• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • It would have to be game changing! Get it?!? “Game” changing?!? Ah, whatever.

    Awful puns aside, it really would have to be a major step up in hardware. The Steam Deck is a platform developers (plus accessory makers and open source devs for emulators and stuff) seem to care about. Even modern AAA game devs will often try to make their games playable on it even if they have to compromise. (It may not be technically possible or economically feasible but devs seem to all want to support the Deck even if their bosses have other plans.)

    At some point, it’ll be impossible for the Deck’s hardware to handle recent games and then we’ll all upgrade to something that sets a new baseline and strikes a better balance — whether Steam Deck 2 or a competitor. But my guess is that it’s going to be more about hardware generations than something Microsoft does. (Proton might be nearly perfect by the time Microsoft makes a decent controller interface and they seem to be focused on shoehorning AI into Notepad and Paint instead of doing useful things.)


  • I got it when it came out and had fun with it. It’s kind of short, at least for an adult, but that makes it accessible for kids. And they added some (free) content later. Controls were pretty good. A little hard to get used to at first but I played it on Steam Deck while traveling — so with a controller on a small screen — and I imagine there’d be no learning curve with a mouse and monitor.

    Anyway, at the price it is there, it’s well worth it. You solve puzzles by building stuff but there’s usually plenty of extra pieces so you can make something fun/creative within the parameters of solving the puzzle.



  • I would take a class if I were you. Not necessarily at a college but an art, cooking, or dancing class. Whatever you’re into. You mentioned running so maybe try to train for a marathon (or whatever your distance is).

    The only other way I know of time traveling is brown liquor and you definitely don’t want to go that route if you’re depressed and lonely. A class will help you meet new people too.

    I ran some trail and road marathons when I was younger and trail runners are always super interesting and a bit nuts in a good way. It’s a solo hobby at times but there is a community. Trail running isn’t about your time since every trail is different. No one really compares anything except distance and even then, finding a cool trail is more important. So, it tends to be about the process rather than the outcome.



  • Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.

    Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.



  • I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

    Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

    Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.


  • My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

    I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)





  • Meh. I’m an American and I don’t hate it here. But I’m from (and moved back to) a culturally distinct place (New Orleans) so I don’t really identify with the dominant culture. I loathe the politics/corruption and how our government is structured. (The amendments are the best part of our constitution and maybe we should think about that for a bit.) I’m deeply ashamed that we’re the world’s biggest arms dealer and oil/gas producer.

    That being said, we have beautiful landscapes and individual American people are usually kind, decent people, at least on an interpersonal level. The corruption of companies and elected officials doesn’t usually extend to the middle class. (Like, you don’t have to bribe someone to get a driver’s license or permits or whatever.) There’s obviously loads of advantages to being an American citizen, just as there are to being an EU citizen. I love our national parks. Just the western half of the United States contains enough varied forms of amazing landscapes to keep a person occupied for a lifetime.

    So, I wouldn’t say I like America as a political entity. It’s definitely in my top 30 or so countries to live. I wouldn’t give up my citizenship for a random place but, having travelled extensively, there’s a lot of countries that have a better form of government and a healthier balance between oligarchs and labor.



  • I prefer the PS5/SteamDeck joystick layout to the Xbox/Switch layout but I’m addicted to back paddles now — I even got 3rd party joycons for Switch that have two (and also are as thick as the Steam Deck so it feels familiar when I jump over to play Zelda or whatever).

    They’re BINBOK controllers and have been great for my needs in handheld mode. The back paddles aren’t fully programmable and I think there’s some features missing but nothing I really notice. And they’ve probably lasted longer than the official Joycons.

    What I’d really like is a controller that’s basically just the deck without a screen.


  • Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?