The Octonaut

Bold of you to assume we didn’t just pick up the newspaper in the shop, flick to the funnies, shake our heads at what Andy Cap was upto today, and then leg it before Mrs Murphy tried to get us to pay

#ElonTakes

I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:

• the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
• it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
• it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
• and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
• • It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
• • I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
• • Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.

If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.

Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.

I don’t think the meme should be exclusively about building/fixing PCs though. Half the young people starting in our business show the same ineptitude as my parents when tasks with clicking stuff.

It also reminds me of “and then everyone clapped”

One of the good things about living in Ireland is that I’m 99% our government is neither competent enough to perpetrate elaborate crimes against its people without being exposed almost instantly, nor powerful enough that even fascists getting into government would have a meaningful impact bar providing a colourful humorous segment of the inevitable documentary on Europe’s second fall to the Axis.

I work for a telecom. In my country there is well regulated legislation that specifies how and when the police can ask the telecoms for cell location data, usually used for missing people.

They also provide large scale, anonymised data for crowd movement analysis. For example it was used to demonstrate how 60,000 people moved into and out of a stadium located for historical reasons in an old-fashioned, dense residential area, in preparation for the arrival of English football fans.

I think there’s some useful context, if not a good defence of this story.

It’s one of the original stories told by Reverend Awdry told to his 2 year old, measles-ridden child in 1942 war-era England (Wait, is this making it worse?).

Awdry would sing/recite old poems to Christopher, who then pressed him for further details that turned into a story.

For example, the opening of that episode of Thomas features the Limerick that prompted the story, which was around at least since 1902:

In the original story by Awdry, there is only a single tunnel, and the train is completely blocking the line and essentially ruining a business. So stubborn is the engine, that they have to dig a new tunnel beside the old one. The rails are removed and “a wall” are placed in front of the tunnel, for safety - to prevent trains literally running into the wrong tunnel and crashing. The Fat Director/Controller is also pretty unsympathetic deliberately - he commands people to push and pull the train out without success, but doesn’t himself help - “My doctor has forbidden me to push”. However the original books follow the realities of steam engine and railway operation far more closely than the TV series did (and as a result, the original series, closer to the books, were far more realistic than the later ones).

As portrayed in the TV show it definitely comes off more villainous. But in the original telling we have to take away 70 years of Thomas trains having faces, personalities, relationships and familiarity. When originally told, the Henry story didn’t even take place in the same “universe” - there was just 3 abstract stories about trains, loosely based on old rhymes and news stories.

You are correct. In my defence:

In Old English, ⟨ð⟩ (called ðæt) was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme /θ/ or its allophone /ð/, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨th⟩.

They’re using Thorn Edd, the single character that represented the Th sound in old English (still used in Icelandic).

It’s a harmless little quirk in their own writing, although editing the title of a book to include it seems pretty silly.

I think he deserved it, don’t you?

Um.

Does Ev have an Iron Cross on his hand?

Edit: questions bad?

That’s why you got to wait until you’re beekeeping age.

Im pretty sure you don’t know what a curb is.

Agile is explicitly a way for a team to be self-organising. What benefit do you get from it as a solo developer?

How is your wife doing by the way

1. What, lol. China doesn’t kidnap foreign businessmen.
2. “Their” equipment was 51% (at least) owned by a Chinese company. Of course they can’t literally steal it.
3. “They considered crime”
4. They were going to buy the equipment again… from China anyway? lol

Tell your boss get off the Trump juice.

It is usually also followed by “but I can download my installers and then I can have them whenever I like” as if it’s a sane idea to store terabytes of offline installers for the day that GOG goes out of business.

I mean, I also have terabytes of offline installers for the day that Steam or GOG go down. On other people’s computers. In a, uh, distributed distribution system.

GOG themselves literally said that you do not, even very recently. You own a license like every other customer, and it can be revoked at their discretion.

GOG choose to exclusively sell games for which they can sell DRM-free versions, which is a great option for consumers. It is not a straightforward decision however as this is, whether it is a priority or not, a tradeoff for the things that Steam integration provides - cloud backup, mod workshops, multiplayer functionality etc.

Steam also sells plenty of DRM-free games, and offer customers the informed choice when selling Steam DRM and Third-Party DRM controlled game licenses.

This is not an argument that Steam or GOG are objectively better. But it is a straightforward lie to state that the license you buy from GOG is legally different from the one you buy from Steam. What is different is the possibility or otherwise of DRM software being used to control your adherence to the license.

The idea is to change your passwords on other sites if they shared the same password (which is why you shouldn’t do this).