Stability, reliability, don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

Some companies have a need to reinvent them every 6 months to justify some middle Manager’s existence so they can pad their resume for the next overpaid job position.

This Is what it looks like when you don’t have that problem

Also, when developers have lots of cross-team and cross-skillset coordination that needs to happen, you can spend the majority meeting, documenting, and reviewing.

Case in point; my Cloud team spends a significant chunk of time coordinating between backend and frontend, Ops, Firmware/Hardware team and DevOps.

Product Owner wants a feature, specs how the feature should look in the frontend, and what the device needs to do when used. Backend has to spec the cloud logic and API glue between them. A feature might need support from DevOps if infrastructure needs to be updated, and Ops needs to know how the feature works to support customers.

It’s a whole lot of talk and documentation so that the amount of time we spend coding is as little as possible. That’s a good thing. If you’re spending the majority of your time writing code, you’re probably doing something wrong.

The new app doesn’t require a log in at all, the old one did.

The old control panel was anything but snappy though. There is a long standing bug that makes it incredibly slow to respond under certain configurations, where a single click can take several seconds to register.

Give me the Steam Deck layout sans screen and I’ll buy several.

So fucking fed up being charged out the ass for a few extra buttons and/or shitty build quality.

I went through RMAing SIX god damn Xbox elite 2 controllers before just giving up and getting my CC agency involved to get my money back.

I just want a controller with back pedals and touchpads for mouse emulation. Is that so hard?

I’d consider it if it was SteamOS, since I love the Steam Deck, but it’s performance is just shy of where I’d like it to be.

No SteamOS is a hard pass from me though. I’ve just finished ditching Windows on my gaming PC, I don’t intend to back step back to Windows, especially on a handheld.

I frequently amaze new colleagues when I show them that deploying an update for our backend application is a sub-second affair. Our pipeline keeps track of what git tag was deployed last, diffs between that tag and the new release, and uploads the files to each of the deployment targets. It takes longer for the pipeline agent to spin up from Cold on a Monday morning, than it does to actually deploy.

The core of the application is just php scripts, and those are either immediately up to date whenever the next call is, or swapped out the next time that component finishes a processing cycle.

Docker containers are nice, but nothing beats the cause of a stack trace being fixed, tested and deployed to the acceptance environment within minutes of it arriving.

This is probably controversial, but i always disliked how the Borg seemed to assimilate for the sake of assimilation? It was sometimes explained as their way of growth or achieving perfection, but that always rang a bit hollow as a motivation.

If I could write a longer term direction, it would be interesting as a quasi-justifiable thing; have the Borg be the boogeyman in the dark of space, until we find out its collective drive to assimilate is a way to insulate itself against some greater evil.

I’ve always liked stories of eldritch horrors lurking in the depths of space, so one way you could do this, is for there to be something lurking in subspace; warp drive weakens the fabric of space holding it back, which explains the Borg using transwarp conduite instead. This horror would be able to easily subvert individual minds to its needs, but the collective acting as a whole could resist it.

A “bad guy” doing bad things for an understandable reason is much more interesting that them just being straight-up evil. So in general I would aim for something like that.

This falls in the category of “looks shitty, but could be pretty good”.

I once had a variation of this with devilled eggs with minced chicken cooked in a broth mixed in. It was fantastic, so meat in devilled eggs could probably work?

I think you know the answer: your copy goes poof. It’s up to you to decide if the convenience is worth it.

Steam’s TOS does cover you a bit on the first part; an unlisted game must still be available for previous purchasers, but the publisher or developer is not obligated to keep it functioning. They aren’t allowed to intentionally sabotage the files on the depot though; steam can and has rolled back changes when a developer tries this.

I’m actually fine with this distinction; most games I buy are Indies anyway, and most can easily be backed up outside of Steam. On top of that, nothing lasts forever, even software. Hardware platforms change, dependencies shift, and over time things break.

We should try to preserve games, and not accept them artificially breaking, but we shouldn’t expect things to last forever, for free, either.

Likewise, no online platform lives forever. I quite like Steam, I think it’s been a positive force for players and developers, and I think it will be around for quite some time. Someday, eventually, it will go away. But you have to trust someone, at some point.

If that is a problem for you, buy from a place that gives you more control, like GOG.

