Who the fuck types out “snigger” haha

Teleports behind you

I mean if you think that it’s bad for linux culture because you’re teaching newbies the wrong lessons, fair enough.

My point is that most people can parse that they’re essentially asking you to run some commands at a url, and if you have even a fairly basic grasp of linux it’s easy to do that in whatever way you want. I don’t know if I personally would be any happier if people took the time to lecture me on safety habits, because I can interpret the command for myself. curl https://some-url | sh is terse and to the point, and I know not to take it completely literally.

You should start getting it from CD-roms, that shit you can trust

You have the option of piping it into a file instead, inspecting that file for yourself and then running it, or running it in some sandboxed environment. Ultimately though, if you are downloading software over the internet you have to place a certain amount of trust in the person your downloading the software from. Even if you’re absolutely sure that the download script doesn’t wipe your home directory, you’re going to have to run the program at some point and it could just as easily wipe your home directory at that point instead.

It’s fine to want a gui debugger and I want to clarify that I’m not actually trying to persuade you to use gdb! My actual advice would be vscode (or other ide) with it’s gdb/lldb integration which allows you to debug from your ide in a gui-oriented way.

I do however think that you’re wrong about how hard it is to learn gdb. I learned to use it not that long ago and it doesn’t take “1 month”. Using gdb on a basic level is actually not particularly hard, and I can recommend this talk for anyone actually curious about learning gdb. It’s just 15 minutes, but the same speaker has done a couple of other talks on the same theme that are longer if you want to learn even more, you can probably find them in the recommended videos sidebar.

What I actually think is the case is that learning gdb takes a bit more mental effort because it’s a different paradigm than gui debuggers, and a lot of things aren’t intuitive. If you’re prepared to be a bit uncomfortable and lost for an afternoon, and maybe even flip through the official document for a bit you can be “good enough” at gdb in less than a day.

Gdb is also more powerful than most gui-only editors, because you can do scripting in gdb. For example you can execute an arbitrary series of gdb commands when you hit a certain breakpoint which can be really useful in some circumstances. My preferred way of debugging in linux is actually to both have a gdb window that I can enter commands in so I can do more scripting stuff if I want to, and also some extra bells and whistles for viewing source code and setting breakpoints etc. I edit in vim so I use the termdebug plugin that comes bundled with vim, but use whatever exists for your editor if you don’t use vim yourself.

I like this quote

and just the other day I caught myself wondering who will clean out my Inbox after I’m dead

I think that it’s bad to become too dependent on a certain tool, especially if that tool is owned by microsoft, although in this case your dependent on various microsoft api:s anyway so that’s probably a bigger problem in that regard. Experimenting with programing without Visual Studio is a good idea and will probably teach you lots of things about yourself and microsoft api documentation in this case. If microsoft has built a system that is so impractical that you need visual studio to navigate it, that’s a pretty bad sign for the health of the microsoft ecosystem, but that’s not exactly surprising anyone

Rust allows you to create more powerful abstractions, which can allow you to express your intent in a clearer way. C code can feel like you’re bogged down by details all the time. C is on the other hand a smaller language, so just getting to the point where you “know” the language is a lot easier.

Pathologic (2005). Been wanting to play it for years but been a bit too intimidated because of the reputation it has, but finally gave it a try and am about halfway through the Bachelors’ route.

It’s actually not as bad as I had made it out to be. The core loop of resource management isn’t too difficult and pretty engaging. You famously spend a large portion of the game walking between places but because of the stakes imposed by the resource management and the constant potential for sweet deals in the hobo economy, you’re always engaged. The game isn’t afraid to throw unfair feeling scenarios at you, but if you’re not above reloading and retrying a couple of times they are very possible to deal with, at least so far. I have a decent stock pile at the moment, so I might actually fuck around and not reload next time I catch the plague.

The game does a lot of things with the medium that very few other games have even attempted and is absolutely worth a play. It also has a very unique and compelling setting, Morrowind is probably the closest example I can think of in terms of world building even if the setting in Pathologic is relatively speaking more grounded.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Quinns article in rock paper shotgun is a good introduction and what first made me interested in the game when I first read it maybe a decade ago. Since it was written, Ice Pick Lodge (the studio behind the game), has released a remastered version of the first game with better translation, released a sequel and announced a second sequel, both of which are retelling of the story in the first game from the point of view of one of the three available protagonists in the first game.

Based on the games you listed, Morrowind! One of my absolute favorite old RPGs. Out of the elder scrolls games it’s the one with the strongest world building, which paints a nuanced picture of a very strange and compelling world. Compared to Skyrim in particular it’s more like a pen-and-paper rpg and less like an action game which gives it a higher barrier to entry. In particular, a lot of people find the combat frustrating at the start.

The modding community for the game is very active to this day. To begin with, there’s OpenMW which is a re-implementation of the engine that runs natively on Linux and contains various bug fixes and quality of life features. There’s also a fork of it, tes3mp, which allows you to play Morrowind in multiplayer!

There’s also Tamriel Rebuilt which is a modding project that adds the mainland of Morrowind (the base game just takes place on an island called Vvardenfell) and adds maybe another game worth of content. Theres also Project Tamriel which has one project that recreates Skyrim based on Morrowind-era lore and one that recreates Cyrodiil based on Morrowind-era lore.

“algorithm” just means “set of instructions”, it is a bit unfortunate that it’s become the default term for talking about this kind of thing.

I think that youtube wants to maximize watch time, if you just watch subscriptions you might get “done” at some point but with the home feed you can just keep watching forever

One of my acquaintances has actually made a small game in Odin (Cat and Onion) and after that written a book about the language (Understanding the Odin Programming Language). I don’t know much about Odin myself but from what I’ve gathered there isn’t that much quality documentation or that many good tutorials etc. so it can be a bit hard to get in to the language, which is why he decided to write the book.

Most of the music I listen to fits under the alternative umbrella. While I never actually spent a lot of time directly on /mu/ that type of online music culture circa ten years ago has been very influential on my music taste. A couple of years ago I also had a big emo phase, in particular 90’s emo and 10’s emo revival. I also listen to a lot of punk and post hardcore.

People have scrutinized what chatgpt for example is allowed and not allowed to say by its programmers. I think the difference here is that there is lower hanging fruit to grab because the Chinese state has a different relationship to censorship than a lot of other states.

I also associate Sinophobia with being prejudiced against Chinese people or Chinese culture, however being critical or skeptical of the Chinese state is actually perfectly reasonable. I’m also very critical of the US state and this isn’t because I’m “americaphobic” or some nonsense.

Please explain how this is Sinophobic.

I’ve interpreted the “I want smaller games with less graphics and I’m not kidding” meme as saying that we need AA games rather than indies. Games with large-ish teams but less crunch and less complicated asset creation pipelines and more space to fix bugs and iterate on the core game.

One thing that I don’t think anyone else has mentioned is data structures. Bash does have arrays and hashmaps at least but I’ve found that working with them is significantly more awkward than in e.g. python. This is one of several reasons for why bash doesn’t scale up well, but sure for small enough scripts it can be fine (if you don’t care about windows)

Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.

Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.

Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.

The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.

Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup :make to run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use :Cfilter to focus on one type of error and then :cdo to for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.

In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.

Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim