As a fan of HR and MD, I have the original purchased on GOG, but I’ve never played it. Are there any quality of life mods I should know before I drive in?

All software is political, riddled with biases and potential security risks. Most of the time we ignore the policy of the software, because we either agree with that policy, or are conditioned not to clock it as a “policy”, because “this is just Common Sense™”.

I suspect, if the author would have been more honest with themselves, they’d write something along the lines of “turns out, software is a platform for political action, and it scares me” - an opinion that is very valid, valuable and thought-provoking.

The future’s wasteland will be covered by bodies of web stalkers who were naive enough to get tricked by mid-2010s shitposts.

“Turns out they never used this to make their metal cutlery darker - who would have thought the ancients were so casually cruel?”

“After months of research we have concluded, that despite all their technical achievements, the ancients never figured out, what does the fox say”

“Today prof. Drobyshevsky is going to tell us about their newest work in XXI cent. anthropology - what is ‘streamer dent’ and why do we have such long heads 2300 years later?”

“Ass, coochie and the rich - dietary practices of homo sapiens in the age of over-production”

Hey this one looks exactly like what I expected to get, thanks!

Gyro has been present in Sony controllers since Dualshock 3. All of the Nintendo controllers I ever used had it. Steam deck has it. I honestly assumed it is a standard feature.

Rovio lawyers be like

Nanomachines, son!

Back in 2011 I already felt that there should be some sort of easy-to-follow hygiene to maintain around mass media, especially internet. You know, like we hide our coughs and sneezes, maintain healthy distance around people, wash our hands, use slippers in communal pools. I should probably look up if someone smarter has already done the work.

Handwriting has been proven to enhance learning in humans, so you are doing great by keeping the habit!

I don’t have much to recommend, but so far this little tool was very useful for me and my math studies: https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

I am not a student, but I learn like a student all the time. I also enjoy handwriting (got an e-ink tablet for that) and knowledge management. I am often dreaming of a “perfect setup” where all I write gets pushed automatically through OCR into my knowledge vault (Obsidian, Logseq or whatever I/my peers happen to use). Even came up with a plan. I hope this new year will leave me enough energy to execute something useful.

Would you like to collaborate on that perhaps?

As someone who has built a career in building and maintaining digital services, a lot of what Carmen talks about rings very true to me, especially this part:

“The platforms make money based on the time we spend on them, and they don’t hesitate to use unethical, addictive resources, so how are you going to ask a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old to stop, if it’s even hard for us adults?”

I’ve struggled with social media and technology addiction myself, so in my mind, allowing a child a smartphone is akin to teaching them how to smoke - that is how toxic and generally “bad-for-your-health” modern internet is, I think.

At the same time, I am not (yet) a parent, so I really don’t know how am I going to be making such a decision when the time comes.

So many cool suggestions in the comments, I have to add a mention of Ennio Morrricone’s soundtrack to “The Thing”.

On a personal note, Shnitke’s Concerto Grosso #1 always sounded like a manic bad dream to me.

I think this is a fun concept, I would definitely play something like this! I suspect it could be just as fun to build. Game like this could be extended in another direction: I always dreamed of a game that would let me cleverly sabotage a powerplant or delivery network to achieve some other goal, like a heist.

A genuinely cool and somewhat lean alternative to Electron!

It’s not that native UIs are lagging behind, there is a whole set of reasons.

TL;DR: browsers, as opposed to desktop apps, are stardartized - because they were originally designed to display and deliver text documents. We were never supposed to build complex application UIs on a web stack.

First, there is no standard way of making native UI on a desktop. Every OS uses it’s own solution, while Linux offers several different ones. Browsers rely on a set of open standards developed specifically for the web, and even there not everything works exactly the same.

Second, browsers are designed to draw a very specific kind of UI through a very specific rendering mode - they run an immutable hierarchy of elements through layouting and painting engines. It works great for documents, but it becomes extremely unweildy for most other things, which is why we have an entire zoo of different UI implementations (crutches, most of them) for browsers.

On the desktop we often make a choice of what UI technology would fit best our purpose. For a game engine I would use an immediate-mode UI solution like ImGUI, for the ease of prototyping, integration and fast iterations.

For consumer software I might choose between something like QT or GTK for robust functionality, reliable performance, acessibility and community support. Mobile platforms come with their own native UI solutions.

For data-intensive UIs and heavy editors (e.g. CAD, video and music production, games) I might need to designan entirely new rendering pipeline to comply with users requirements for ergonomics, speed, latency etc.

It is also easy to notice that as a team or employer, it is often much easier to hire someone for web stack, than for native development. Simply put, more people can effectively code in JS, so we get more JS and tech like Electron enables that.

If you are interested in a single solution that will get you nice results in general, no matter the platform - you might see some success with projects like Flutter or OrbTK.

UI rendering in general is a deep and very rewarding rabbit hole. If you are in the mood, this article by Raph Levien gives a good overview of existing architectures: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html

Y’all just have no idea how complicated the process is. In 2004 it was OK to just “ship a working game”, - in 2023 you have to include all of the software stacks you have partnering contracts with, deploy an entire cloud infrastructure to deliver updates and short purchases, design and launch automated targeted ads campaigns, pay union-busting lawyers, accommodate for all the “fun” senile execs want to put in the game, pay handsome compensation to these senile execs, pay more lawyers to bury workplace toxicity-related incidents. At the end of the day, you have to sustain the company somehow when 95% of your workforce goes on a sick leave after a 3-month-long crunch period. All of that takes money, time and effort. And y’all don’t get a lot of time in-between autumn release windows.

Hey, we’ve been at it for 20 years, and we have just managed two months of 16-hour workdays without anyone dying, it looks like it might be one of those projects we actually manage to ship - what an important internal milestone!

PS: I don’t actually work at Ubisoft, I love my life too much - this entire comment is a satire

Humor can be read in various ways, the author’s public statements and policy paints a cringey picture, unfortunately. I am not a trans person myself, so the tastefulness of this humor is hard for me to judge. Still, this particular episode has left a bad taste, even if the show as a whole cracks me up. Doesn’t help that I am growing into a huge Matt Berry fan

I used to love this show until that one transphobic episode. After watching that I looked up the main show writer and learned that he is huge piece. Such disappointment.

Pretty much the entire discography of Imagine Dragons. No offense to the fans or musicians - I can see the appeal, it’s genuinely good music. It is hard to explain, but their signature rythmic melodic and vocal makeup evokes some sort of visceral reaction in me, to the point where I could identify an ImDrag track I’ve never heard before just based on my body’s desire to stop hearing.

Again, I treat it as more of a tragic circumstance preventing me from enjoying some unique and well -produced music. If you like it and it makes your soul go bop-bop, more power to you!

Fascinating, as a developer, where can I read more/contribute?

It’s it possible even to buy a decent EV that doesn’t have connectivity and data-harvesting tech built in?