There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

I bought the JSAUX dock (from Amazon). Has been really good. It’s a fair bit cheaper than the official one and there are a load of reports.of the official one having issues.

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level “direct control of memory” language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don’t have to “fight the borrow checker” - it’ll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn’t know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there’s a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn’t work, or it has a security hole because it’s possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.

Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

I don’t think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on “idea to deployment” speed. Python’s downsides:

• Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don’t have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
• Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They’re not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

Rust is good when you need at least one of:

• High speed
• Control over use of memory
• Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
• Can’t cope with a Garbage Collector
• Compiling to a microcontroller

If you’re doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it’s just a single binary.

One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it’s designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.

Black Skylands. A friend gifted me a copy on steam after he had a transaction error and got two copies. Thought it might be fun for a few hours but I’ve been obsessed.

It’s an open world exploring game where you’ve got an airship and go from island to island, and it’s a top down twin stick shooter. The mobility is really enjoyable with the grappling hook, the combat is fun with interesting weapons, tech and upgrades and you have an airship!

From that quote I took “that salmon is ok, but this dish that it’s in is overall good”.

There’s also Stormgate coming out later this year from a load of the former StarCraft developers.

What do you mean by Phase 2?

There’s some stuff about the roadmap for most of this year: https://blog.beeper.com/p/state-of-the-app-spring-2023

If it’s dead then it’s no risk, right? Afterwards it’s either working or still dead.

Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.

I’m lucky enough to be able to have a lot of choice where I work - in a software engineer and there are any number of places where I could work and be paid well. Given that I feel some responsibility to work somewhere ethical - not everyone else has the opportunity to decide.

This is like the physical product version of the Nigerian prince scam - have something so shit that the only people who engage with you are idiots.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

See “Password Hashing” here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function

It is actually important to have a controlled cost to calculate in the forward direction too.

Gaming laptops are really just portable PCs. If you’re playing on them on in the usual “Keyboard and Mouse” way then you need to put it on a table to make that work properly. Maybe you could do it on a sofa but it’s very quickly going to get uncomfortable.

Handhelds on the other hand are extremely portable and happily usable anywhere. They’re also a lot cheaper than a gaming PC! I’m a big fan of my Steam Deck and recommend it a lot, but I should admit I also have a Gaming PC which I use for multiplayer stuff with my friends

There’s different levels of playing to win though. I play a lot of R6 Siege. In the evenings I mostly play casual with my friends. I’m either using the random button to pick my operator for variety, or I’m playing all shotguns for a battle pass challenge or I’m trying to find ridiculous places to put a frost mat.

Within that structure I’m trying to win the rounds, but it doesn’t matter if we lose. I’m just having fun in a game with my friends.

Do you have a citation for this? It conflicts with what I know about GDPR.

Mostly GDPR encourages companies to delete personal data they were holding once they no longer have a legitimate use for it. There is a rule where you can demand your data be frozen if so that misuse cam be investigated and in that case you’d be right. But in general companies can and should delete personal data.

This is great news! I was debating getting Battlebit and even though I was planning on mostly playing on my PC this put me off, out of principle. But now Deck compatibility too is great.