Oh man. Currently rocking an AMD AM4-socket CPU with 64 GB of DDR4 - I did have 32GB but when one of my sticks failed, it was actually cheaper to upgrade to 64 than it was to replace an 8.

Haven’t upgraded anything in my desktop in over 5 years. An entry-level AM5 setup would cost about three times as much as my entire computer did, and would be a much less powerful machine. Completely stupid. Just hoping all my components keep holding up until the whole bubble explodes.

You’d potentially end up with some slightly nonsense results, like having districts that are divided by a river. Doesn’t make sense to allocate public services that way - are you going to maintain the roads that aren’t connected to the rest of your district by road?

I think that this is seeking a technical solution to a human problem. Life doesn’t really work that way. Still leaves the potential for shenanigans that could no longer be argued with, because it’s “fair”. Having the election districts be drawn up by a truly independent body would be better, no?

If you’ve a fishing shop near you that’ll sell you a tub of mealworms, then you could make a new best friend…?

What you going to be making the guns from, if you’re not importing Canadian iron and steel any more?

Can still set up a header-matching rule - just need to mark the email with a label, so you can report it without even having to read it.

I like to throw a few fucks and a couple of speling misteaks into my PRs, just so anyone reading them knows that all my stuff is done by hand. Fuck AI.

If you’ve ever played or watched cricket, which is a very imperial kind of game, then the pitch (the distance between the wickets) is exactly one chain, and the field (the whole playing ground) is typically one acre although it isn’t standardised.

Cricket ball is leather, about the size of your fist, and surprisingly heavy. A chain is about as far as you can throw such a ball over-arm, and an acre is about the circle of how far you can smack such a ball with a bat before it touches the ground.

Free games all subsidised by the Fortnite cash cow, which as far as I can tell is from children spending pocket money so their parents can get some peace. Devs being given a bigger cut of earnings I don’t believe is being done in good faith and would be reverted if they’d managed to challenge Steam. Besides which, what does it matter if you get 20% more of $0 in sales?

Game dev more accessible = Unreal engine has a good ide? Or are you suggesting that slop coding makes game dev more accessible? Am not with you there.

Gabe Newell and Tim Sweeney are both wealthy men. Gabe keeps on making decisions that challenge monopolies and are pro consumer choice; you may argue that that’s ultimately in his selfish best-interest but for now Steam is the best store front for gamers. Tim is like a weathervane for spouting the tech-bro fascist quote of the day, props up monopolies and doesn’t see any value in people that create games for the love of it. There is quite a difference between them.

You don’t have to do anything fancy, I don’t think. Initialise your RNG with the seed that you have stored, shuffle the list, and then rotate the list to get to the ‘first song’. Every RNG seed will give a correct result.

If you shuffle using eg. Durstenfeld/Knuth shuffle, which is O(n), then you can make a note of the ‘first song’s position’ and do the rotation at the end of shuffling straight to the first song, in a single pass.

You’ll still get a repeatable ordering if songs are added or removed from the playlist - the order will be different, of course - and it takes a lot less storage to write down the seed and the ID of the ‘first song’, which might matter if you’re using a crappy old music player with very limited storage space.

Indeed. Don’t comment “what”, only comment “why”. If you’ve written code that looks like a mistake but is there for a reason - poor algorithm, not idiomatic, etc. - then the proper “comment” is a unit test that exercises the business logic behind it, but a one-liner to stop someone from “fixing” it is maybe polite too. Don’t write an essay for private functions; rename them so they’re obvious.

Hey! Native speaker here. If we:

• reformed the spelling

• stopped the locals from coming out with any deranged shite that they liked the sound of and made them follow some rules instead

…then it would be a perfectly usable language, thank you.

That’s the reason that consumables and money don’t carry over between levels in Thief: The Dark Project. No point in hoarding stuff, you might as well use it. Except of course that if you’re good, you don’t need to use any items at all - not even the blackjack.

Electric cars just move the power generation elsewhere - often a gas- or coal- powered plant. Yes, large power plants can have better treatment of waste gases, for lower particulates and sulphur dioxides. Still produce the CO2, tho. We need robust public transport options, low-carbon power sources like renewables and nuclear, and reduce the number of unnecessary journeys by shopping locally, car sharing, and working from home wherever possible.

Completely agree - let’s stop BBQ’ing the planet. Just need to make lots of little changes, but we need to start.

Likewise, but the code is pretty far from perfect. “Future maintenance hazard”, but half my colleagues can’t even see what’s wrong with it, and the bot tells them it’s all fine so they don’t think about it any further.

Can’t wait for that bubble to burst. Burn the whole lot down.

For me;

• the download is absurdly massive. Although it makes sense that you’d need an Android OS image to run Android, it’s bigger than the copy of Arch I used to run it

• integration with the host OS is poor - be nice if copy-paste worked, and file transfer was easier

• super-sluggish, even on quite powerful computers

• never idle, makes my laptop run hot

Okay, it’s emulating ARM64, and emulators need a lot of CPU, but since Android apps are compiled to “Google’s own version of Java” and are JIT compiled to suit the phone CPU, should be possible just to compile them to AMD64 instead and run native.

If there’s an app that only exists on Android and has no desktop / web equivalent, it’s a workable solution, but it does entail compromises.

BTRFs, which has advanced filesystems features like snapshots, data integrity checks, and scrubbing, is a less performant filesystem for databases than filesystems that don’t have these features, like EXT4, F2FS and XFS. No shit, Sherlock. At least compare it to ZFS or something.

If you are storing files that you care about, use a filesystem with integrity checks. If you require high database performance, it’ll probably be happier using a whole partition, if not just a whole pile of disks, and be allowed to get on with it. If you are driving nails into a wall, do not compare the performance of different screwdrivers for the task. And so on.

Considering that her dad married his niece, and that her dad’s great-great-grandparents were all the same two people, her name is one of the last weird things about her family.

Fair play to Cleo VII; she introduced more fresh genes into her family bloodline than anyone had in generations. Four kids by two dads, you go girl.

If you haven’t read it, Torvalds’ book is pretty interesting. He’s a fairly blunt writer of prose - alas, no Hemingway - but has a good voice and his slightly-cynical Finnish humour comes through clearly. Doesn’t have the massive ego that you might have expected, either - he knows he’s one of the planet’s biggest nerds.

Essentially, his somewhat geeky summer project was to implement the POSIX parts of Minix as a learning exercise, and basically locked himself in his room till he’d done it. Photocopied the spec sheet, and was ‘ticking off’ all the calls he’d got working. He was dual-booting with Minix for a while, which is why the filesystem layout is the same, but at one point managed to break his Minix boot, and Linux had to become self-hosting.

Fair play to him - took him a few months to produce the OS kernel that the whole GNU team couldn’t manage in a decade. Perfect is the enemy of good. Open-sourcing ‘something that works’ was all that was needed for everyone else to add in all the bits they needed as well, and the rest is history.

https://goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun

First two books of ASoI&F were pretty good, I thought. Then the rest were just him writing himself in circles, ever more slowly. Then the TV adaptation came out, to initially great acclaim, and then ended with a damp fart.

Yes, there were more problems with the end of the show than just his plot, or lack of it, but I can’t see that the ending will be redeemed without substantial changes, and his skills as a writer don’t really extend to “writing towards the desired ending”.

I think if we do ever get a conclusion to the book series, it will be written by someone else; I believe he’s left instructions to destroy all his notes and work-in-progress when he dies?

It does just fine for claiming the free games and then otherwise ignoring the Epic store, which is perfection. Think I’ve installed about one out of fifty or so I have available, but the important thing is that Tim doesn’t receive a penny.