While the “recent troubles” put energy to my leaving, I have always been uncomfortable with Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Stack Overflow, Quora and Fandom, as corporate-owned repositories who work by, in one way or other, profiting off of freely contributed work.

It used to be that if someone wanted to help people with freely-given information, they’d offer it in a forum, on Usenet, or on a website they started and hosted themselves, or if it fit in there, put it on Wikipedia. Now, people add it to a freaking pile that corporations monetize. Don’t just hand them value! Put it somewhere that won’t beg you to install an app, or beg you to “upgrade” to “Nitro,” or force you to watch intrusive ads, or force people to create an account to see it, or track you! Your volunteer labor should not be a profit center!

Wait a moment…

“Work from home is here to stay, US data shows”

“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O”

Even 20 minutes seems like too long, but that would still be wonderful.

I understand this impulse. It is popular to demonize people on the other side, and truthfully, their voting for Trump in the past is a severe issue. They once in a while ask me for computer help, but this whole matter has made me reluctant to do it.

I’m not going to call them good people because voting for Trump has identified them as not being among those. But in some ways they’re decent? They don’t think they’re evil. They don’t stab people in the back personally. They work hard. They’re honest face-to-face. it’s mostly on the national stage that their odious beliefs are brought out.

There are lots of people like that here. I feel like, if they can be brought to see, viscerally, what the effects of their political decisions are, that could be the breaking point that changes their political beliefs. January 6th might have been one such event.

Not voting for the opponent in a two-party race is like a half vote for the other guy, but wouldn’t it be nice if they came around and gave Biden a full vote each?

And yet, that is what those models claim to do. If the possibility of late-breaking events is not included in the model then the model is flawed.

A friend of mine has right-wing parents who were Trump boosters in 2016. He says that January 6th left them aghast, and they aren’t supporting him now. That’s just two people sure, and this is entirely anecdotal, but it might be indicative of how the wind is blowing.

What is the counterpoint elsewhere on the page? “Donald Trump Must Be Allowed To Destroy Us All?”

They also hate the idea of phone trees. Companies don’t care unless we make them not care.

Doom, for multiple reasons.

I have questions about how useful the basic information Dominos gets from me from their app will be to anyone. Android doesn’t let them just harvest roaming data any more.

Remember, Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016, and when Trump won instead, it was chalked up to the fact that it really was a random chance.

Don’t panic about this. Keep quiet and keep doing the work to get Trump thrown out. And charge your mental health bills to the Democrats, for putting up an old man up for election in 2020, one who’s even older than Trump, in the first place.

I used to work at a Dominos, and their side items have been ludicrously priced for a good while. There’s usually a “coupon” in their app with a substantial discount on pizza, it’s the only way I’d order from them.

It is true: Destiny 2 is rated by ProtonDB as “borked”: https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660

But there are an awful lot of other games with high ratings there. The Steam Deck has done wonders for getting Windows games working under Linux.

Molly White’s been covering the lobbying of the crypto industry recently on her podcast/blog Citation Needed.

Saying “American people” the way the Beastie Boys would say “Another dimension”

It just seems like it’s a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.

I’m aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn’t have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it’s usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.

Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called “blobbers,” have mostly died out: The classic Bard’s Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.

The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.

DOS Wizardry has a significant bug that makes it one of the worst versions.

Warning: this is secretly a Nethack thread!

So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.

Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren’t playing on Friday the 13th…