ everywhere makes any code that you can’t ‘keep in your head’ very difficult to reason about.

Frezik has a good answer for SQL.

In theory, Ansible should be used for creating ‘playbooks’ listing the packages and configuration files which are present on a server or collection of servers, and then ‘playing the playbook’ arranges it so that those servers exist and are configured as you specified. You shouldn’t really care how that is achieved; it is declarative.

However, in practice it has input, output, loops, conditional branching, and the ability to execute subtasks recursively. (In fact, it can quite difficult to stop people from using those features, since ‘declarative’ doesn’t necessarily come easily to everyone, and it makes for very messy config.) I think those are all the features required for Turing equivalence?

Being able to deploy a whole fleet of servers in a very straightfoward way comes as close to the ‘infinite memory’ requirement as any programming language can get, although you do need basically infinite money to do that on a cloud service.

No love for the ‘declarative’ programming paradigm? You can actually do some useful work with SQL or Ansible…

I found that too. The animations are misleading - just listen for when you need to press the buttons.

The plural of faux pas is also faux pas, because you know, French. But this is less one false step in the dance, than doing entirely the wrong dance altogether.

Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.

I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.