donuts @ donuts @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.

So true and well said.

I love playing a 70 hour From Software game or a 50 hour JRPG as much as the next guy. But some of my favorite games of all time are old classics like Super Mario World or Zelda: OoT, which can probably be completed in a single session or two if you know what you're doing. And there have been some truly great, but short, indie games over the years.

Then there are also sim games and arcade/fighting games that had great reliability and you can get many hours out of if you like them.

In the end, as long as the game is fun and satisfying, I don't care how long it lasts.

Probably nowhere, to be honest.

Today's Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back thousands of years and combines politics, religion, race, war, and territory all in one.

If you really want to understand this from a non- biased point of view, your best bet is probably wikipedia, where different people with different viewpoints can debate the facts and non-biased writing is somewhat enforced.

The truth is that it's a very complex conflict with innocent people and some very shitty people, on both sides.

Not voting for Biden does not automatically mean a vote for Trumpty Dumpty

The older I get, the more sick and tired I get of people making this flawed argument...

Pop quiz: In a tug-of-war, what happens when people on the left decide to let go of the rope?

American elections are just like a tug-of-war, between the Democrats (on the left) and the Republicans (on the right). And in that type of game you're either pulling the rope towards your side or giving up ground. Whether we like it or not, by the design of the American political system itself there are two viable teams, and if you don't support the team that's generally pulling in your direction, then you are making it that much easier for the other team to pull the country further away from what you want.

Side note: if we dislike that American politics boils down to 2 teams we can fix that by voting for people or measures that improve the system itself, like Ranked-Choice or STAR voting.

In other words, it's just plain stupid not to vote. Votes are power, and just like the rope, every inch of power that one side concedes will end up in the hands of the other side. And we've seen what happens when the wrong people get power, time and again: corruption, war, pandemic, erosion of human and civil rights, economic crashes, failure of governance, and so on.

If you care about which side wins the tug of war, you'd better pull the damn rope. And please, if you decide to let go, don't feign surprise and upset at the very obvious results.

Won't vote for Biden? Then you deserve Trump and all that comes with him.

And now here you are showing your stupidity it in so few.

What a joke. If Russia could have successfully invaded Ukraine, they would have done it by now.

The fact is that Putin's invasion of Ukraine has already catastrophically failed and now Russia is caught deep in a quagmire of death and failure that will set the Russian society and economy back by decades more than it already was. I have no doubt that Russian autocrats and oligarchs will spend the foreseeable future diverting, deflecting, distracting and generally looking for every pathetic way they can to blame the United States for the situation that they find themselves in, but objective truth will always remain: Russia mistakenly invaded a country that they believed that they could take over using a combination of hard and soft power and now they are only beginning to pay the price.

Giving guns to our allies fighting for their freedom in Ukraine and watching the Russians throw their own people into a meat grinder for no reason other than for Putin to save face is some of the best military money that the US has ever spent. Dramatically worse even than the Americans wars in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan, Putin is bleeding Russia dry of lives, money, equipment, brains and talent and so far they have absolutely nothing to show for it.

siding with Israel

Siding with Israel over... Hamas?

Personally I don't find that to be very controversial at all, as Hamas aren't exactly angels. You'd have to have the memory of a goldfish to forget that Hamas just led a mass terrorist attack (if you consider Hamas a legitimate military force, which I do not, then please substitute "terrorist attack" with "war crimes campaign") against Israeli civilians including old women and young children.

To state what should be obvious to everyone, you don't have to be pro-Hamas to feel empathy for innocent Palestinians. I feel that Biden's actions and rhetoric have been reasonable and measured on this extremely complex and highly volatile conflict.

I like Flatpaks and AppImages for application delivery and here's why:

