Yeah, I agree that there could probably be a way to “close” Activities, which doesn’t do the session management, so explicitly just throws the windows onto another Activity (or maybe prompts you when there’s still windows on that Activity), without having to outright delete that Activity.

Deleting an Activity is relatively disruptive, since you may have files linked to it or nicely setup wallpapers and such. And there are a number of places where Activities show up, where it can be annoying to have Activities showing up that you’re not currently using.

I can imagine them being open to that suggestion, if you articulate it well.
From what I saw, they did make a lot of changes to remove the start/stop functionality, but most of it was session handling code. So, it might not be too additional much trouble to add a way to close Activities instead.

As a wise Nate Graham once said: The most reliable way to find out whether people use a feature (and how they use it) is to remove it. The second-most reliable way is to announce its removal.
Well, you did miss the announcement, so it probably felt a bit rude to you, but yeah, you should still consider this the start of a conversation. They’re not hellbent on removing this feature.

I would make a joke that my Christmas tree is still planted on a field somewhere, but it’s not like I’ll get a tree either way…

Yeah, that is also my primary motivation, to not need to interact with hairdressers. 😅

I do also like it a lot, though, that I can just cut it every 2-3 weeks. My hair is a lot easier to take care of when it’s short, and I look sharper, so I can just keep it short all the time.

The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…

Yeah, this explains why they decided to remove it: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/upcoming-changes-to-activities-in-plasma-6-5/

I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.

For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.

To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.

But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.

So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.

Yeah, most errors occur somewhere in a library that you use (because libraries typically do the actual heavy lifting) and in the vast majority of cases, it will give you a (English) string describing what went wrong.

If you can just slap that string into the final error message (or at least into logging), that is so much easier and more helpful than pretending you could possibly assign an error code to each such error case.

Damn, are you me? I haven’t bothered with fading out the back yet, but I also cut 12mm on top, 9mm for the rest.

Personally, I found that when I lean my head back, then there’s a pretty noticeable bend where my neck starts. And when my hair crosses that line, it looks bad. So, that’s where I create the border.
And I just basically grab the back of my skull and move my hand down until it meets that bend to the neck, then I cut along the index finger.
I feel like I’d probably create the fade above that, too, but your mileage may vary, of course.

I’m saying spray-mop the floor once a week and you’ll take most of the dust out of that room before it settles on harder-to-clean surfaces, which reduces how often you need to clean shelves, plants etc…

Most dust in a typical household is from shed skin cells, from either humans or pets. And I do imagine that most shed skin cells just fall onto the floor at first and can be collected there.

I’ve found that regularly wiping the floors helps quite a bit. You don’t have to be super thorough, just reduce the amount of dust in the room.

Not sure, if vacuuming would work similarly well, since it kicks dust into the air, which can settle on surfaces again…

That’s kind of why I never feel great about buying video games. The price is pretty much entirely arbitrary.
Like yeah, they did an investment, it is fair that they recuperate that. But the actual price they need to ask of each customer entirely depends on how many customers there are.

And so, they will always start out asking more than what they expect to need to ask of each customer, which just feels like I’m paying too much.
But even when they do put it on sale, there’s likely going to be sales in the future where they sell it for even less. It’s not like they need to empty out a warehouse or such, where they put up uniquely low prices. So, even when I could get a game on a sale, I’ll feel like I could also just wait longer…

Yeah, or their parents argued a lot and they don’t want to end up in a relationship where this is the case. This can also mean they’re quick to exit a relationship as soon as the first conflicts need to be resolved, because it feels like a sour relationship to them.

That “l” is an L. 🙃

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Weird_Al"_Yankovic

𝆐𝆑

Oh yeah, I do think setTimeout executes in parallel, so only the largest element determines the execution time. It was difficult enough to make that sentence make sense, so I didn’t want to cram that detail in as well. 🙃

I mean, it does scale with the size of the input. Just not with the count of inputs, but rather the size of each input element.

I agree in general, that a crash is much better than silently failing, but well, to give you some of the nuance I’ve already mostly figured out:

• In a script or CLI, you may never need to move beyond just crashing.
• In a GUI application or app, a crash may be good (so long as unsaved data can be recovered), but you likely need to collect additional information for what the program was doing when the crash happened.
• In a backend service, a crash can be problematic when it isn’t actually necessary, since it can be abused for Denial-of-Service attacks. Still infinitely better than failing silently, but yeah, you gotta invest into logging, monitoring and alerting, so you don’t need to crash to make it visible.
• In a library, you generally don’t want to trigger a crash, unless an irrecoverable error happens, because you don’t know where it’ll be used.

Currently implementing error handling for a library I’m building and the process is basically to just throw all of the information I can find into there. It makes the error handling code quite verbose, but there’s no easy way for me to know whether the underlying errors expose that information already, so this is actually easier to deal with. 🫠

However there are things when the Ai is helpful, especially for writing tests in a restrictive language such as Rust.

For generating the boilerplate surrounding it, sure.
But the contents of the tests are your specification. They’re the one part of the code, where you should be thinking what needs to happen and they should be readable.

A colleague at work generated unit tests and it’s the stupidest code I’ve seen in a long while, with all imports repeated in each test case, as well as tons of random assertions also repeated in each test case, like some shotgun-approach to regression testing.
It makes it impossible to know which parts of the asserted behaviour are actually intended and which parts just got caught in the crossfire.