swordsmanluke

joined 1 year ago
[โ€“] swordsmanluke 10 points 8 months ago

I have both. I do not think the OLED version is twice as nice, though it is noticeably improved.

If the cost is an issue, but doable, consider getting the LCD deck and putting the extra cash toward a TV dock and Bluetooth controller. The deck is awesome on the go (just took mine on vacation - 10/10) but it's also a fantastic console in its own right. I play a lot of PC games on my couch, even though my I have a decent desktop PC available.

Either one you purchase though, the Steam deck is the best gaming device I've ever owned. Access to the vast Steam library (even if not all titles are compatible yet), access to install whatever else TF I want - even competing stores, ~~emulation~~ nevermind.

It's just... ๐Ÿคฏ

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 3 points 8 months ago

My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It's taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

Balatro came out two months ago.

I have 93 hours in it.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 2 points 8 months ago

Yup. Zorin's another great Debian-based distro. I've been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I'm a fan.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 15 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Man... Anybody remember "Back Orifice"? The late nineties were weird.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I'd still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it'll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you'll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a "family" (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

  • Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

  • Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven't used it in a decade, so I won't say much about it here.

  • Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. ... Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros... But not necessarily in distros from other families.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. ... And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.

My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 3 points 8 months ago

Ho-ly shit... I had forgotten this particular bit.

But yeah, me too. Undead Mummy Ernie...

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Just saying.

.... Saying what, exactly?

I said that we should

  • design for change
  • "within reason"
  • because we can't know what exact changes are needed.

And you argued... The same thing? Just in the reverse order?

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I wanted to disagree with you, but checking the data almost all of the best action flicks I could have sworn were fairly recent actually came out in the early-mid noughts. Seems like after The Matrix blew up the genre, nobody ever figured out how to put it back together.

Even if I wanted to quibble and argue for ~~the best~~ my personal favorite action flicks within a precise "2 decade" window... it's a depressingly short list:

  • 2004

    • Hellboy (technically a comic movie, but I'm keeping it because Doug Jones and Ron Perlman just rocked)
    • Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Vol 1 missed the cutoff)
  • 2006

    • Crank
  • 2007

    • Hot Fuzz
  • 2009

    • The Bourne Ultimatum
    • District 9
  • 2017

    • Baby Driver

... Almost every single other action flick I thought of came out between 1998 and 2004. (Also, 2000 was a weirdly good year for action fans in retrospect)

Sigh. I'm gonna go bemoan the world getting lame and shake my cane at the kids out on my lawn.

Edit: JOHN WICK! How TF did I forget those? But yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it now.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 7 points 8 months ago

USA: Real barbeque. I don't mean braised meat slathered in a sticky sauce, either. I mean tough cuts of meat, cooked slow and low over woodsmoke until it is fall-off-the-bone tender. No sauce required.

Much easier to find this in the southern US, with Texas, Missouri, and the Carolinas all being particularly famous BBQ regions. In the northern states, your best bet is gonna be to find someone local with a smoker - not just a grill.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Bro - no mention of Texas BBQ? Beef brisket with Texas-style BBQ beans (savory, not sweet for those who haven't had them) is amazing.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke 72 points 8 months ago (13 children)

Have you ever been in an old house? Not old, like, on the Historic Register, well-preserved, rich bastard "old house". Just a house that has been around awhile. A place that has seen a lot of living.

You'll find light switches that don't connect to anything; artwork hiding holes in the walls; sometimes walls have been added or removed and the floors no longer match.

Any construction that gets used, must change as needs change. Be it a house or a city or a program, these evolutions of need inevitably introduce complexity and flaws that are large enough to annoy, but small enough to ignore. Over time those issues accumulate until they reach a crisis point. Houses get remodeled or torn down, cities build or remove highways, and programs get refactored or replaced.

You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict. But the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems.

 

I've interviewed for and been interviewed by companies large and small. We all know software engineer job interviews suck. But it's hard on the other side of the table too.

One of the better places I worked for had a lightweight process of one phone screen and a four hour on-site. The company also prepared offers before the on-site interview round.

When you finished interviewing, you got a same-day yes or no answer, and if it was yes, you had the offer in your inbox within an hour.

What interview practices have you found effective?

... And by what metric?

 

 

I want to make my programming language! ...for fun.

I've been reading LLVM's own tutorial, which is really good. I'm curious though, for those of you who have written your own languages before... What do you wish you had known before you set out?

In terms of previous experience, I have written a really basic lexer and parser for a non-executable markup language I designed. Now I'm curious about the next level. I have some ideas for a language design I'd like to try out. The language features themselves are nothing new - I'm sure some other language out there has done these things and done it better. That's fine! I just want to better understand how all this stuff hangs together.

 

I've been dual-booting since the early-oughts, but I'm only just now preparing to delete my Windows partition for good.

What with all the repartitioning in my future, I figure it's a good time to just make a clean start - reinstall from scratch. ...but I have about a decade's worth of tools and dotfile tweaks accumulated, including things like updates to xorg.conf to support my old (but awesome) mouse.

So... What's your favored toolset to get your machine back to the way you like it?

I've done this all manually many a time, backing up my home dir, writing scripts to install software, copy important config files into place, etc.

How do you like to go about reinstalling your programs, restoring .dotfiles and config?

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