If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.

3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.

In which case, I’ll set aside a very good bottle of whisky for that day.

I bought Subnautica on Steam when I wanted to replay it, despite having it free on Epic, just because it was easier than dealing with their trash.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Considering the random branches of science that have gone into making better hard drives, I’d be willing to put money on ‘understanding dark energy’ => ‘higher density data storage’ as one benefit of the tech.

But yeah, we understand more things, we’re in a better position to understand even more things, and some have applications you benefit from every day.

Scottish: got the painters in.

Some things cross language boundaries.

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

I had 32GB of RAM in my desktop as 4x8GB; one of the sticks failed a couple of years ago, and it was cheaper to replace it with 64GB = 4x16GB than it was to get a replacement 8GB.

That’s convenient for work purposes (in fact, I could actually do with more) but massive pointless overkill for most games. Even games which do “big loads” - Witcher 3, say - aren’t noticeably quicker from RAM cache than they are off of an NVMe drive.

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

I’ve always seen it as a “take turns at being the guesser, and whoever does best wins” kind of game. If you take six goes and your opponent takes seven, then taste that sweet victory.

A digression, but the “viking chess” game Hnefatfl basically guarantees a win for white as written. So you need to mix it up - play two games, see who wins fastest; or constrain it like backgammon, roll dice and that’s the moves you must make.

Zelda 3? You get fast travel quite early and the world is packed with stuff, it’s not absurdly huge. Doesn’t have that bloody owl in it either, telling you the obvious at great length.

Certainly not Wind Waker, anyway. Now there is a slow game.

No unexpected crashes, no game breaking bugs. Performance was… dubious. It looks amazing, but UE5 has scalability issues. None of the graphics options seemed to do anything for frame count.