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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • There are a bunch of compromises for the (unknown) price point and form factor. It is clearly targeting the “relatively accessible living room gaming PC” market. At the same time, I don’t think this is as restrictive as your comment makes it seem.

    I don’t expect hdmi2.1 for over 60hz, but still a flaw

    This is likely a legal limitation rather than a technical one, but the included DisplayPort can do 4k at 120 Hz. Most games probably won’t be able to actually run with good performance with those settings.

    then lack of ability to add extra hard drive, dvd, floppy (/s on this one)

    The SSD is user replaceable, and other drives can be added through USB (even floppy drives). Micro SD is also a bit clever in that you can use the same cards for the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame.

    no output set for home audio 5.1+ set is already a thing for me

    Back to USB, it has more connectivity than consoles, and works with more devices (because it is really just a PC). This includes USB audio interfaces and such if you need audio options outside of HDMI.




  • This is one of the changes I’m most frustrated with, and one I didn’t expect. Maybe it feels worse for me because I didn’t expect it, unlike some of the other compromises.

    I’ll still buy one, but I don’t like this change.

    EDIT: The other big disappointment that I knew was possible but didn’t expect was the loss of Lighthouse tracking.



  • I’ve been playing a couple new-to-me games lately, Plague Inc and Guntouchables.

    I can see why Plague Inc is so popular. It has a bit of that “one more turn” feel to it for me, and it is interesting how you can employ different strategies to try to win. I find it to be a decent game for relaxing after a tough day of work (though it could also be frustrating when you lose).

    Guntouchables I got for free when it first launched and just played it yesterday with some friends (who also got it for free). It is a fairly simple co-op rogue-lite top down shooter, but I think it is well executed, and I enjoyed the couple runs we had. I’ll probably buy the supporter pack DLC for this at some point, because I do feel it deserves that.





  • It is fair to have a preference for exceptions. It sounds like there may be a misunderstanding on how Option works.

    Have you used languages that didn’t have null and had Option instead? If we look at Rust, you can’t forget not to check it: it is impossible to get the Some of an Option without dealing with the None. You can’t forget this. You can mess up in a lot of other ways, but you explicitly have to decide how to handle that potential None case.

    If you want it to fail fast and obvious, there are ways to do this. For example you, you can use the unwrap() method to get the contained Some value or panic if it is None, expect() to do the same but with a custom panic message, the ? operator to get the contained Some value or return the function with None, etc. Tangentially, these also work for Result, which can be Ok or Err.

    It is pretty common to use these methods in places where you always want to fail somewhere that you don’t expect should have a None or where you don’t want your code to deal with the consequences of something unexpected. You have decided this and live with the consequences, instead of it implicitly happening/you forgetting to deal with it.


  • For this example, I feel that it is actually fairly ergonomic in languages that have an Option type (like Rust), which can either be Some value or no value (None), and don’t normally have null as a concept. It normalizes explicitly dealing with the None instead of having null or hidden empty strings and such.



  • Personally, the main thing keeping me on Xorg is support for global keybinds. Plasma and GNOME both have support for the XDG portal which mostly addresses this, but apps still needs to adopt it. Plasma also has a workaround for global keybindings, but I don’t use that. Sway doesn’t have any good solutions for this last time I checked.

    Overall, I like Wayland more but I need support for global keybindings for at least a couple programs I regularly use.



  • Arma is an interesting example. I’d say that it is only an open world game in some scenarios, and often times is a linear game that happens to have a big map and sandbox.

    In any case, I’d agree that it having a large world with many possibilities is important for the gameplay and ability to mod/create content across the maps.





  • Sometimes I chill after work by driving around the Nurburgring in a touring car in Automobilista 2.

    Alternately, for more driving games:

    1. Art of Rally has a free roam mode, which is pretty chill.
    2. I’ve been playing Sledders, a snowmobile game. It is super early in early access, but it can be fun to just roam around (and learn how to drive a snowmobile).