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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.

    Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.

    Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.


  • Except that wouldn’t make a difference as far as the children data protection bit is concerned. It goes WAY beyond porn and governs the handling of any data that can be tied back to a child, including IP address, online aliases, and email addresses.

    And it’s not even just about selling it, but processing it and storing it at all. There’s technical necessity exemptions, like routers aren’t subject due to handling the IP address for routing, but stuff like logging the submitting IP address with an image to be able to handle abusive submitters would count. While it is a legitimate use, part of the UK law is requiring consent for doing anything with the data of someone under 13, and the current legal situation is “well, most sites probably break the law but you can trust us that we won’t go after you if you give it your best shot”.

    I’m surprised more sites aren’t pulling out of the UK with a law that seems designed for selective enforcement to get rid of sites the government deems “bad” while letting the ones it deems “good” or “harmless” serve as examples that they are trying to be reasonable with the law that basically makes websites illegal because 12 year olds can use browsers and might go there without parental consent.

    Also handing the ones that do check age even more information, but it’s OK because once you become an adult to do whatever with that information.


  • I’d put it like this:

    Your mom and dad give you a credit card plus $600 in allowance each month and expect you to cover all expenses, including groceries, maintenance, plus the cost of hiring a cleaning service using those, which totals $800 per month. Oh, also a bunch of guns, so it’s more like $1100 per month.

    Anyways, every now and then, your credit card hits its limit and mom and dad need to agree to raise the credit limit. And if they don’t, then you refuse to pay for anything. Except the guns, but they are only like $300, so the $600 a month will cover them easily.

    Oh but the cleaning staff should still come, they just won’t get paid until the credit limit is raised.



  • If it makes you feel any better, you would have turned 30 today regardless of what you have done in the past (unless you don’t make it to 30 (unless quantum immortality is real)).

    Happy birthday! And if you aren’t happy with your efforts so far in life, better to tackle that looking forward than regret it looking back, though be kind to the yourself of today so you don’t regret spending your life preparing for the future instead of enjoying the moment.






  • I used to do “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc”

    But then found it was better to so l switch it to “one-thousand one, one-thousand two, etc” because then the count matches the time closer. In the first, when you say the count, you are actually one second earlier. Eg, “two” marks the end of the first second and the start of the second one. But saying the number after (one-thousand, steamboat, mississippi, or whatever) means you can just say the number you last said for an accurate second count.



  • Plumbing issues? When I had one of those at my last place, it just had an attachment for the tap to get the water and another hose that drained into the sink. My current under the counter dishwasher is the exact same setup, it just taps into the inlet and drain under the sink instead of over it. The only physical change to the pluming was replacing the tap nozzle, which I put back without issue when I moved out (might have even given them a new screen when I did so).


  • I bet early adopters will just end up with a robot that mostly just lives downstairs, occasionally making it to the top, but usually failing on at least one stair before it gets to the top and loudly clattering to the bottom before going to sleep for an exponentially increasing time (so that people can use the stairs between attempts).


  • Yeah, I can say that covers most of the “troubleshooting” I’ve had to do with games that don’t work. I usually go in thinking “uh oh, maybe it’s time for me to have to check a bunch of proton versions, this will be a pain” only to see that it’s trying to run it natively and switching to proton at all resolves any issues.

    The only other thing that comes to mind is that I use dvorak and something about the way keyboard layouts are handled means it tries to “preserve” the bindings when I switch layouts in game, so it keeps the messed up QWERTY keys but dvorak layout even when I switch (and can tell it’s switched from typing things like in chat). Most games let me rebind the keys so I just need to go through the bindings, hitting the key currently bound each time as if I was using QWERTY and it rebinds. Though I suspect that due to the “preserve the layout” behaviour that keyboard input is handled specially by proton and maybe I can tweak settings to get the desired behaviour (ie, changing layouts in game means I want the bindings to change).


  • It is a translation layer, but the bit you added “to native code” sounds like you’re misunderstanding what translation layer means.

    Games use a collection of APIs (DirectX is a set of APIs, but there’s others to handle offer operations like network access and such) to interact with OS functionality, and also receive communicarion back from the OS (the windows message loop). Proton and wine are implementations of those APIs that translate the API calls to their equivalent in linux, as well as setting up their own message loop that translates messages from the linux kernel and UI system into their windows equivalent before sending them to the registered windows messaging loop functions.

    A simple example would be if a function header in windows looks like int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ), but looks like int32 SomeFuncLinux( std::string name, int64 index ), then the translation would be something like:

    int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ) {
    std:string TranslatedName( name );
    return SomeFuncLinux( TranslatedName, index );
    }

    So it doesn’t change/translate any of the code of the program itself, it just provides the environment that behaves exactly like a windows environment by translating the “hey could the OS do this for me?” requests from windows to linux. Note that not all translations are that simple, there might need to be more processing on the values, missing arguments might need to be filled in, irrelevant arguments ignored, sometimes data needs to be translated to another format, etc.

    The speed ups can come from improved efficiency in the underlying implementations (which Vulkan has, as I understand even using a translation layer from DX to Vulkan in windows can result in better performance) or having fewer services running in the background.