1. Software doesn't just magically appear in various distros' repositories. There is a considerable amount of work (time/effort/energy/thought) that goes into including and maintaining any given program in a single distro's repo, and then very similar work must be done by the maintainers of other independent repositories. To make matters worse, some programs are not straight-forward to compile and/or may use customized dependencies. In those cases, package maintainers for each distro will have to do even more work and pay close attention to deliver the application as intended, or risk shipping a version that works differently in subtle ways and possibly with rare bugs. (Needing to ship custom versions of deps for a certain program also totally eliminates a lot of the benefits of shared libraries; namely reduced storage space and shared functionality or security.) That's part of the reality of managing packages, and the fact is that there's a lot of wasted effort and repeated work that goes into putting this or that application into a distro repository. I have a ton of respect for distro package maintainers, but I would prefer that their talents and energy could be used on making the user experience and polish of their distro better, or developing new/better software, than wrestling with every new version of every package over and over again multiple times per year.
2. As a developer it's very nice to know exactly what is being "shipped" to your users, and that most of your users are running the same code in a very similar environment. In my opinion, it's simply better for users and developers of a piece of software to have a more direct path, instead of running through a third party middle-man. Developers ship it, users use it, if there's a bug the users report it, developers fix it and add features and then ship again. It's simple, it's effective, and there's very little reason to add a bunch of extra steps to this process.
3. The more time I spend using immutable, atomic Linux distros like Silverblue, the more I value a strong separation between system and applications. I want my base system to be solid as a rock, and ideally pretty fucking hard to accidentally break (either on the user end or the distro end). At the same time I also want to be able to use the latest and greatest applications as soon as humanly possible. Well, Silverblue has shown that there's a viable model to do that in the form of an immutable and atomic base system combined with containerized applications and dev environment. What Silverblue does may not be the only way of achieving a separation between system and applications, but I've never been more certain that it's the right direction for creating a more stable and predictable Linux experience without many compromises. I don't necessarily want to update my whole system to get the newest version of an application, and I certainly don't want my system to break due to dependency hell in the process.
4. The advantages of the old way of distributing applications on Linux are way overblown compared to the advantages of Flatpak. Do flatpaks take up more drive space than traditionally packaged apps? Maybe, I don't even know. But even if they do, who the hell cares? Linux systems and applications are mostly pretty tiny, and a 1TB nvme ssd is like $50 these days. Does using shared library create less potential for security flaws going unfixed? Possibly, but again, sometimes it just isn't possible or practical for applications to share libraries, Flatpaks can technically share libraries too, and the containerized nature of Flatpaks mean that security vulnerabilities in specific applications are mitigated somewhat. I'm not a security guy, but I'd guess that Flatpaks are generally pretty safe.

Well, that's all I can think of right now. I really like Flatpaks and to some extent AppImages too. I still think that most "system-level" stuff is fine to do with traditional packaging (or something like ostree), but for "application-level" stuff, I think Flatpaks are the current king. They're very up-to-date, sandboxed, often packaged by the developers themselves, consistent across many distros, save distro maintainers effort that could be better used elsewhere, easy for users to update, integrate with software centers, are very very unlikely to cause your system to break, and so on.

It would be really hard for me to want to switch back to a traditional distro using only repo packages.

Trump has made everything better. You're simply salty.

• Herman Cain, 2020

Don't worry Jim, I've heard that the 15th try is the charm.

And there's also existentialism that basically says that we have the ability and the need to create our own meaning and value in life.

A small dose of existentialism or nihilism has certainly helped me get through hard times, because both make me realize that the meaning of life is totally subjective. We all have the potential to decide what value life has and whether it has meaning or not.

In any case, I find that it's enough to simply exist and survive through hard times, but life is better if I'm doing something that makes me happy. Its never too late to change yourself and start doing things that are less hurtful to yourself and others. In fact, today is a great day to turn things around.

Oh you sweet summer child, I wish.

This is the part where you show the receipts...

Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets towards Israel. (Pretty much all of them seem to have been blown out of the sky by the "iron dome" defense system.)

Honestly, I'm with you on the latter part at least. I've also found cannabis (usually a indica gummy for me) is a great sleep aide, and it's at least said to be less habit forming that melatonin, which people take commonly. I now semi-regularly take a cannabis gummy on Sunday nights to get me ready for my early Monday meeting and the start of the week.

I don't know about taking any during the day though, at least in my experience it leaves me a bit too scatterbrained and dyslexic to work with code/text. (I also haven't being diagnosed with ADHD so I don't know how it might affect people who have it.)

I'm not sure why people are voting you down, but I'd guess it's because of the conservative, misguided and draconian pot laws in much of the world. Where I live cannabis has been legal for almost a decade, and it's cheap and very easily available to any adult. It's not for everyone and that's perfectly fine, but in my opinion there's absolutely nothing wrong with moderate and responsible drug use if it makes your life a little bit better.

I'm gonna continue my run of not giving Elon Musk a fucking cent.