For this to become a serious issue a couple of conditions need to be met:

• there has to be enough second hand supply to meet demand and keep prices low.
• …which means lots of people need to circulate their games.
• …which means they didn’t like your game enough to want to keep it in their collection for replayability
• …which means you made an unremarkable game

Now, given the fact that I have full confidence in your ability to create something worthwhile (because you would do so from passion), this cycle will likely be broken at some point.

There’s also the other option where people will circulate their second hand games with the knowledge they’ll be able to buy back another copy somewhere down the road.

But yes, you’re right that this will bring a new factor to the gaming industry that everyone has to take into account. Keep in mind that your financial security in the indie gaming sector is fully dependant on wether you develop something worthwhile. You are in no way entitled to be able to make a living from publishing games regardless of their quality. Which is the beauty of the indie games segment: the more love and care you put into your game, the bigger the chances are that it’ll be a success.

I haven’t dabbled that much in PCB design but I have seen some good things in KiCAD. All my electro engineer homies assure me Altium’s the way to go for now though. Most of them also happen to be big F(L)OSS nerds so I’m curious to see where KiCAD goes in the future.

FreeCAD is an awesome attempt at building a parametric CAD modeler, though it will need a lot of polish to be usable. Especially on the UX side of things the software could do with a lot of improvement. As far as I know the most difficult part to program for parametric modelers is the actual geometry kernel, which is why so many modelers are based on Parasolid, including the recent hybrid modeler Plasticity. For a F(L)OSS parametric CAD modeler to truly succeed some genius needs to build an open geometry kernel that performs at least close to on par with Parasolid. But that takes a special kind of autistic in order to achieve. Either that or the engineering world needs to collectively decide this needs to happen.

As much as I hope FreeCAD becomes the open source alternative everyone is looking for, it is trying to be everything at once and that might be too ambitious for the current state of the project. I’m secretly hoping we also get a new project sometime soon with a smaller scope.

The problem is mostly a lack of competition in specific fields. And the companies that own the monopoly in their respective niches make it so that any form of competition is either…

• immediately acquired and killed
• handicapped by market dependencies on pantented features
• unable to generate business because customer processes are completely dependant on proprietary solutions

Most of these applications have codebases that are FUCKING ANCIENT. Let’s take a look at Solidworks for example, which is the industry standard for Computer Aided Design for the manufacturing industry. Under the hood, it’s still the same software from the 1990’s. And there is no incentive for Dassault Systemes to rewrite the codebase.

Lots of these giant monopolistic software products have turned into frankenstein-esque monstrosities over the years. I often tell people they are built like backyard playhouses that have been expanded over the years by building an extra story on top, adding a swingset, adding a slide, extending the roof and attaching a rope ladder to the side.

All of this makes for more functionality, but they haven’t really thought about the structural integrity of the original playhouse. In a direct parallel many of these programs have unmaintainable code that no one dares touch because “hey it works, and we need to keep it that way because if we break it we’re no longer getting payed”.

These companies unintentionally hold their businessmodel hostage by choosing profits over innovation and investment in an adaptable codebase.

Which is why it is near impossible for them to support technologies that are different from their original install base. And this is also why they have incentives to make sure they stay in the lead becuase they know damn well that open source movements that get some support and take flight are dangerous to their market share, and by extension their profits.

Blender is probably one of the best examples of what good open source software will do to an industry. The day someone develops a parametric CAD solution that’s platform agnostic and based on open standards we’ll see a lot of engineers ditch Windows for Linux.

Yes, this is the best argument in favor of air cooling. Air cooling has less points of failure.

With water cooling there’s tons of potential problems that “haha wind go brrrr cooling” just doesn’t produce: Water block gummed up with mold? Take a performance hit. Pump dead? Sucks to be you. Leak in the system? Enjoy replacing your motherboard.

Main issue you might encounter in air cooling is just “fan died, replace fan”. (Obviously not counting thermal interface materials since they are required for both cooling solutions)

Wood you believe it

You little shit… Keep this up and I’ll stick it to ya!

You’re getting ratio’d but you’re right. Core parts of the user experience are steaming piles of dogshit while people praise MacOS for its many gimmicks.

