Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.

One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.

Some people dual-boot to play games with anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, so a recent “AAA multiplayer” release might skew the numbers for a bit as people boot Windows instead.

Linux installations are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, and much much higher than in China. The “use of Linux online” has a bit of a sinusoidal pattern every day depending on who’s awake. But a big Chinese release - Fallen Feathers, for example - will suppress the Linux percentage for a while as well.

Steam do publish the number of concurrent users as well, it should be possible to multiply through to get roughly the “absolute numbers” you want. I think they publish the numbers of players online for multiplayer games too, and since those are the games that Linux will be locked out of, it might be possible to point fingers at the specific games causing the problems?

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

They all challenge you on different ways.

DS3 is actually quite interesting to finish on SL1. You can cast one basic spell, lots of weapons are available to you, but you need to think carefully about your loadout so you’ve got a good set of resistance and buffs for each area.

DS1 limits you to terrible weapons with boring movesets, and by the time you’ve heard the pyromancy noise for the ten thousandth time, you’ll be ready to chuck your monitor out the window.

DS2 is hellish. Your dodge is tied to your agility, which only a few items boost, and for the first 3/4 of the game, you’ll only get that from a crap armour set. Only a couple of weapons are available to you. You’ll need to know basically every boss inside out; some of the ones that were comedic before are no longer so funny.

Scholar is like DS2, but you can’t run into the DLC early on any more to get some of the powerful rings that are in there. I almost cried when I finally got the ring of the embedded.

Wouldn’t know about finishing ER on RL1/no summons. Cleared out the four demigods easily enough, but Morgott was a run ender. RL1 does not leave you a lot of room for mistakes, put it like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Suspends disbelief a little that the food is still rotting in centuries-old dungeons. Maybe should have some completely dried-out fungus in the vague shape of the food, that collapses into dust when your presence moves the air that’s sat motionless for decades.

Not that the DnD economy makes any sense anyway, of course. Bret Devereaux, in amongst his other excellent writings, did an excellent explanation of why “gold currency” wasn’t a thing in historical times; he’s written specifically about BG3’s armour problems as well.

Really traditional vampires are super OCD; one of the ways to get rid of them is to spill a big bag of eg. rice in front of them, and they’ll spend so long counting every grain that they’ll get caught by the rising sun. Salt ought to work as well?

One grain of salt, two grains of salt. Ah ha ha ha. Three grains of salt…

Oh, cool. Great game, really fun to play.

I’d like to nominate “several different versions of Dredmor” as the update required; maybe have some cryptic clues as to which version he is as you progress down the dungeon. You either know what he’s like and have planned your build around it, in which case you’ll whip him like a red-headed stepchild with implausibly big eyebrows; or you’ll get a complete kicking because he will one-shot your otherwise end-game character as soon as he gets close.

A rogue-like where most of the options aren’t good isn’t a great one. Everything should be useful in some kind of character build.

Problem being, of course, that you can add more certificates, but you can’t revoke the original M$ one. And since it’s vulnerable and you can’t get rid, then these exploits still work and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

I’m all here for the green energy. I think it’s worth investing in “both sides of the coin”, though. Now that I’ve replaced all the energy-wasting bulbs in the house with LEDs, and the house is well-insulated enough that there’s just no need to run a three-bar electric fire to keep warm, then I’m at the point where solar panels would be sufficient for nearly all my energy requirements. That’s partly because solar has got better, but mainly because I’m just using loads less

On that note, the secret to not having power and cooling issues running tens of thousands of super-hot GPUs in the desert, is not to build them. Which as they’re not being built, might be enough ;-) But investing in more effort processing units and more efficient models would do it too. They wouldn’t have their “no one else can afford this” moat if it was all made more affordable, tho.

He’s mentioned in the third paragraph of the link. But yes, it is. In order for it to be “worth” burning a trillion dollars every year on AI, then there has to be a time in the near future, 2030 or so, where AI will be making unimaginable trillions. If the datacentres aren’t being built, then that money can’t possibly be coming in as planned. That makes the massive investment in NVidia’s GPUs look extremely shaky - why buy them if they’ll never be turned on? - and it means Oracle will be completely in the shit.

Ed’s arguments have been, “if any link in the chain fails, the whole thing falls down”. I think he’d been leaning towards “banks being unwilling to keep financing datacentre builds on debt” as the most likely stumbling block, but just being unable to power the damned things for want of infrastructure and skilled engineering, as here, is a problem he talks about frequently too.

He thinks it’s likely it’ll bring down the entire tech industry, since they’re now full of idiotic MBAs with no other big ideas. And frankly, it’s about time.

Asha Sharma had this statement, in amongst the rest of it. As per Ars Technica:

Some decisions in the gaming division currently pass through “14 layers” of decision-makers, Sharma said, before promising that the new Xbox will be a “flatter organization” with “no more than 5, and where possible, 3” layers of management involved in any decision.

You’d have to think that it’s this shit that she’s pointing at. Massively excessive management certainly helps with all the design-by-committee cookie-cutter crap that’s filled with monetisation. Alas, they’ve just got rid of the really interesting studios that I’d like to see spread their wings a little.

Lots of options and you’ll need to spend some time RTFM. But if you already know how you want to partition your disks, then the basic installation (with a network controller!) takes about two minutes.

Then you can restart into the cli, and the real questions - what else am I going to install? - can begin.

Oh, what was that thing called, ndiswrapper or similar, where you downloaded the windows versions of the drivers and then wrapped them up and hoped they worked, and good luck with power saving or resume from sleep.

Don’t get me wrong; amazing that it worked even as well as it did, but glad we’ve got native drivers now. A small step forward every day and soon you’ll have gone a long way.

I’ve found that the real problem is having a television to plug them in to. Still got my old NES and SNES from when I was a kid. But no modern TV has the RF input to connect them to, they’re all digital only. Emulation is much easier.

PC version is incredibly hard to get working on modern computers, fwiw. SecuROM servers are all closed down; I’ve got the SKIDROW patches but have never managed to get them to start up. Emulating the 360 or PS3 might be easier…?

Zero remote exploits since it was released. That’s what divinely-inspired coding looks like, everyone.

Fill up a jerry can or two with petrol next time you fill up your car, and save the vodka for making martinis.

I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:

• the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
• functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
• directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
• terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago

It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.