I tried Vampire Survivors and despite how fun it was to see the game played, I am not sure I actually enjoy playing it. Then again, I have put quite a few hours on Time Wasters, and that may just be more my jam.

Otherwise? Playing Infested Planet. The control scheme is serviceable, if awkward, but I can also just pick it up whenever which is the use case for the Steam Deck.

I would love to see a grand sci-fi game that’s a mixture of Titanfall and mirror’s edge.

You would have open world runner sections where your entire job is to run messages between agents on a city/station that is working hard to steer the war… and then you go and do big stompy robots combined arms, titalfall-esque fighting, just open world instead of the (rather great) map, point-to-point of the original.

Alternatively, just give me either a single player or MMO implementation of The Allbright System.

Whatever I choose, I would just like the engine to be released under GPL, and the assets under CC-3.0-BY-NC-SA so that it lives on, regardless of however well it does.

I wish you the best of luck on your future endeavor. I admit I never quite managed to just pick up a textbook to read through ahead of time, though it would have (perhaps) helped.

I would give a few pieces of advise to my younger self, and I think they should still be valid for others:

First: it is very important to sleep, for a bunch of learning-related reasons. But, perhaps more measurable: if you feel the need to pull an all-nighter, it is very likely you are falling behind and trying to crunch your way through. I’m not saying don’t do it, because if you are there, you are there, but maybe take the opportunity once it is all said and done to see if you can avoid it in the future, yeah? Sleeping enough is cool, and helps you learn better.

Second: understanding the fundamentals really helps you understand everything else. I struggled with some of the mathematics classes in my course exactly because I did not have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

Third: you’re going to be in class anyway, so pay attention (not that I didn’t) and then, afterwards, review the class. Probably by writing a summary/notes about it. The point isn’t to produce something that I can then look up, but to see what I retained and what I didn’t, and thus I should review.

Fourth: put it into practice. Try to teach others (even if it is just a video you’re never going to upload to youtube), or work through a project that exercises it. Theory is great. Toy exercises are great too. The best thing my university did for us was to get us 2 weeks worth of project at the end of each semester.

Fifth: the better you are at language, the better you will be at everything. Why? Simple: your classes will use language to transmit the knowledge to you, whether spoken or written. You will use language to transmit your answers to whoever is grading you. You can have the most amazing teacher and the most amazing learning materials, know all the right tools and techniques… but if you cannot really parse and understand what you are hearing/reading, then you won’t learn. Likewise, you may know the material perfectly, but if you cannot articulate your answer? Not only will you not get good grades (which sucks), you will later on struggle to work with others as they, too, need to understand what is going on.

There are plenty of tools to help with all of the above. Index cards are great, whether physical or digital. But I would try to avoid falling into the pitfall that highlighting/underlining or writing notes is learning. They can definitely be tools for learning, but I have seen people who were prolific highlighters and note takers who did not have such a great domain over what they were supposedly learning.

FWIW, in Portugal, during my youth, I ate at the cafeteria rather often. It was decent food for the most part (it was also my first exposure to soy minced meat). It was hot, didn’t involve carrying a lunchbox, and it was tasty and convenient and cheap. Eventually I opted to go back home because I lived close enough to walk, and mom’s food is better.

We did not get ways to heat up food (though I bet you could have asked the cafeteria staff if you needed it) of our own, though.

Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.

In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.

The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.

I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?

My issue with some of the bird designs is that they decided to go for buildings for the other side. Could we have a mixture of the bird and the ones that have people in a space, instead of just the building?

Otherwise, some of those are really, really pretty :D

My hobbies boil down to doing things that I have enjoyed enough to put in time and effort into them, with little regard for it beyond working out for me. I could go into more detail, but at the core it is all about it has to do with how I experience the world and how I engage with it, and that these hobbies enhance how I do that and thus make the time spent on them enjoyable, ensuring thus I keep doing them.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I do:

• Reading, which the to read pile keeps growing.
• Writing, both non-fiction and fiction
• Video games.
• Tech stuff in general
• Every now and then I bike around, because I just enjoy it
• Photography, every now and then

Why did I get into them? Because I enjoy doing them!

I like reading, because it’s fun to read a story, and because it’s fun to read about others perspectives, and because it is fun to learn. I like **writing **because I like putting my thoughts in order, and it helps me think, and it helps me communicate. I like being able to share something with someone else and feel like I managed to get something across. **Photography **also fits into this because it is a way for me to capture what I see (and often, what I don’t see) and share it with others. And, often, it serves as a way to focus me onto what is around me in ways that I never would have otherwise.

Tech stuff? Well, I like gadgets and machinery. In another life, I would have delved into hardware instead, making weird gadgets and one offs. Instead, computer and software are my thing. Video Games are

Biking: because I get to go fast and be active. More engaging than walking. Not as awful as running.

I also recently took a look at Meshtastic, though that has been burning along in the background due to physical constraints. Radio things are fun, though in this case the driving factor was… worries about the world at large.

Sure, and using the AUR is something to pay attention to when you do. You are right on that¹.

But, here is the thing: I just don’t have to update anything if I don’t want to. There is no Windows Update saying “next reboot we’re going to update and you don’t get a choice”. That is what I meant when I said that I just don’t worry about it.

Though I guess that says more about what one gets used to when dealing with Windows, than necessarily being high praise for Linux. My work machine has been having issues with a bt headset for reasons I cannot phantom despite working for years, so forgive me if the joy of being able to leave well enough alone has got me excited.

¹ I would argue that updating in general has become more fraught with danger, so I don’t really see the AUR as particularly dangerous in comparison, but my tolerance for danger may just be out of whack. See Notepad++ vulnerable versions, or just npm in general, for non-Linux cases.

