Strength is EAT MY DAMN FRUIT SALAD OR I’LL SMASH YOUR FACE IN.

Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.

After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).

It can be a vicious cycle. Someone raises price for whatever reason. Their competitors see that and think “well, if it works for them, it’ll work for us”. Their suppliers see the price rise and want a share of it, so raise theirs too. New players entering the market will likely set prices based off competition, even if the competition has actually set inflated prices. Eventually even companies that wouldn’t want to raise prices arbitrarily has to because it’s now inflation and their costs have risen.

Even without direct colusion, many companies still end up all following each other.

Why would “something is complicated” mean you can’t have a stance on it? By all means, you should be extra careful with complicated issues, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion or that there aren’t parts that are more clear cut.

Eg, your comment reads to me like you’re conflating Palestine (the largely unrecognized country) and Hamas (the terrorist group). Your Al Qaeda comment certainly reads that way. These groups and the vast majority of people support Palestine, not Hamas. So it’s like sympathizing with Iraq because they got invaded after 9/11.

And the why now is pretty obvious. Because big things are happening now. Yeah, this isn’t the first time Israel and Palestine have faced conflict, but it’s a big time and people are afraid that Israel is going to put a complete end to Palestine this time around. If you don’t speak up now, when will you?

I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.

The “somehow” is because IRC is extremely bare bones. It doesn’t stand up to modern expectations of what chat software does. Plus accounts aren’t all a bad thing. Anti-spam is vital for the internet today, as is rigid ways of preventing impersonation. IRC is a relic of a simpler era.

Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you’re good at it (and when there isn’t major time pressures).

Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you’ll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.

Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I’m constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I’m googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like “split a string of comma separated ints and add them up” are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I’ll just use Python, but Python’s weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

Side note, isn’t it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there’s no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?

The most recent C++ thing I worked on (not that recent, like 5 years or so ago) was a fairly new project and the people working on it were really passionate about C++. But it was C++ code that ran as a Python library and was using the official Python C bindings. Not sure why we didn’t use one of the unofficial C++ libraries, but the usage of that C library (and such a fundamental one) held things back. We wrote was was modern C++ (at the time), but big chunks would be a completely different style.

I hate writing code in either language. But at least what C has going for it is that it’s waaaay simpler than C++. Simple can be a really good thing. Sure, all those cool features can save you time, but they can also be gotchas that will cause bugs.

Though it is a balancing act. Too simple and you’ll make mistakes due to how much you have to repeat yourself or using unsafe equivalents (like using preprocessor directives to mimic features that C++ natively supports).

I remember wondering this when I was first trying to self learn. It’s because I needed a map (or list + struct or something) and was such a noob I didn’t know what maps were. Whatever material I was learning from wasn’t good enough, especially for winging things. Plus I was trying to learn C++ and maps aren’t quite so built into the language as they are with a better first language like Python.

You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.

Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.

Plus often we’re talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I’ve written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.

Eh, I think we have to recognize that many people using this site are doing things like taking the train, using the bathroom, or waiting on something. That often necessitates browsing to be short.

Many games I play automatically determine pretty reasonable settings. And worst case, you can always lean towards lower settings.

It adds value by helping convince clueless investors to give you money. I’m entirely serious. There’s a significant number of investors that think blockchain technology is a good thing. Doesn’t matter that it’s a terrible solution to practically every problem. The goal isn’t to be a good solution. The goal is to make money. They only need to convince a few clueless people to give them that.

Yeah, it wouldn’t even make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying. Most renting is from for-profit landlords. Obviously they have a mortgage, too. They’re obviously going to try to make a profit. Plus mortgage is only part of the cost of owning. There’s also property taxes and maintenance, which renting includes in the rent price.

The problems are mostly that there’s not enough supply (most commonly due to bad zoning), homeowners oppose anything that could help (cause that would reduce the value of the home they already own), and that most of these landlords are for-profit. Being for profit means they aren’t just going to charge more, but they also have a vested interest in making sure it’s more expensive and less tenant friendly.

K3s? What did you do to the other 5 letters??

I have two levels of backlog. The first level is my curated list of tickets that are highly worth doing in the near future and is limited in size. It’s currently larger than I’d like at 30-something (for a team of a little under 10), but I’m trying to get the team to focus on it more after historically neglecting it.

The second level is literally just everything else. Hundreds upon hundreds of tickets, ranging from restructuring unit tests (which will frankly never happen unless the structure of the tests somehow became a major barrier) to cool features that just aren’t important enough yet (or would take too long). Plus all the super low risk bugs, often in edge cases that nobody really cares about yet or aren’t worth the time to fix yet. And then there’s all the automation style tickets about improving the handling of something (commonly edge cases of things already automated for the happy path), but often that something just isn’t common enough to be worth it.

