I played Arknights for a bit because there’s actually a pretty solid tower defense game in there. There’s not a big selection of good games for Android and I wanted something I could play when I have no laptop with me.

Unfortunately the good gameplay is buried under tons of attention hogging gacha bullshit.

I stopped playing once I realized that I was spending more time doing chores than actually playing through interesting content. Also, while the BGM is nothing short of lavish, the presentation of the story is like a very cheap VN, which basically killed any hope of getting engaged in the story or the characters.

I didn’t spend much more than maybe twenty bucks on it so it’s not too bad given the partially solid gameplay. But yeah, I’m done with live service bullshit games.

We don’t eat the fruits of carrots and onions, though.

In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:

Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.

Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.

You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.

Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.

I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.

I wouldn’t call that a good foundation for a diet.

yFood kinda sucks taste-wise IMO and I think meal replacement shakes from a sports nutrition company offer a better bang for the buck. (Plus the whole thing where Nestlé owns a share of the company these days.)

Fair enough. Of course with public transit you could send some of you home with some of the goods while one person waits for the tow truck.

Shared IPv4 addresses are not to deter hosting but because there aren’t enough v4 addresses to go around. Most ISPs will happily give you an entire block of persistent IPv6 addresses but won’t give you a v4 because of address space exhaustion.

Went mask off early on, caught the heart of a neurotypical. A personality consists of more than dopamine effectiveness and sometimes the rest makes for what someone considers a compelling package.

The comic does point out that the litterer is not a good person, though. You could argue that this cutesy depiction of a gleefully evil person serves to normalize misbehavior but it doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s misbehavior.

I agree that Mimi is being a dick in this comic and that anyone acting like that in real life is a dick.

That being said, dropping the plastic bottle in the generic trash hole is something I could ignore. (And if your area has a bottle deposit I damn well expect you to put the bottle beside the trash can so less fortunate people can at least get your deposit – of course a gleefully evil person wouldn’t do it in this case.)

That’s my point. Being at peace with yourself only works until you have to regularly deal with someone who isn’t. Of course you can isolate yourself from those people if they fail to adapt but that means you get to choose between being in a relationship and feeling tension over your neurodivergence on the one side and being alone but at peace with yourself on the other.

I’m not saying that you can’t make a satisfying choice but it certainly ain’t an easy one. If you get a partner who meshes well with your brain, congratulations. But a lot of people don’t.

Also, making a choice about your relationship means making a choice that affects two people (or more if you’re poly or have a dependent). And sometimes you can’t in good conscience end a relationship because you know that doing so will majorly screw over your partner.

Life is complicated. Inner peace is a precious and fragile good and sometimes you trade that good away. Appreciate it if and while you have it.

Though, to be honest, plastic recycling is mostly a myth in in the first place. For most plastics, the “recycling” procedure consists of paying some impoverished country to let you dump them there.

Basically, every plastic bottle can be assumed to contribute to microplastics contamination sooner or later. Glass and aluminum bottles are better (as are cans); both of those are economically feasible to recycle.

Then you get into a relationship and feel your partner’s disappointment every day because it turns out that while you have gotten comfortable with how your brain works, the rest of the world hasn’t. But don’t worry; tomorrow is the day when it’ll all get better…

I generally find that cutting taxes is more popular with the politicians who think that reducing the debt is more important than a functioning power grid and bridges that don’t collapse. Don’t ask me how the hell reducing tax income is supposed to help with the deficit but it’s probably built on the assumption that the kickbacks economic growth will make up for it.

To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That’s what I referred to. I don’t see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn’t have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn’t see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it’s going to die a bit sooner if it’s hot. (Also notice that we’re talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google’s “low” usage bracket) you probably won’t see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

On the other hand, austerity politics (aka “don’t spend money in order to reduce the national debt”) tend not to work, either, because they offload maintenance to the future. Repairing broken infrastructure costs more than keeping it from breaking in the first place.

I suppose you could just raise taxes but even with WWII-level tax ceilings it’s damn expensive to run a country.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

I always end up ship-of-theseusing the hell out of my computer. Even if I replace my mainboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, and PSU, the old storage is still good, as are the case, the fans etc.

I phase out old components as they lose relevance, although my DVD burner has lasted forever and will probably keep doing so.

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

It’s an old term for the sexual organs that’s only used as part of terms these days. I tried to kinda match that. My translation wasn’t great, though.