I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.

It wasn’t a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.

So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven’t figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.

It has to do with the stroke you make as you write. In all three ways that I know how to write by hand (full cursive, my actual current style, and print), crossing the ts and dotting the is is just the last stroke(s) of writing the word. The word is not complete until those are done, just like an A (if you write it as a ball with a tail) is not complete without its tail, and sword is not complete without a d at the end.

You keep track on your head the same way you keep track in your head that a word is not finished up until you have written all the letters in it. My first language uses accents, and it is the same process. And yes, you can forget, not just for longer words. Teachers would certainly mark it on homework and tests. I struggled with accents, in general, but just like learning how to spell a word, you just practice it when you get it wrong until you get it right and it becomes muscle memory for how you write that word.

My signature doesn’t, however, since I have not built enough muscle memory to reproduce it. Yes, it is technically cursive, so that part is easy to get right; but the flourishes that make it a signature instead of just me writing a word like every other kid who learned the same cursive style would aren’t muscle memory due to lack of practice.

It really depends. Either a permanent ink pen + something to write with, praying that I can make a record that will outlive me…

A waterproof kindle (or similar ereader) loaded with an offline copy of wikipedia and a solar charger + usb cable might be right up there.

Probably a good knife. A really good backpack, perhaps? A first aid kit instead?

It is challenging to decide, because here is the thing: if I am put in the middle of nowhere, I am going to be a stranger at the mercy of whoever I happen to meet first, or whoever in power happens to hear of me first. So, chances are I, foreigner who does not speak the local language, would not fare rather well. In this one, self-defense tools, such as the knife, and other camping-useable gear (covers, first aid kits, water filtration systems, etc) would be immensely more useful than other options.

If, instead, I was dropped somewhere near somebody sympathetic, or at least not bound to kill me immediately, I might manage (assuming I survive the environmental shock) to become useful enough to not kill. Here, wikipedia would certainly be useful, and at that point I might make enough to resolve the record-keeping aspect by virtue of getting compensated.

In this later case, besides the kindle + solar charger combo, I would bring my DSLR (and it would be a DSLR and not a Mirrorless, or other such cameras). I have a really neat variable travel lens that should be very damn useful for the military (either for a general or for scouts), and it should work with no batteries for seeing.

Under FAQ of the digital euro’s page Q9. How private would the digital euro be?, that they want it to be equivalent to cash when it comes to privacy.

The digital euro is designed to be able to function offline in a way that would offer users a cash-like level of privacy, both for sending money to other people and for making payments in shops. When paying offline, only the payer and the payee would know the personal transaction details of the payments made. Anti-money laundering checks would be carried out by the distributing payment service provider (PSP) during the funding and defunding process, just as it is the case with cash withdrawals and deposits today.

In the case of online transactions, the Eurosystem would not identify users making or receiving payments, thereby protecting their personal data, but PSPs would be able to identify users for the purpose of compliance with anti-money laundering rules.

I… am not entirely clear on the technical aspects of it, or if what they said can actually accomplish what they claim. However, it is a factor they are considering, however much you actually trust them aside.

I would be interested in an explainer, for sure, on how they actually accomplish any of this (assuming they deliver).

While I get what you are saying, I’m not entirely sure where else could the people focused on consumer/passenger rights be focused on, considering it was introduced as part of a series of other reforms around this particular form of travel which millions of Europeans use. It isn’t like this was a whole procedure brought about just for the seating of kids, either.

I’ve been slowly setting up my own services locally, and one of the issues I quickly ran into was simple: what’s the point of running the uptime monitor in the same machine? Granted, it still serves is purposes, but…

So, if you do find a way to get something going, I think it’d be really cool. My biggest concern would be, though, on how to ensure you don’t accidentally build a DDoS network instead. A though issue I have no idea how to solve, but which should be solvable!

I really don’t think the article makes a good case for why they are using “withdrawal symptoms” (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn’t say so.

The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren’t really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.

Experience (see Facebook, in general, and the real name experiment) says that no, your last point does not hold. As it turns out, people are more than happy to be assholes with their names attached, never mind the many others who don’t want to make drama and are more than happy to keep hanging out with them.

If you roam around the internet for long enough, in the right public areas, you are bound to find plenty of tales of families choosing to keep hanging out with abusers over the victims, never mind people who are just “being mean on the internet”.

People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).

It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

I would hope that (given recent situations like the Portuguese/Spain blackout) we keep a baseline set of bands and stations for emergency communications on simple, cheap hardware, so in principle I agree that ditching AM/FM radio entirely is a bad idea. I could see the band allocations narrowing, though. We just don’t use it as much anymore. I am sympathetic, but I don’t even listen to radio stations in the first place because… well, I can just choose something that suits my tastes instead from the internet?

(In practice, I would rather that we had more resilient mobile infrastructure, as more and more people have phones and can receive SMSs in an emergency; and more people getting into CB due to the possibility for bi-directional communication)

Is there a technical requirement for the 3+ seconds of decoding before sound output? Or is this a matter of simply waiting for buffers to be filled before outputting?

Your points about 1 and 7 really seem like a product issue more than a technology issue. I am not saying they aren’t actual issues (because they really seem like they are), but claiming DAB is bad because the products are bad is… weird.

Point 6 is not really the fault of DAB but instead of how the infrastructure is setup. FM transmitters could be source their data from the cloud too, and would be vulnerable to the same things.

The issue with “children” local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn’t reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we’re back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions… but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don’t recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you’re on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don’t have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let’s you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?