branon

I do not, sorry, if you go to the bare domain there's contact info for the guy who does

This one by chance? https://web.archive.org/web/20240505033302/https://villavu.c...

There are a few of these history-posts, mostly not lost I don't think, but can be hard to dig up. The old forum is not online very often any more. Most posts including members+ are archived here https://blandtoo.ben.land/srl/

Unreal Engine means it's a pass from me, especially for this - if it's not RuneTek, it's not RuneScape

I also finished Roadside Picnic recently and was enthralled, easily the best sci-fi I have read this year, I can see why it's spawned so many derivative works.

The Tarkovsky film wasn't bad either. I played a little bit of the game but increasingly I find immersion in video games difficult.

Recently I have begun reading more than one book at a time, which I have never done before.

I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...

Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me

Full circle, streaming is just OTT cable TV now. Actually this is worse than cable I think because previously I could buy HBO or Starz and actually get an ad-free premium channel.

Agreed - information always expands to fill the available space, and placing a cap on your available space is an underrated strategy

I mostly remember how it felt to be a child and it's extremely important to me that I continue to do so as I get older. The best days of my life are when I can capture the perfect nostalgia, or deja vu, of the past when I was much younger. Sometimes only for a split second, sometimes longer. Increasingly I believe it's one of the few things in life that truly matters on an existential level: how children feel, and how we feel about (ourselves as) children.

Would appreciate recommendations for reading material about this.

This is against site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

Perhaps that's the grandparent commenter's idea but I don't think it's the point the article is making:

> So, seriously, I do really like the smartphone idea. It’s just that I don’t have any browser or "social" app on it. And I don’t want anything else than what I have.

> I wish I could say it is all I have, that I’m a true minimalist.

He defines true minimalism as having an _ideologically conformant_ computer, not no computer at all.

Depending on what type of computer (if not smartphone) you have at hand, you can probably use a search engine to find the same menu. Or ask somebody at your table. Or ask the server. Or point at somebody else's food and say you want what they're having. Or eschew the menu entirely and ask to be surprised. Chef's choice can be fun.

Or leave yeah, I think that's valid. TFA is predicated on the notion of pretty-much-lying to people by telling them you don't have a smartphone even if you do. Leaving a restaurant if you can't find a menu seems like it'd be on similar ideological footing.

File is File not exclusively because it has to do with files (though file-related actions should also be there) but because of relative significance versus the other menus

In the "File" menu you are doing something that has the potential to fundamentally alter the app you are using, by tampering with (typically a large portion or even all of) the data files it contains, or by resetting the state of a running session (file > new window in browsers)

"Edit," semantically, is the same but for a subset of that data, often only a single piece of data. Here I'll sustain that the "create a singular new password/event" button could be under Edit, not File, since those are not actions scoped to the whole app or to the filesystem, instead only to individual records in a database.

"View" is read-only and actions under here should not write anything anywhere. And so on.

Please do not abandon decades of UX tradition in favor of inserting tautologies into your programs.

(1Password/Passwords, Automator/Automations, really? might as well put a pictogram there rather than duplicate the word - I already know what the app does, I want the UI to signal what scope my actions are applying to)

"Project" for DaVinci Resolve makes sense, probably because it's a synonym lol

Propaganda to what end? Are you referring to anything in particular?

Is your angle merely that shadow library hosts should be operating their services entirely for free (to the point of refusing payment) or is there something we're missing here?

I doubt most dontators think of it as "paying for Anna's Archive" - I pay to contribute to the institution more than for the minor convenience of the fast download links. I'd still donate even if I got nothing extra in return.

It also helps that AA has the best UI and search of any shadow library I've seen. Some really established bittorrent sites win out on curation but otherwise AA is top tier, not something I'm accustomed to seeing from a (free, no-signup!) clearnet/direct-download site

As far as GP's question I think you can be in it for the money (though I personally have my doubts that Anna is) and also be a force for moral good as well. Whether the operator's morals perfectly align with all of our ethics is an open question but the room at large generally tends to agree.

Also Torrentfreak's reporting has been extremely solid for an extremely long time so the link itself fits here too

I have a year membership to AA now, been meaning to contribute for some time, archive.org is next on the list

Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded

People are, absolutely, yes! In the tech world there is an ever-growing focus on devices which can operate independently of smartphones, even to an offline/local-first extent.

The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.

I bought the regular mouse and had a fun time assembling it. It works fine.

However the "ergonomic" design is extremely uncomfortable for me and caused hand pain. I let it ride for a few weeks hoping I'd get accustomed, the pain got better but didn't go away. Also the far-left and far-right mouse buttons are superfluous and detract from the core experience.