• Finder is an absolute pile of shit and gets first time users addicted to bad habits. It takes digging through hidden settings to even make it match the out of the box functionality that Windows Explorer offers and it still can’t match the full potential of Explorer for file management. The integrated search is unpredictable and fuzzy so they went and made Spotlight its own thing.
• Window management is a nightmare if you’re actually trying to do multiple things at once without switching windows. Mac OS has not implemented window snapping for years and they still managed to make it suck when they did. Not once have they considered stealing great ideas from the tiling window managers, Apple simply decided to reinvent the wheel and make it square.
• Got multiple applications running at the same time while minimized? Lol, get fucked. The only way to know what’s actually running at a glance is the shitty little dot below the dock icon and restoring a specific window takes either way too many clicks or requires you to know the magic keyboard shortcut for untangling your windows (another gimmick they added later in order to actually make the OS usable bearable).
• Got any sort of issue during startup? Here, take this black screen with a single icon. Not even a slight hint as to what the actual problem might be and if you should worry about it. MacOS might seem like a stable OS but that is mainly because it is very well integrated with the limited set of hardware it can actually run on. If any real issues do come up, the troubleshooting experience is basically just a giant “get fucked” sign pointing to the nearest Apple store.
• Sometimes simplicity is a good thing, but usually designing something to be accessible means severely limiting the amount of depth you can go into as an experienced user. Every aspect of the OS and the tools that come with it share this overall problem that there’s just not much depth to what you can do with it. Can’t have a steep learning curve if there’s just nothing to learn.

And I feel like none of these are unreasonable. I like using the right tools for the right jobs, which is why I run Windows for heavy productivity and engineering work. Desktop Linux has come a long way but it just doesn’t (yet) have the required toolset to support engineering workflows. While programming of any kind and getting more complex data wrangling done is best done using Linux. My server needs are also best covered by Linux as most distributions can be run without all the bloat that Windows comes with. And I am sure as shit not paying for Windows Server.

I just can’t find a valid reason for using MacOS. It seems to combine the worst of both worlds into an OS that’s like a trial experience of actually using a computer to get things done.

Honestly that probably goes for any interpreted programming language that supports imports.

Many Javascript frameworks just put their configuration into -.config.js files in the project root. Which is a pretty elegant solution that does not require custom parsing. Just import the config and go nuts.

Compiled (and by extension bundled) software obviously requires a different approach, but at that point you should probably consider storing your config in some kind of database.

Maybe there just isn’t a right answer to the config conundrum if all the general solutions are janky in some way.

Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states “product leadership”.

I agree, we don’t need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.

The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I’m still having fun I’d be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant “collect all these flags” middle finger for 100% completion.

Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.

Yeah not a fan of YAML either. I simply don’t see the benefit of getting rid of delimiters and replacing them with indentation. Yes, it does save several bytes, which might be important if you measure space in kilobytes I guess. It does provide cleaner files which may or may not be more readable.

It does not provide any advantages in parsing complexity. It does not provide any protection against typos.

I guess the same can be said of python, which forces indentation and therefore readable code formatting. Which is a problem that does not exist since the invention of code formatters and linters.

I like python for what it does but delimiters are actually useful in terms of readability. They provide an extra hint that the text you’re about to look at conforms to a specific structure.

This only works if you spin this with a product leadership strategy:

Shovelware games that don’t offer a solid chunk of hours or any kind of replayability should be priced lower, and proper games should be priced normally.

The thing is, this is not at all how pricing works if you’re building a business model. Prices are always heavily influenced by what the consumer is willing to pay, or in this case what they’ve been used to for years. For as long as I can remember “full price” has always been $50 or $60.

Special editions with marginal bonus content, $10 price increases on the base game and shitty DLC (horse armor comes to mind) are all examples of corporate shit tests, designed to see how far they can take it.

History has proven though, that changing consumer expectations is among the more difficult things to do in a market where alternatives are rampant. Though the whole franchise loyalty thing kinda ruins that, but I’ll be damned if I have to pay $200 for a game. That will promt me to just play something else instead.

The python community would like to have a word with you.

The free games are 80% shovelware not worth playing, 15% indie experiments that have the potential to become a full game with another development iteration, and 5% AAA games that can be bought on sale for a fiver anyway.

