Badabinski
Alt account of @Badabinski
Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.
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Yep, taking some care early on can pay dividends down the road. The data structures you choose really matter, and YAGNI can stop you from going overboard with indirection and other shit. Premature optimization is bad, but there’s nothing wrong with writing performant software as long as it’s still comprehensible and extensible.
I knew I had heard of this game, but I couldn’t remember its premise. For anyone else like me:
THE LONG DARK is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies – only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.
I’m the opposite. I find LC much more interesting, plus REPO’s camera inertia gives me terrible motion sickness, even when the animation speed is reduced and all the other settings are changed. I can’t even watch someone stream it, the inertia is so extreme.
I think they’re fundamentally different games. The limited day length in LC gives a much more tense vibe, where repo is a bit more laid back and lets you really scour every level. LC also doesn’t have the upgrade system present in REPO, meaning doing well on the harder moons is entirely skill based. I prefer skill over upgrades, but I know others don’t. I’ve heard from people who are really into REPO that past level 6 or 8, the difficulty doesn’t really increase, and getting too many strength upgrades can trivialize the game.
They both have their merits. You find REPO to be more enjoyable which is totally fair and valid.
I love the thing about the bees. I remember doing the exact same thing multiple times. I eventually learned that you should leave them on the catwalk on the side of the ship and then run to grab them once the ship is leaving (since you’re safe as long as you’re on the ship somewhere, you’ll just be teleported inside with whatever you’re carrying).
Also, the airhorn is great. I think I like the hairdryer even more because it’s louder, and I think it’s fun that you can recharge it to get more VRRRRRRRs out of it.
tbf Apple membrane keyboards are pretty nice for what they are. I wouldn’t daily one, but I’ve frequently used them in a professional context.
Source: I’m a huge keyboard dork sitting at a desk with an OG TX-CP.
I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.
I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.
Sorry for the off-topic question, but is your username a reference to the Culture books? I think that would have been a great addition to Very Little Gravitas Indeed/Zero Gravitas/Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Like, I can just imagine a book where the Very Little Gravitas Indeed, Zero Gravitas, and A Gravitas Deficiency all happen to be in the same incident group chat and constantly fuck around while the other ships debate and fuss, and then one or all three of them pulls a rabbit out of the hat and fixes the problem while the other Minds aren’t looking.
God, I miss Iain M. Banks. Also, if your username isn’t a reference then I probably sound like an absolute lunatic.
Very true! I was just in a rush and didn’t want to explain who he was.
For others, Bryan Cantrill (the guy in the video) is an incredibly gifted engineer who worked for Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle. He was deeply involved in Solaris (Sun’s really cool operating system that included pioneering shit like ZFS), and was then involved with Illumos, which was a fork of Solaris. He worked for a company called Joyent that made a super fucking cool thing called SmartOS, and now he’s the CTO for a company called Oxide Computer.
This is a hideously bad summary of his accomplishments. People who want to know more should read his Wikipedia article or watch the talk I posted. He’s a great presenter, so his talks are always pretty entertaining.
EDIT: The shit they’re doing at Oxide is absolutely nuts. They’re making what is effectively a datacenter contained within one 48u rack, and they’re writing all their own firmware and BIOS and shit for it. It’s crazy cool.
Oh hey, the owner of the publisher is an Ellison! What a fun fact! Megan Ellison is Larry Ellison’s daughter. For those not in the know, Larry Ellison is the owner of Oracle. He and his company are profoundly interesting in the way a tornado’s effect on a wooden shack full of sheep is interesting. This section of a talk from a former Oracle employee does a great job of explaining why we should not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. It’s hilarious and I highly recommend checking it out.
All of this is to say that his children might be a bit like him. Children aren’t doomed to be like their parents, but they certainly can be like their parents.
EDIT: that talk is only of passing relevancy, but it’s really funny and I can’t pass up a chance to share it with people who may not have seen it.
They need to do what MacOS and Linux have done. There are safer ways to interact with and inspect the running state of the kernel in those operating systems (eBPF for Linux, a bunch of APIs I don’t know much about for MacOS). Software needs a way to do the shit it’s doing, you can’t just turn it off and provide no alternative.
If Microsoft provides a safe API, then Wine can translate calls to that API and approximate the same degree of protection for Linux boxen.
I also agree with the other person, you should still be allowed to fuck around with the kernel on your own box. Major software vendors should be discouraged from writing shit that directly runs in ring 0, but end users should be allowed to do whatever.
I don’t bother with those unless I’m specifically going for all the orbs. Like, I’ll get the closest one, but I don’t bother with the one you mentioned or the one that makes the boss spawn. There’s usually enough health to be had once you know your formations, and if you want mondo amounts of health, there’s always the heart mage trick. I don’t go out of my way to dig gold in the mines for the same reason. You can win without doing it, and it just breaks up the flow too much imo.
It’s amazing that he released the game for free, given the amount of time he’s spent on it.