This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

It really shouldn’t be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say “you agree you can’t sue us in future for anything ever”.

What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.

Support local business!

If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!

… isn’t that the point of mechanical keyboards?

I feel like you could totally change the switch resistance with magnets. Electromagnetism goes both ways… apply a variable current to a coil in each key that repels it from or pulls it towards the base?

AliExpress is the worst at this. Which category should I disable? AliExpress, aliexpress, Chat or message push? And even if I figured it out, there’s no way to stop store spammers from sending you useless messages constantly, detracting from actual sellers with questions.

It might stop the heat though if he’s a US puppet to appease congress.

Once you’re in the industry and see the typical shitshow that goes on in most companies and teams, you won’t think twice about not hearing anything for 3 months. There’s a million reasons why you won’t get a job or not hear back for a really long time that have nothing to do with you. Stick with it, times are tough right now but your luck will eventually change.

I like to remind juniors that you can only become an expert on something temporarily, especially on large teams/projects. Between skill atrophy and the foundations shifting beneath your feet as other developers continue working, it’s not possible to truly understand a complex system in a state of flux for very long.

A programmer sitting in front of a text-based IDE with millions of keyboard shortcuts at their disposal has to be the least necessary use case for a voice assistant I’ve ever heard of.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.

I discovered this very quickly after breaking a finger. One-finger typing didn’t slow me down at all. Turns out my brain was the bottleneck.

Large data sets are valuable. And many people who hack are primarily motivated by the challenge, so targeting a site isn’t always a vendetta. Unfortunately sometimes hackers stumble across these things and are motivated by money too, because they’re human like the rest of us.

I’m confused why the IP address of a resource is changing for you when you’re moving in/out of the wireguard tunnel? In my setup the LAN IP addresses always stay the same whether I’m on the local network or accessing remotely, It’s just the route to them that changes (over a different ethernet adapter). Perhaps that’s what you meant, or there’s some crazy configs out there I’m unaware of.

Q. How do you know an open source project is written in Rust?

A. Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

It’s up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.

And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.

Absolutely! I spoke to my GP because I was completely functional with my stress and anxiety levels, but I just wasn’t feeling great - I was whiteknuckling my way through each work day, despite nobody knowing or my job performance being affected. I tried to justify the feeling to myself as “well, it’s just busy, I’ll be more relaxed once this rough patch is over”. But the “rough patch” would never end, it was like chasing a rainbow. Once I finally realised that it didn’t matter why I felt shit, if I still felt shit all the time, I spoke to a psychologist and tried some CBT. That didn’t make a huge difference, so my GP suggested trying out an SSRI. I’m now on a low dose of escitalopram and it’s been pretty life changing. If you’ve considered meds before, I’d highly recommend revisiting that idea. Modern anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs are a lot more targeted than the older generations. You don’t need to be on them permanently either, you can try for 3-6 months and see how you go.

But you’re right - the one downside is potential insurance implications. For example, my life insurance no longer covers me for anything mental health related, which is quite a broad stroke considering I’ve got it under control and it was just garden variety mild generalised anxiety. I’m apparently one of “the crazies” now to them. But considering how much better I feel now, I’d make the same decision a million times over.

Happy to discuss more if you have follow-up questions, more people should chat about this stuff!

I used to have this feeling often with open world games, and it put me off playing them for a long time - it was just too overwhelming, and an activity that was supposed to relax me was having the opposite effect. Now when I play them I don’t care so much and just enjoy whatever I come across.

So what changed? I started taking medication for my anxiety, which I never thought was an issue until a few family members gave me a gentle nudge to talk to someone about it.

Not saying you’re in the same boat, but thought I’d share my story in case it’s helpful.

Natalie Portland OMG!!! I loved you in Store Wars and Black Duck.

The concern is if they don’t fork yet, grow a huge userbase that dominates the fediverse and app landscape, then start messing with the underlying protocol to their advantage. Look at what Google did with browsers and email as an example.

It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in that it weeds out all but the most hardcore gamers in the first few minutes of gameplay.

I got very addicted to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead for a while… so much so that I ported it to Android so I could play on my commute to work.

https://cataclysmdda.org/

Similar story here, it’s a great idea until it goes wrong, then you’ve got two appliances down instead of one.

My Home Assistant instance has become so mission critical to my household that I’ve got a dedicated Pi 4 for it, with a fallback Pi 4 and preflashed SD card ready to hot swap and restore from backup.

This is a feature, not a bug. But we definitely need a solution to make subscribing/coalescing them easier for users. Mastodon allows subscribing to topics (hashtags) - I think something similar is needed here, but that will evolve naturally over time.