I doubt much of their Fortnite money is actually being spent on licenses for these games. They likely negotiate some kind of “do it for the exposure” deal with the smaller developers in order to keep the flow of free games going.

Chances are the games given out for free will end up in a Humble Bundle at some point anyway. Which is when you acquire a steam key anyway.

I’ve identified good progression systems as the main thing I like about games with crafting. You make something which enables you to get the next best thing, repeat.

Notable examples are Terraria, (modded) Minecraft to some degree, Runescape (no bias towards OSRS or RS3), Monster Hunter series, various MMO’s, Subnautica, ARK and Forager.

Not sure how I should feel about that. It’s highly likely any party engaged in tracking activities will try to grab as much data as they can. So a non-Google device seems like it would be doing twice the amount of data collection.

But considering Google also controls the hardware design of the Pixel, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have some additional tricks up their sleeve.

What we really need is a full open-source phone, including firmware. Maybe we’ll get there one day.

Additionally, if you’re into mapping, give QGIS a try.

It’s an open source geospatial data management application, which is available cross-platform.

It neatly integrates many processing tools into a relatively intuitive GUI, and having even some basic skill can lead to some job opportunities.

You can even import OSM data through plugins or download services, which you can use for all kinds of fancy things.

It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.

The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.

If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.

Anything other than whitelist-type parental controls will likely be insufficient to block absolutely everything you don’t want them to have access to (or want to have access to them, for that matter).

Honestly, the best way to do so would be no internet access without supervision, which is usually not really a viable option in any reasonable real-world scenario.

The second best way I can think of, albeit a slightly technical solution, is to setup a VPN server at home using a raspberry pi or a similar hosting solution and have the phone connect through that. That way you can control internet access in any way you’d like and even block nasty tracking attempts from apps if you so wish. Most android phones have the option to prevent internet access entirely if not connected to the VPN (this will prevent internet access from any WiFi and mobile data networks). In which case they can still just call or text in emergency situations. The only thing left to do is locking down the phone’s settings, and the rest can be dynamically managed from your network.

All of this does require some basic networking knowledge, but it’s actually surprisingly easy to setup.

You can do both though. Lots of high-profile software is both open source and available as SaaS.

The beauty of that strategy is you can ensure the software will survive your service provider going bankrupt or otherwise suddenly disappearing, leaving you without a solution.

By not being locked into a specific vendor, competition will be centered around providing the best service, which is in my opinion exactly as it should be.

I take issue with some of the statements here. First of all:

I find this whole “right to repair” really pointless endeavour pushed by repair shops wanting to retain their outdated business model.

Right to repair is definitely not just being pushed by repair shops. If you take a good look at the rate Framework is selling devices at (batches instantly sold out until Q1 2024), you’ll see that consumers want this more than any other group. We, as the consumers will ultimately benefit the most from having repair options available. Right to repair is not meant to halt innovation, it is not about forcing manufacturers to design products in ways detrimental to the functioning of said products. It is about making sure they don’t lock third parties out of the supply chain. If you replace a traditional capacitor with a SMD variant, someone is going to learn to micro solder. If you convert a chip from socketed to BGA mount, someone is going to learn how to use a heat plate and hot air gun to solder it back in to place.

The main problem is manufacturers demonstrably going out of their way to prevent the feasable.

The second part I take issue with is this:

It is probably better use of our collective resources to focus on researching technologies that will help us deconstruct these tiny components into their constituent matters

From my 12 years of experience in design of consumer goods and engineering for manufacturing I can tell you this is not happening because no one is going to pay for it. The more tightly you bond these “constituent matters” together, the more time, energy, reasearch and money it will require to convert them back into useful resources.

There is only one proper way to solve this problem and it is to include reclamation of resources into the product lifecycle design. Which is currently not widely done because companies put profits before sustainability. And this model will be upheld until legislation puts a halt to it or until earth’s resources run out.

In terms of sustainability the desireable order of action is as follows:

• reduce: make it so you need less resources overall
• prolong: make it so you can make do as long as possible with your resources. this part includes repair when needed
• reuse: make it so that a product can be used for the same purpose again. this part includes repair when needed
• repurpose: make it so that a product can be used for a secondary purpose
• recycle: turn a product into resources to be used for making new products
• burn: turn the product into usable energy (by burning trash in power stations for example)
• dispose: usually landfill