losing integration because “containerized”

Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.

And I know you’re talking out of your ass because AppImage isn’t even sandboxed.

taking GBs of space

That part is true and accurate, and for a very good reason: dependency pinning. System packages can break if they don’t have the correct versions of shared libraries. If a package requires a very old version of a library, and doesn’t link it statically or supply it with the package, it can misbehave, have missing features, or refuse to even start. Flatpak (and probably Snap too, can’t speak for it) solves that by letting the packager specify (pin) the exact version of a dependency. If five separate packages require five different versions of the GNOME application framework, then they will download five separate packages of the correct version. AppImage solves it by being monolithic: everything is packaged together into a single executable.

Tailscale should work. It uses Wireguard and does some UDP fuckery to get around the firewall and NAT (including CGNAT). I can stream Jellyfin through it at 1080p native with no significant buffering, it’ll work for music.

Look at this: https://github.com/ChthonVII/guildwarslinuxinstallguide?tab=readme-ov-file#part-11-toolbox

“Run EXE inside Wine prefix”

It might not work, though. I’ve tried to use a similar tool with Snowrunner, it found the process, but didn’t actually work.

One of these might help: https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/0/601902145259725017/

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was caused by NMS’s own network backend. When the Corvette update was launched, multiplayer was fine on my work computer, but did not work on my home PC. It’s a constant dumpster fire.

If you have Steam installed, try putting them in ~/.local/share/Steam/compatilitytools.d.

Uh… kinda? Powershell has many POSIX aliases to cmdlets (equivalent to shell built-ins) of allegedly the same functionality. rmdir and rm are both aliases of Remove-Item, ls is Get-ChildItem, cd is Set-Location, cat is Get-Content, and so on.

Of particular note is curl. Windows supplies the real CURL executable (System32/curl.exe), but in a Powershell 5 session, which is still the default on Windows 11 25H2, the curl alias shadows it. curl is an alias of the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet, which is functionally a headless front-end for Internet Explorer unless the -UseBasicParsing switch is specified. But since IE is dead, if -UseBasicParsing is not specified, the cmdlet will always throw an error. Fucking genius, Microsoft.

He can’t, he had to re-run a benchmark.

Never let perfection be the enemy of getting it to work.

Is this what normies feel like when Linux users tell them to just use Linux? I have some apologies to make.

My opinion is the exact opposite. Narrative games, even action shooters, need to have high action and low action parts in balance. If high action segments are excessive, it can lead to combat fatigue. If low action parts are excessive, the player gets bored and the pacing dies.

Half-Life 2 E1, the “Low Lives” chapter, has probably the most stressful combat in the game because the player has to balance so many things. Shooting the zombies attacking Gordon versus helping Alyx fight. Helping Alyx versus keeping the flashlight charged. Firearms versus explosive props. All of that in oppressive darkness. Combat fatigue sets in. The short puzzle segments, even as simple as crawling through a vent to flip a switch, are opportunities to take a breath, absorb the environment, and prepare for the next segment – especially at the end of that particular chapter, when the player escapes the zombies and has a chance to wind down.

At the same time, puzzles, by their slower nature, are excellent for delivering narrative and player training, and to let the player absorb the atmosphere. Alyx’s first encounter with the stalkers in “Undue Alarm” wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact if the player could just pop them in the head and move on.

In contrast, most of “Highway 17” is just a prolonged vehicle-based puzzle. By the time the player reaches the large railway bridge, they might be sick of driving. I know I was. It’s a relief to finally engage in some platforming and long-range combat while traversing the bridge.

So what are the narrative values of my two examples? The cinderblock seesaw in “Route Kanal” is just player training. A show, don’t tell method to let the player know that physics puzzles will be a factor. It’s also a short break after the on-foot chase, before the encounter with the hunter chopper. In “Water Hazard”, the contraptions serve a larger narrative purpose: they’re the tools of the rebels’ refugee evacuation effort. The player utilizes them like one of the refugees would have.

auto complete

It’s called lexical analysis or lexical tokenization. It existed long before LLMs (as long as high-level programming languages have, since lexical analysis of the source is the first step of compilation), it doesn’t rely on stolen code, and doesn’t consume a small village’s worth of electricity. Superficial parallels with chatbots do not make it AI – it’s a fucking algorithm.

Besides, there is a world of difference between asking a clanker to spit out a Python function that multiplies two matrices, and putting the knock-off Shadowheart from TEMU in a million-dollar game.

Then you should hold yourself to higher standards than “people”.

Maybe some people, who are an ocean away from me, have been gaslit into thinking they can’t be anything other than consumers. I know it can be difficult to grasp the concept, but you can refuse a service if the terms are unacceptable. It is possible to go into a transaction with open eyes and full knowledge of the rights granted to you by law and responsibilities demanded of you by the contract.

That’s why I say “customer”. It’s a reminder to myself that I should demand equitable treatment, even if the chances are slim unless the courts get involved. You don’t have to jump into the meat grinder willingly.

consumers

This is very much a pet peeve, but be careful about how you use “consumer” versus “customer”. They each imply completely different power dynamics.

POW is a far higher cost on your actual users than the bots.

That sentence tells me that you either don’t understand or consciously ignore the purpose of Anubis. It’s not to punish the scrapers, or to block access to the website’s content. It is to reduce the load on the web server when it is flooded by scraper requests. Bots running headless Chrome can easily solve the challenge, but every second a client is working on the challenge is a second that the web server doesn’t have to waste CPU cycles on serving clankers.

POW is an inconvenience to users. The flood of scrapers is an existential threat to independent websites. And there is a simple fact that you conveniently ignored: it fucking works.

Interface configuration and DNS resolution are managed by different systems. Their file structures are different. It’s been like this for many decades, and changing it is just not worth breaking existing systems.

No numbers, no testimonials, or even anecdotes… “It works, trust me bro” is not exactly convincing.

I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.