I read a bit of fan fiction ages ago that extrapolated on what would have happened if Anakin had, at the pivotal confrontation with Mace and Palpatine, made the choice to support Mace instead.

I liked the interpretation that it would have still resulted in Luke and Leia, since Padma would still have had the twins, but not in secret, and without force fuckery, would’ve survived childbirth.

In this timeline, it results in a new high republic era, Anakin as a master, raising his children and them being his anchor to the light side. The friction in the story came from the politics of the Council disapproving of his attachment to his family, but it is also politically difficult to kick out the person who just saved their hides.

While the story didn’t touch upon Ahsoka’s fate much, I would have loved to see a timeline where Ahsoka raised a family and her kids hanging out with the Skywalker’s.

That alone has so much potential for storylines; there would still be remnant forces of separatists, rogue troopers, the death star plans being out there, and potentially Maul as well.

I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I’m not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.

I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.

Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.

Oh absolutely. The reason isn’t financial, the reason is cruelty. It always is with this shit.

The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn’t curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.

The effect you are describing is “viral load”; the degree to which a virus is present in the body. This is an indicator of how infectious you are. It is especially important for people with HIV to see if they are “safe” or need their medication adjusted.

However, an at-home test will not be a good indicator of this. These have too many variables such as the site that was swabbed, time delays from the various biological functions, how well you used the kit and even variability in the kit itself.

To properly test for viral load, a blood test should be used. I worked with a company that tested for viral load via expelled breath, and while this was a good indicator of infectiousness y/n, and was faster than a PCR, it was not more accurate.

It honestly wasn’t so bad. I played about 80 hours of it, right after launch. In typical Bethesda fashion, I used a few ini tweaks and such to tailor it to my tastes. Mostly fixing the Stealth (which was horribly broken at launch) and balance changes like reducing the bullet spongyness of enemies.

Both are now patched and configurable through the built-in difficulty settings.

I enjoyed my time with it. I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got.

Yup, I don’t even dislike Dead Space 3, but I would rank Callisto Protocol far, far, below that game. I finished the entire game and felt like I had simply wasted a colossal amount of time. The story was abysmal, the world building was weak, the gameplay was repetitive sidestep nonsense. I literally see no reason to ever recommend that game to anyone.

What’s wrong Glen? I thought you said this game was your baby, exactly how you envisioned Dead Space was supposed to be, if you had completely creative control?

Turns out maybe the problem was you, Glen. Because that DDR-inspired wet napkin of a game that was Callisto Protocol, had zero of the appeal that draws people to Dead Space. The DLC was something you should creatively be absolutely ashamed of and made it pretty much impossible to actually continue the story.

I switched to using Moonlight to stream rather than Steam’s built-in RemotelyPlay months ago. It was just absolutely unusable; not a bandwidth issue, had that in spades. The problem was that it would either not connect, connect to a blank/green screen or the audio/video would randomly cut out. It would work maybe a fifth of the time, and if I had to reconnect for whatever reason, it would absolutely always fail.

Moonlight? It worked out of the gate, and has never failed despite running on some beefy encoding settings since I have very good WiFi with next to no interference from neighbors.

I desperately want Steam’s own offering to be better though. Not having to install a second tool, and to just connect from Steam directly would be a much more polished experience.

Thanks! I will pass it along and hopefully we can push for a change. I can’t guarantee that anything will happen in the short term, but at the very least we can create some bad publicity for them.

I’m mildly autistic, to the point I do have to put on a “face” and try to act “normal” in social situations. I am generally quite sociable and outgoing, so I don’t feel it’s held me back. It’s just different.

Both socially and through work I interact with a diverse range of people, and I don’t think I am any more different than a British person is from an Italian. I’ve taken the mindset that if someone has a problem with that difference, it’s merely an excuse for their bigotry that would’ve surfaced for a different reason either way.

On the flip side, it’s been incredibly helpful in my career. I have an affinity for processes and an analytical brain, as well as the ability to disconnect from any discussion emotionally. I have always felt that this stems from my autism and it’s allowed me to have business discussions about difficult topics while leaving Ego at the proverbial door.

So I would say that for me in particular, it’s been a positive. Someone having a problem with me being different is just that; their problem, not mine.