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.
Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.
Man… Anybody remember “Back Orifice”? The late nineties were weird.
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.
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.
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.
What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can’t talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don’t.
But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
That’s a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!
Now… Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog… That’s another question.
In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe
Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:
Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.
Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)
Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.
True, true… yet still more reliable than LoZ’s “hold the reset button and hope” method of saving the game…
This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.
The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.
After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.
Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.
The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.
The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.
I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.
Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.
Yeah. Some basic tables showing how a json object would be encoded in CBOR would go a long way.
RFCs make for dry reading.
Compilers are a specialized topic - and syntax design is fiddly - but it really is no harder than any other sort of program. A lot of the hard theoretical work was done back in the sixties and seventies. You don’t have to start from scratch. These days it’s “only” a matter of implementing the features you want and making sure your syntax doesn’t leave itself open to multiple interpretations. (just as arithmetic, e.g. ‘5 × 4 - 1’ requires some rules to make sure there’s only one correct interpretation, so do language syntaxes need to be unambiguous to parse. )
Don’t get me wrong - writing a language is a lot of work and it’s super cool that OP has done this! I just want to stress that language development is 100% doable with an undergrad degree. If you understand recursion and how to parse a string you already have all the theory you need to get started.
Ha ha, yup. I love telling this story, but it’s also a definite indictment of the state of medical care in the states.
I never felt my hand break.
The tip of my opponent’s long sword snapped into the back of my right hand, just behind the pinkie. There was no flash of incandescent pain, no stars in my sight - my mind was too focused on the swordfight. My opponent had scored a hit - and it had hurt, even through my glove - but adrenaline, as they say, is a hell of a drug.
After the tournament, it became clear that something was wrong. My hand began to swell and deform, my right pinkie levering itself inward across my palm until it was sitting at nearly 30° off true. Its nail sat jauntily behind the second knuckle of my middle finger. Making a fist was impossible.
Unfortunately, I was nineteen and had neither cash nor insurance for a doctor. So I did the next best thing - ignored it and told people it was probably just a bad sprain. When people suggested I see a doctor i responded, “What’s a doctor gonna do? Tell me it’s broken and take it easy? I’ll save the money.”
After a few weeks the swelling had gone down enough that I could finally feel the bones in my hand. Where there had once been a single line from wrist to knuckle, I could now feel an ‘x’. An ‘x’ which had clearly spent the last few weeks knitting together at a now permanent bad angle.
It occurred to me then what a doctor would do - set it properly. But now they’d need to re-break the bone.
Unfortunately I still had neither insurance nor cash.
What I did have was a freezer full of popsicles and a small toolbox. I ate a popsicle. And then put the stick between my teeth as I braced my right hand on the table and raised a hammer in my left.
WHAM … WHAM!
I hauled on my pinkie to pull the now-separated bones out straight then massaged them into position until things felt roughly aligned properly.
… Many years later I had health insurance and told my doctor this story and asked if he could x-ray it for me. A week later I received a letter in the mail. Inside was a printout of my hand x-ray with the healed break circled in pen. Besides the circle was a note: “Good job with the hammer”.
All things considered I did a pretty good job, but it’s not quite perfect. My pinkie still leans inward - just a hair. Just enough to remind me.
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,
emulationnevermind.It’s just… 🤯