Please do a symmetrical version and maybe throw in a scroll wheel with steps/clicks, I'd happily buy another.

One thing I've found that purports to address (some of) these risks: https://mail.cock.li/cock-mail/

Haven't tried it yet though, done some reading but don't know enough to be sure their proposed paradigm is valid.

I refuse to go running with a phone - too heavy, and too distracting, running outside is one of the few places I _escape_ the phone for a bit. So I made sure to get a fitness tracker with onboard GPS. It syncs to the phone later, when I return, which then uploads workout data to the vendor's cloud.

I look at the results on my PC with a web browser, phone is a passive middleman and is never touched directly for fitness tracking.

My cats rarely chew, either dry or wet food, even treats they inhale and swallow without chewing. If I want them to chew, I have to give them meat trimmings or something large enough that they can't swallow it without chewing.

They seem smart enough not to choke on larger pieces of meat but it's still weird to me that they don't chew dry food.

And I just bought a Garmin Forerunner 55, too. I'm still within the return period, will have to consider this...

I got Robert Fitzgerald, wish it would tell me which passages were by which authors after I finished though

ah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"

This is a nice idea but I think practically the shift will come not from instituting gender-affirming nomenclature but rather redefining male biases.

The idea of being involved in an important (and historically female) profession dedicated to compassionate care should be received as honorable by men irrespective of the job title's femininity. I disagree that it's demeaning.

My thoughts were along this line too. Being laid off is unfortunate, but being laid off after making $500k/yr for a mid-level managerial position is a karmic self-correction.

The opening sentence of the article even tacitly admits this - "Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery" - the operative word here is "lottery" and I am not altogether surprised the type of person to coast on Facebook money for decades found themselves hard up after it got cut off.

For me, the hard-and-fast ruleset is implemented from an ideological perspective rather than a technical one. Stipulated, UE5 games can be fun and certain genres suffer less from upscaling than others.

Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. The inability to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for, without burning thousands of dollars on hardware and emitting hundreds of watts of waste heat (and sometimes not even then!) is worse.

I refuse to believe that upscaling/framegen is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames at actual resolution. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse.

The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-management strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology.

I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten.

I also think that by using software like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are choosing first & foremost to participate in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s).

Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary.

By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space.

Despite how bloated and ridiculous this has become, the industry continues to grind forward as these companies perpetuate and profit from the model, because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right?

But that consumer is ever-more taxed by the state of AAA gaming. And it only gets grimmer every year (as evidenced by TFA and recent happenings at Xbox).

I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer. Looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things.

UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.

I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

There was probably a case to be made for this stance when systemd was very new and getting shoehorned everywhere but increasingly I don't see the point

I think the issue people took with it was less on technical merit and more about the principle of resisting a change which was occurring too quickly for comfort

it was kneejerk reactionary to begin with and hasn't made any more sense as systemd has improved and received better integration with other software

I do mourn the loss of Upstart though, I thought that was one of Canonical's cooler projects

I also use Void/runit primarily and enjoy it because of its simplicity, it's a nice _exercise_ to run systemd-free but I don't pretend it comes anywhere near the level of capability that systemd provides

I do still enjoy the odd >30 day uptime on my PC. Usually only reboot when a new kernel version is cut.

I used to reboot into every kernel patch but often I leave .0 running for a very long time now. They seem stable and the kernel moves fast enough nowadays there's often another .0 right around the corner. There might be exploits but they're not a valid threat model for my little desktop.

If something smaller like Mesa updates, I can reload everything simply by logging out/back in, no need for a full reboot/LUKS unlock.

Here's RuneScape 2 in a browser: https://2004.lostcity.rs/client?world=2&detail=high&method=0

I respect what Valve is doing here and I loved the Steam Deck but a prebuilt desktop PC with 16 GB system memory and 512 GB storage for $1,000+ is insulting. Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S.

I think this product is going to be hamstrung by its attempts to present as a midpoint between a PC and a console. The way this is being achieved seems to be by selling a device with the specifications of a console but the price tag of a PC.

Valve already did the "this is a lowend device and that's okay" thing with the Steam Deck, and got away scot-free because nobody expected a handheld and people didn't have a ton of preconceived notions. The Deck was also a better value since it was priced reasonably for its specifications.

The desktop PC and/or living room console modalities are both significantly more stratified. People have more solidly defined expectations about price-to-performance-to-usability ratios, and I worry this doesn't go far enough in either direction to meet the demands of any specific market segment. Leaves me wondering who exactly this is for.