Time to write some bug reports. ~/.cache is supposed to be disposable.

• Mirrors Edge
• Turrican 2
• EF2000
• Mass Effect Galaxy Map

ls reaction to this is unexpected:

$ mkdir foo
$ echo Foo > foo/file
$ chmod a-x  foo
$ ls -l foo
ls: cannot access 'foo/file': Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? file

I expected to just get a “Permission denied”, but listing the content it can still do. So x is for following the name to the inode and r for listing directory content (i.e. just names)?

It’s not just the playing, even the buying can be a chore, as you’ll have to dig through dozens of different versions, DLC, and season passes to figure out what you are even buying, most of the time the actual online shop doesn’t even tell you, you have to search around forums to figure out what you get. Starting one of those Ultimate Edition that includes everything also means spending 5min clicking though dozens of “You just bought DLC” notifications.

Getting late into a game series is also always “fun”, as you can’t even tell what is a prequel, sequel, spin-off or whatever, as most content no longer puts a number in the title. That’s another trip to Wikipedia, as I have yet to see any online shop providing that information.

Needless to say, I stick mostly with older or indie games. I can’t stand how every modern game needs to have skill trees, collectives, level ups and hundred different weapons that all look and feel the same.

That said, chores can also be quite subjective. The Riddler trophies in the Batman Arkham games can certainly be seen as chore when you just want to reach the end fast, collecting them takes around three times as long as the main game. I however found them to be the best part of those games, as they are very old school and based in exploration and puzzles, as opposed to just running from cutscene to cutscene. They give the player a lot of agency and freedom that is missing in the main plot.

I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren’t properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you’ll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can’t have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).

Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.

I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).

Anybody remember Euphoria? Also seen in that canceled Indiana Jones game.

are they acceptable collateral damage if Israel bombs them?

What’s the alternative? Let the other 2.4 million in Gaza suffer under Hamas forever? Collateral damage doesn’t magically disappear just because you wish for it.

2006 Palestinian legislative election

Though luck. You voted terrorists into power and let them dig tunnels under your cities. So cleanup is going to get messy.

As long as nobody has a better idea on how to get rid of Hamas, this is unavoidable.

A single stray rocket from within Gaza killed 500 people

Don’t worry, that 500 number is bullshit, the parking lot wasn’t even big enough to house that many people, let alone with all the parked cars blocking the way.

• Another World
• The Longest Journey
• EF2000

That’s why you don’t humble them, you destroy them and replace them. We didn’t get rid of Hitler by being nice to him.

How exactly does any of that help to get rid of Hamas?

What’s your alternative approach?

One theory is that they hoped that other Arab nations would join and attack Israel. That so far didn’t happen and so Hamas has to bear the full brunt of Israel’s response all by themselves.

many people have proposed several extremely viable alternatives

This discussion would be so much better if you people would just stop DODGING THE QUESTION.

so, history has shown that the military stuff doesn’t really work

Worked pretty damn well against Germany and Japan. The crux is that Hamas is no longer just random insurgents, they already are the government and they have wide support in the population.

you have to do the “rebuilding” beforehand

All of that just ends up supporting Hamas. They’ll have all the resources with none of the responsibilities. Just look what they have done in Gaza, they build huge tunnel networks, thousands of rockets and kept indoctrinating the next generation in schools and camps. You don’t stop that by throwing more resources at them. You have to completely disrupt their organisation and replace the hole they leave with something else.

You can’t defeat hamas militarily.

Of course you can. You essentially have to. The issue isn’t defeating them, but rebuilding afterwards. Deradicalizing Islamic terrorists without a fight is not something anybody knows how to do.

I love how nobody ever provides viable alternatives.

“Stop defending yourself while I murder you”

Propose an alternative solution if you don’t like what IDF is doing, since otherwise all you are doing is nothing more than revoking their right for self defense.