Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

  • 3 Posts
  • 7.59K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Ok, so it’s effectively the same as P2P, just with some guarantees about how many copies you have.

    In a P2P setup, your data would be distributed based on some mathematical formula such that it’s statistically very unlikely that your data would be lost given N clients disconnect from the network. The larger the network, the more likely your data is to stick around. So think of bittorrent, but you are randomly selected to seed some number of files, in addition to files you explicitly opt into.

    The risk w/ something like Nostr is if a lot of people pick the same relays, and those relays go down. With the P2P setup I described, data would be distributed according to a mathematical formula, not human decision, so you’re more likely to still have access to that data even if a whole country shuts off its internet or something.

    Either solution is better than Lemmy/Mastodon or centralized services in terms of surviving something like AWS going down.




  • Monero isn’t like the other three, it’s P2P with no single points of failure.

    I haven’t looked too closely at Nostr, but I’m assuming it’s typically federated with relays acting like Lemmy/Mastodon instances in terms of data storage (it’s a protocol, so I suppose posts could be local and switching relays is easy). If your instance goes down, you’re just as screwed as you would be with a centralized service, because Lemmy and Mastodon are centralized services that share data. If your instance doesn’t go down but a major one does, your experience will be significantly degraded.

    The only way to really solve this problem is with P2P services, like Monero, or to have sufficient diversity in your infrastructure that a single major failure doesn’t kill the service. P2P is easy for something like a currency, but much more difficult for social media where you expect some amount of moderation, and redundancy is expensive and also complex.


  • Unit tests aren’t intended to find bugs, they’re intended to prove correctness. There should be a separate QA process for finding bugs, which involves integration testing. When QA inevitably finds a bug, the unit tests get updated with that case (and any similar cases).

    only cover cases that you know will work

    And that’s what code reviews are for. If your tests don’t sufficiently cover the logic, the change should be rejected until they do. It’s a lot easier to verify the tests cover the logic if the tests are submitted w/ the logic changes.











  • Yeah, I didn’t have a Steam account until they came to Linux back in 2013 or so. Back then, I bought most of my games through Humble Bundle since most had Linux support, and the rest direct from the dev’s website (e.g. I bought Minecraft and Factorio around their public alpha/beta release). I played a few games through WINE, but not many since it was a pain.

    Steam was a game changer, and they didn’t even have Proton yet, so I only bought Linux-native games through them. Being able to finally find games that supported Linux easily and keep them all on an account was amazing! And then they added Proton for the Steam Machine launch, and I could finally play many Windows games as well!

    In that time, what has GOG done for me? Offline installers suddenly doesn’t sound as impressive, especially since they don’t come with a compatibility layer, so I’ll have to go mess with WINE directly again to use them for Windows games. With Steam, I can copy the installed files for most games and it’ll work without Steam running, so I can get 90% of the value GOG provides (my “installer” can be a tarball) with a small amount of effort, and also get all of the extra value Steam provides, so why pick GOG?

    Here’s what would change my mind, in rough order of preference:

    1. GOG brings Galaxy to Linux with a WINE compatibility layer that works with local installer backups
    2. 1, but without support for local installer backups
    3. 2, but offloads the WINE support to another project, say by adding Steam entries or handing off to Lutris or Heroic or something
    4. Officially recognize and support Heroic (or another launcher) on the download page for Galaxy (e.g. “until Galaxy comes to Linux, use Heroic, which is officially supported by GOG support”); the closest they have now is a Heroic affiliate link

    I mostly want some indication that GOG cares about Linux gamers. Valve has gone out of their way to support Linux, EGS has done the same to not support Linux, and GOG is somewhere in the middle. I like GOG’s principles here, I just need some level of actual support from them.