Having had one of the old Windows phones with a keyboard dumped on me at an old workplace, can confirm it’s completely possible for a phone to have a keyboard and be a complete piece of shit.

A good phone with a good keyboard may have some use cases. If you do a lot of writing but not any more computing power or screen space than a phone has, plus you want to be doing that on the move, then yeah. For me, can shitpost on forums using my phone in my spare time, and dealing with on-call work issues - having multiple tabs of Jira and Slack open, for instance - just isn’t really practical on a small screen.

If your job is very email-centric, then yeah, sure. Blackberry were very good for just having the stuff you need - email, vpn, ‘corporate’ office documents - in a form that worked.

Also interesting is the notion of ‘Kolmogorov Complexity’ - what is the shortest programme that could produce a given output? Worst case for a truly random sequence would just be to copy it out, but a programme that outputs eg. a million digits of pi can actually be quite short. As can a programme that outputs a particular block cypher for an empty input. In general, it is very difficult to decide how long a programme is needed to produce a given output, and what the upper limit of compression could be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

Assuming that these have fairly impressive 100 MB/s sustained write speed, then it’s going to take about 93 hours to write the whole contents of the disk - basically four days. That’s a long time to replace a failed drive in a RAID array; you’d need to consider multiple disks of redundancy just in case another one fails while you’re resilvering the first.

Why buttplug for tachyons?

Yeah. Doesn’t take much optimising of disk writes to make things run much better on a Pi; they’re quite capable machines as long as disk i/o isn’t your limiting factor. Presumably the devs have been doing some tidying up.

My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy ‘todo’ list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It’s a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you’ve been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can’t do with the command line and ssh. But it’s free, so there’s no downside.

Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I’d been working on.

Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it’s a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, “very Github inspired” interface. Time to run some updates…

Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.

Annoys me that “less” is always correct, which makes “fewer” completely redundant, and yet it’s a short word that could be valuable in conversation if opened up and reused for something everyday that has a long name.

“Before I leave the house, I always check that I’ve got my keys, phone, and fure in my pockets.”

Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…

A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.

Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.

“One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:

• can’t have the same character more than twice in a row
• can’t be one of the ten-thousand most popular passwords (which is mostly a big list of swears in russian)
• all whitespace must be condensed into a single character before checking against the other rules

We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.

We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.

Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.

Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.

C

Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.

It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.

Indeed. Here in the UK, people can request that their water company should add it in if their water supply is low-fluoride, for instance from a reservoir, and the water company must add it in.

Back when I used to work in water, that was always the stuff that gave me nightmares. Concentrated hexafluorosilicic acid is what we’d use for dosing. We’d test all the equipment in the chemical room on plain water, drain it out and then literally brick up the doorway. Site would be evacuated during delivery - delivery guy would connect everything up in a space suit, hop in the shower afterwards. Lasted for ages and ages, since you only need the tiniest drip in the water supply to get what you need, but the tiniest drip on your skin would be enough to kill you as well; its lethal dosage is horrifically small.

Made working with all the other halides much less of a concern - we use shed loads of chlorine, but that stuff is much much less nasty in comparison.

Yeah, it’s always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don’t notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.