Tickets in the second level sometimes do get done. Usually because some issue becomes more common, enough people ask for it, or we simply finally have time for a new feature (can only do so many of those at a time). A common theme I have is I’ll encounter a problem, file a ticket, then eventually encounter the problem enough times that I go, “fuck it, I’ll do it myself”.

Yeaaaah, that’s sketchy. I can understand them blocking the communities out of fear of legal risk. They didn’t sign up for that kinda risk and we all know that piracy oriented sites get targeted by legal action (isn’t there currently an ongoing attempt to get Reddit to turn over user info about people who accessed piracy communities there?). But why the heck would they hide that they blocked the communities?

It’s the same as with Hexbear. I can understand why they defederated from that instance, since I’ve seen how they comment. They’re extremely aggressive. Even when they’re right, they’re assholes about it. And they’re often straight up supporting Russia, which is batshit crazy (they have no nuance, acting as if there can’t both be Nazis in Ukraine and Russia can also be an evil aggressor). But Lemmy.World was happy to silently defederate until they got called out. Even despite the fact that for Exploding Heads, they at least had a big post about it (even though Exploding Heads is far worse).

I like the idea of progressively higher taxes. Second house might have a modestly higher tax, but the third will be a steep increase and it only gets higher from there. Anyone who truly wants/needs multiple homes can have em, but they’re gonna pay through the teeth for them (which we can invest into building more homes).

We have such a shortage that IMO any extra home ownership is a problem. But it’s the kind of problem that I don’t think is a concern if they pay sufficient taxes on it. It’s the kind of problem that we can largely throw money at to fix.

Are plastic bags still a thing anymore? I think Ontario banned them, cause I haven’t seen them anywhere. It’s especially awkward if you use Instacart cause they just keep giving you need reusable bags every time. But even before this, they’ve been dwindling for ages, with lots of big chains no longer having em.

Only at places like farmers markets for me, and even then, I’d say at least half of vendors accept credit cards. And frankly I hate using cash. I don’t want to carry physical money around when tapping my phone is so easy.

Heck, this has even been my experience at Walmart. Even the express aisle took an eternity compared to self checkout. I love self checkouts and think they’re great. The complaints about hAvINg To ScAn mY OwN GrOCeriEs are ridiculous. I just want to buy my stuff and get home ASAP. Not like scanning groceries is difficult or anything.

Just wish the self checkouts weren’t so shitty about mis-scans. If you accidentally scan something twice, you usually need to call an employee over. You should be able to do that yourself. If they’re worried about theft, just make the button get flagged for loss protection to scrutinize or something.

Light mode is the best and I think a significant number of people who oppose it are students or hobbyists who only program outside of typical work hours. During work hours, I want bright light to keep me alert. And I work in a well lit office and home mostly during the time of day when there’s lots of sunlight. Dark mode just doesn’t make sense for professionals.

Plus, if even a single documentation site or Google search uses a light theme (and many do, especially by default), you risk blinding yourself with the sudden flash to light. By comparison, if I’m using light mode and something else is in dark mode, it doesn’t hurt me at all.

Fortunately for everyone, they had to define “woke” during a court case.

DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded that the term means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

So there we have it. Recognizing the flaws in the justice system is woke.

Yeah, I’m constantly recommending junior devs to use TDD specifically for this. I don’t recommend it for anything else. If they don’t write the test first, it’s possible that the test will end up testing the wrong thing and thus they can’t be sure they really did fix the bug.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where to write the test ahead of time, so sometimes a slight variation I do is to write the test after (usually because it was such a struggle to figure out where the bug is), but when I’m testing it, I’ll comment out the fix or whatever and make sure the test fails.

Going in blind is the best. Unfortunately, it’s probably pretty difficult to do, since spoilers are extremely rampant. I don’t even know how I managed to do it. But it really is magical if you go in blind.

ITT: people happy that Canadians won’t see local news as often, just because they perceive this as hurting Facebook.

You can hate Facebook and understand that this is a shitty law. To be fair, if you aren’t in the loop on what the law is, it’s easy to accidentally think it’s a reasonable law. When I first heard of it, I assumed it was just preventing companies from stealing articles and keeping news sites from getting clicks. After all, that’s a real problem and a totally reasonable solution.

