After spending a bit of time today debugging a systemd issue I can start to sympathise with this. Not come across or really looked for viable alternatives that aren’t just a return to random bash init scripts though.

Ok hear me out. I’m a book author, I write a book and try to sell it for £100 while all my peers are selling books at 60 or 70. I spend the most money imaginable making my book. It’s quite possibly the largest book in existence thanks to the effort of me and 5000 other people. I lie awake at night worrying that we’ll never make back the money we’ve spent on it.

Wait what’s this? Some team of less than 10 people has written a 3-page book and sold it for 2.50? And people are… Buying it?! But why? Look at the size of my book, clearly it must be better because it’s so big, so fancy, so expensive! Every letter cost me millions! I read the 3-page book. It doesn’t have money dropping from each letter like mine. It has a beginning, middle and end but mine has 500 acts each more expensive than the last. Surely it’s not that good… It’s pretty great actually. I have learned nothing from this experience, even though it’s happened a hundred times. I will still make more money than entire countries, somehow.

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.

I believe it’s 1% for access to the “entire post-open ecosystem”, rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.

It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.

That works until all* games come with root level anti cheat. It was the same with micro transactions which people still defend despite being utter shit.

• Realistically this will never be 100% but it will be enough of the mass market AAA games like CoD etc to mean that if you functionally want to play a game made in the last X number of years you will need to accept this or stop playing games altogether. I think most people will continue to play games. Most people will continue to install root level anti cheat, knowingly or otherwise, and all of them will get fucked by an exploit of that software. They may never even know about it.

Helldivers 2 does the same thing. If this continues it will be extremely advisable to move any non-gaming use-cases to a different computer as you have no idea what the “anti-cheat” is doing with that level of authority over your computer.

Literally just bought what I believe to be last generation’s X13 on ebay for half the price of the new one. It’s been great so far, especially with the power efficiency of Ryzen CPUs. My one complaint is the soldered RAM, which judging by the new lineup is getting phased out, thankfully.

Yes I was wrong to say that this an implementation detail rather than a protocol problem as the OpenSSH release notes to prevent this vulnerability include extensions to the SSH Transport Protocol, however I still believe that the headline is sensationalist at best since it can and has been protected against by patching ssh clients and servers. It would be entirely unreasonable in the majority of cases to simply stop using SSH on the basis of this vulnerability and that’s why I think the headline exaggerates the problem. The Register has a much more measured take on this including comments from the paper’s authors that people shouldn’t panic and try to fix immediately.

Bit of an alarmist headline here. The vulnerability has been patched in the most common clients (openssh) and it was because the protocol wasn’t being implemented correctly. To say that the SSH protocol “just got a lot weaker” is just not true.

I disagree with the $ per hour framing (it’s more about the value the entertainment provides than the amount of time it takes to consume) but yes you should pay for your entertainment. I got far too used to paying nothing or close to nothing as a student that it took me a while to readjust.

I like it and have been using it for something like 6 months. I had an issue where I really liked the application and how simple it was but I didn’t really want to “budget”, just keep an eye on where my money was going. That was fine, just keep zero-ing the numbers every month, slightly tedious though. Now they’ve got a “report” style behind an experimental flag and that’s made it pretty perfect for me.

I set up some family members with the electron app after they had spent 3 days to do in a spreadsheet what I had done in 3 hours in actual. There was resistance initially due to sunk cost fallacy but now they’re loving it.

Other options like ynab and firefly were just too bloated and complex for our simple use case.

Why is it surprising that you had a pocket knife confiscated at a bar?