English does have some very good bits:

• easiest adjective declension rules of any language, ie. none.
• verb conjugation rules can be scribbled down in their essence on the back of a napkin and there’s not that many exceptions; probably the easiest of any Indo-European language.
• no “grammatical” gender; only pronouns are changed for gender and they’re mostly as expected from biology
• no polite vs. informal forms of “you” and rules to remember
• loads of words, for subtle nuance and meaning

…and some less good bits:

• loads of words, to confuse learners.
• the spelling rules are the fever dream of a madman. Many words are distinguished by stress, which is not marked. Want to learn the language by reading it? Ha ha no. Also, loads and loads of vowel sounds compared to most languages.
• massive reliance of “phrasal verbs”, where the meaning can’t be guessed from the parts. A “hang up” and a “hang over” have nothing to do with hanging and nothing to do with each other, despite up and over describing similar concepts
• grammatical concepts that don’t exist in other languages, like “do support” for forming questions or negating a statement. Mood and tense of a sentence might be difficult to parse for some learners as that’s indicated by “trigger words” rather than anything more concrete
• the native speakers do like to come out with some nonsense, too.

Alas no. Sur-rip-tish-yis-ly. Apparently you can blame Latin for sub + rapere = “secret snatch”.

Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.

We used to do that in industrial automation. If you make any changes to the PLC / HMI / SCADA software, burn a DVD with what you changed and leave it next to the rack. No danger of bringing in viruses on a USB stick (the whole system was air-gapped) and you’d still have a backup available.

I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.

Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.

Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.

Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.

I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.

Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.

Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.

Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.

Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.

The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.

Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.

Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has “fetch content” since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you’d like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you’d like. I don’t think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.

You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

• load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
• manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.

You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.

Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.

If you lose, physical scars. If you win, emotional scars.

This, exactly. When we redid our bathroom, we went from “immersion tank” hot water with about three metres of pressure behind it, to central heating in a closed system, where both hot and cold have the exact same pressure, about thirty metres head. Went from being basically impossible to have a shower, to being an absolute pleasure where nearly the entire range of the tap gives a useful temperature, and it’s got a right blast of pressure behind it too.

Another alternative would be an electric shower - since you’re just heating up cold water, the pressure is “always the same”. They tend to be a bit pathetic and crap, tho.

To be fair, they sent out the email when they first did it. Just their internet connection is a bit slow.

The original did have a lot of varied and interesting quest ideas, and some of the graphics still hold up now - dawn breaking over the mountains and reflecting off a lake looks even better in higher resolutions. The problem is more that there’s about a billion identikit dungeons which only contain level-appropriate loot, so you never find anything really exciting, and of course the leveling system is completely busted so every fight is a slog everywhere you go. Felt so limited compared to Morrowind, too - MW might have been a completely broken sandbox, but at least it was open enough to break.

I don’t really feel that the main problem with Oblivion is how it looks.

Google did claim “half their new code” was AI-generated; obviously, take that with a pinch of salt, since they’ve a vested interest in promoting LLM.

Speaking as a professional dev, about half of my lines-of-code consists of whitespace, opening-and-closing marks for the javadocs, and such matters as function, method and class definitions and their matching curly-close-brackets. My IDE generates all of that for me, but I dare say that I could use an LLM to do it as well, and then “half my code” would be AI-generated as well.

My colleagues who are most enthusiastic about AI do turn in some right shit for code review; I suppose the best of it is over-complex and has confused error handling. They also tend to have about a hundred lines of what they’ve changed in the pull request description, and little or nothing about why. Github shows me what you’ve changed, I’m only interested in why you’ve done it, so that’s actually providing negative value by wasting my time having to read it.

Good shout, Emperor. Appreciate all that you do.

Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you’ve not got a boot manager, of course.

Looking at how chonky his wrist is, I suspect that “original OP” is quite a big lad and that this isn’t his first schnitzel sandwich. Suspect it’s more “plump thumb” than a double-joint.

Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.