a1studmuffin

It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.

The official Python tutorial is very well written and is suitable for total beginners:

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

Piracy is a service problem.

Late-stage capitalism (specifically public companies) are rather incompatible with singleplayer or “one-off” games that don’t have a long revenue tail of a live season or multiple DLCs/expansions. That really sucks for the whole games industry, players and developers alike.

I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).

I’ve already installed Arch on a spare laptop to assess the difficulty of switching over. So far I’m very impressed!

arch-install made the setup pretty easy, and KDE Plasma feels very natural for someone migrating from Windows. Flatpaks make installing/updating apps a breeze, and there’s way more apps available than I expected, including commercial ones like Spotify.

Most of the “muscle memory” habits translate across too, for example pressing Meta and typing “notepad” shows KWrite in the start menu. That was a nice surprise.

I can already tell it’s going to be viable for 90% of my needs, and the fact that there’s good free software to do everything from video editing to office tasks is really amazing. Linux desktop has come a LONG way.

Couples costume: Mothman and a lightbulb.

Tech bros reinventing things poorly… a tale as old as time.

And yet Fallout: London - a community-made singleplayer experience - just hit 1 million players. It feels like there’s a huge mismatch between what many players want and what public game companies are chasing… they’re all going after online MTX and completely discounting singleplayer because it makes less money overall.

This reminds me of the time the Zoom CEO announced he wanted employees back in the office because remote work wasn’t as effective. It’s easy to assume the people running these companies are competent…

I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.

C/C++ still has a huge place in firmware, microcontrollers, operating systems, drivers, application development, video games, real-time systems and so on. It’s a totally different space of programming to webdev, which might explain the surprise.

It sounds like you’re in the right area by focusing on C. Have you got a GitHub profile? I’d start looking for open source projects in that space and get involved. Many of them have beginner bugs and tasks. Some projects are better than others at welcoming juniors, so check their readme to see if they have any advice.

If you’re interested in low-level languages like C and C++, I would take a look at Rust. It’s another performance-focused language that complies to assembler like C, but includes some clever design principles to prevent a lot of common C/C++ bugs from being possible at all. Even if you don’t end up using it much, it’s quite interesting to see a different way of thinking about things to achieve a similar output.

Beyond that, I’d say you need to think about the job opportunities you’re interested in and learn what tech they use.

It’s just such an odd thing to remake. The old version still held up fine and can be played on PS4 or PS5, plus plenty of people would have gotten it for free with PS Plus. They must have really been banking on the PC platform selling well for all that effort.

If you’re concerned about privacy I don’t know why you’d use Tailscale over Wireguard directly. The latter is slightly more fiddly to configure, but you only do it once and there’s no cloud middleman involved, just your devices talking directly to each other.

The one thing that could cause serious porting pain would be the need to support high/variable frame rates. That could require a whole bunch of code to be refactored.

WhatsApp has been exploited before with a zero-day, check the Complaints section in this link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

The reality is WhatsApp and Signal will continue to be high-value targets for exploits given the number of users, cloud infrastructure reliance and promise of secure communications, so it’s a wise idea to avoid them for defence matters.

If they only released RDR on PS3, this explanation might make sense as the engine would be heavily optimised for PS3. But they also released on Xbox 360, which is the closest console platform to Windows in terms of architecture. It wouldn’t have been that expensive to port.

I’d recommend setting up a GitHub profile and developing some personal projects on there, and try to get some experience contributing to other projects (even if they’re just simple first PRs). Make sure you include this on your resume, it’s a great talking point for juniors to show you’re passionate and have concrete examples of your code in the wild.

Also set up a LinkedIn profile (fleshed out as best you can) and start adding people at companies you’re interested in. DM them asking for advice, most people are lovely and want to help. While LinkedIn is horrible and needs to die, it’s still used heavily by the tech industry and you’ll find every tech company and recruiters on there.