But nope, the law actually prohibits linking to a news site without having an agreement to pay them. Yes, linking. I really hope it’s obvious how dumb such a law is. They wrote the law to only apply to super big corporations. Otherwise this post would have had to pay Global because you linked to it. Similarly, copying any part of the article in any amount also needs to pay them. Even the headline and tagline that Lemmy shows. It’s hypocritical that anyone cheers this on when this very post wouldn’t comply with the law.

Seriously, who are these people commenting on CBC articles? I don’t usually even look at the comments anymore, simply because any time I did, they were full of the shittiest, dumbest assholes I’ve ever seen. I’m embarrassed to even share a country with people who comment on CBC articles.

By comparison, comments on Reddit and Lemmy are usually okay. Not good by any means (especially in the right leaning mess that was r/Canada), but miles better than CBC’s comments (which I can only assume are completely unmoderated).

I agree with you on those special weapons. I dunno why the heck they made those so rare or expensive while also not being that durable. I don’t find it an issue for most normal weapons, though, especially with the fuse mechanic in TotK. I like how it forces me to vary things up and allows for regular treasure chests or drops to actually give you something you can use (even if it’s basically like a short lasting consumable).

I’m with you when it’s generic, way too numerous items like those damned feathers.

I’m all for collectibles when they’re interesting, meaningful, and not too numerous. But I think most games and especially open world games really just want to pad the completionist time.

Horizon is a game that did collectibles much better, with the exception perhaps of data points (which aren’t marked on the map for some reason). The collectibles in Horizon are unique, have story, and are usually actually interesting to get to. I noticed often in Horizon, they were just so interesting to either get to (the case for ornaments) or had fascinating story (like the ones that unlock images of the past).

I usually dislike weapon durability (eg, in Fallout), but Zelda is the one game where I actually liked it. Perhaps because in Zelda, it was a central mechanic that the game was designed and balanced around.

For most games, durability is something that the game isn’t really designed around and feels more forced in. When you can repair your gear (as you usually can), durability just means every now and then you gotta deal with the annoyance of repairing.

I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.

Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can’t turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.

Examples:

1. I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game’s checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
2. I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don’t even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
3. I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I’m very wary of any game that doesn’t have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.

I totally agree that most servers work best as monoliths. Though at the same time, every now and then there’s a case that really needed a microservice and you’ll regret not having started that way, cause migrating a monolith that was never designed to be anything but a monolith can be really hard.

I have one of those. A server that is so large, complicated, and contributed to by so many different teams that it takes a lot of extra work to safely release and debug issues. Honestly, the monolithic structure does still make it easier to understand as a whole. It’s not like splitting the server up would make understanding the end-to-end experience any easier (it would definitely become more complicated). But releasing such big servers with so many changes is harder, especially since users don’t care about your architecture. They want it to work and they want 100% uptime. A bigger server means more to verify correctness before you can release it and when something is incorrect, you might be blocked on some other team fixing it.

Yeah, that’s an interesting thing with Apple’s delay in fully switching to USB C. Now they have to and it’s gonna hurt their recent (and today) customers. They should have switched ages ago. The writing was on the wall for a few years at least.

It was especially weird cause they even did use USB C for some things. I have a MacBook for work and it uses USB C. Why the heck didn’t they use it for everything??

The part of the post that stood out to me was this quote:

“Please note that this period could be extended by up to 14 days if you are requested to provide additional information or documentation, or up to 30 days if you are invited to an interview,” the EU has warned on the official ETIAS website.

Even if most people can do it in hours (not sure how much most is – 99.9%? 60%?), that still reads to me like it makes it a case where you can’t count on it for last minute trips or if you forget to do it.

The problem is that even if 90% of people don’t need an SUV or truck, you can’t tell if someone is in that 10% that does need it. You can’t just look at an empty truck bed. Obviously nobody is gonna use their bed 100% of the time. They might have the truck for work purposes and also use it for personal use. They certainly shouldn’t own multiple cars, cause that’s even worse.

I wonder what’s the reason for the change? The article just mentions vaguely about the EU tightening border security. But is border security from Canada really a concern? Or did we just get swept up in a larger change?

I’m personally of the opinion we should be going the opposite direction. It should be easier to visit, work, and immigrate/emigrate to and from similar countries.

Yeah, it’s gonna really suck for some people who forget to do this well ahead of time. They’ll have to cancel vacations or the likes. Most trips, you currently just bring your passport with you and that’s really it. Nothing to apply to ahead of time.

Hopefully it’s something that airlines will make part of purchasing tickets, so that you can’t forget it. But it seems like this means you basically can’t do last minute trips anymore. If you possibly could have a need to travel to the EU on short notice (eg, you have family there), you probably need to just keep this permit valid all the time. It would really suck to not be able to visit a dying family member because the permit could take weeks.