Unfortunately, the alternatives are really lacking. JetBrains Rider REALLY feels underbaked. No deal-breaking issues, but lots of little low-impact ones, and lots of design decisions that go against common conventions, for no apparent reason. The “Visual Studio Mode” doesn’t really help.

On top of that, I’ve had several issues with RUNNING Rider, on account of being on Bazzite, an immutable distro. It was fine on Mint, but Mint had its own troubles with my NVidia card.

I don’t think so. As far as I’m aware, it’s never come up before. The way it would play out, I think, would be something like…

• Future president issues an EO or whatever rescinding the pardon. This doesn’t really accomplish anything, though. It’s really just a signal to the DoJ that the president proooobably wants them to pursue charges against the individual in question. Which they’ve probably already discussed directly.
• DoJ brings charges against the individual.
• The individual, files a motion for dismissal of charges, on the grounds of the prior pardon.
• The judge hears arguments from the DoJ about why that pardon should be considered invalid, and rules one way or the other. If I had to guess, I’d say most judges would rule that the existing pardon can’t be overturned, as it’s a power defined explicitly in the Constitution, and overturning pardon’s isn’t.
• Regardless of the ruling, the decision gets appealed and escalated through the appeals court system to work out the final outcome.

The CEO’s take here is actually pretty on-point. The article title over-simplifies, a bit.

The problem he points out is that a “failed” game that doesn’t sell well, or even sells moderately, is still a valuable game, and experience for the developer(s), but it also often means financial ruin for the studio. In his opinion, it’s that such studios aren’t recognizing when they’re releasing into an over-crowded genre, and need to adjust their budget expectations down.

Cause yeah, people SHOULD be able to make shit little games, without having to re-tool their entire career if it doesn’t do terribly well.

Drug money.

I mean, the trouble is you gotta move the fridge to get to it, yeah? So surely nothing you’d want to get at frequently.

Christmas/Birthday presents?

Really rare house supplies? Like, say, light bulbs?

One of them portable fireproof safes with important documents?

Not QUITE a program, but I’d have to say my own little GBA ROM hacks for the original Fire Emblem. On account of the following story…

IIRC, it was 2007, and I was a senior in high school, reorganizing some of the stuff for the robotics team, in the cabinets in the big science classroom where we met. There were some freshmen interested in the team (season wouldn’t start for a while yet) who’d taken to hanging out there, after school.

They all had laptops and I recognized the menu theme when one of them pulled up Fire Emblem in an emulator, from across the room, and immediately called out “Who’s playing Fire Emblem?”. When I went over and saw he was using Virtual Boy Advance, it occurred to me what I had in my pocket. Or rather what happened to be ON the flash drive in my pocket.

At the time, I didn’t have my own laptop, so my flash drive had years worth of random crap on it. And over the years, I spent a LOT of time tinkering with ROMs and VBA over the years. In addition to a few copies of different hacked ROMs and save files, I had a portable hex editor, and a LOT of text files with hex tables and memory maps and other research I’d collected over the years.

So, yeah, I pulled out the flash drive, said “Wanna see something cool?” and proceeded to apply many crazy hacks as I could think of, in the most obtuse manner possible, just editing hex values directly in memory as the game was running. Free XP, free items, end game equipment, sprite swaps, etc. At one point, one of them says something like “What kind of wizard ARE you?!”

It’s what comes to mind for me when you say “cool” because I like to think I inspired those kids to get into software and programming themselves, or at least consider it as an option. They certainly stuck around with the team for the rest of the year. Also, it inspired ME to really realize how much I’d grown just by tinkering and being curious, and how much you can accomplish through incremental effort.

I don’t see the point of limiting the nominees to just one-per-game, for best performance. There’s still only one winner, and if that game legitimately had that many fantastic performances, more power to 'em.

I’ll second the idea of keeping Best Indie and Best Debut Indie separate. I’ll go further and say E33 just isn’t an Indie game, it’s pretty solidly AA.

#1, usually.

I went into this article hopeful, but then realized there’s not single mention of how their model is TRAINED. Like… what the hell do they think the primary ethical concern of LLMs IS?!

What a class act, declining the nomination because it wasn’t their first game, just the first under the current pseudonym.

Probably a rule that’s intended to prevent self-promotion, eitger over-zealously written or over-zealously enforced.

Just that “power plant” I think most people associate with large enclosed facilities that house power generating equipment, which doesn’t quite describe wind and solar farms. Hence that most people refer to them as “farms”.

Shite, I’m pretty damned sure I updated like a week ago. The updates always pop up in the main menu of the app, and they often mean a fix for google’s latest anti-adblock measures, so I usually update right away. I should probably adjust that policy to add some delay.

I dunno if “power plant” quite fits for solar and wind. Definitely for Hydro, though.

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service.

Denial of Service is the concept of overwhelming a system (digital/computer or otherwise) with bogus usage, to the point that legitimate users can no longer access it. Imagine submitting thousands of FOIA requests to your local city government. Legally, they have to respond to them, even if it’s to reject them as bogus. So, if anyone else submits one, it’s just gonna get buried in the pile. Maybe they get to it, eventually, or maybe it actually just gets lost, or even accidentally thrown out when they decide to just throw away all the bogus ones.

Now, if you were to actuallly do this, your city government would probably just start binning all your requests, immediately, when they realize you’re not submitting them in good faith. Hell, maybe they even get you banned from the building, for harassment. That’s where “Distributed” comes into play. To combat this, what you’d do is get a whole bunch of your friends (you’ve got thousands of friends willing to waste time dealing with the government, right?) to each submit just one or two applications. They can no longer just throw them out based on the name of the submitter, they have to again spend more time inspecting each one, to see if it’s legit, and then process it, if it is. MUCH tougher to defend against.

Code by Charles Petzold was formative for me, over 20 years ago. So, excellent choice.

That’s the precise reason that you eat a hotndog the same way.

I think maybe you misunderstand how selling a home with a mortgage works? To be fair, it’s possible I don’t fully understand as well, but as my understanding goes…

The buyer doesn’t just assume ownership of the loan, and start making the same payments as you.° They have to get approved for their own mortgage for the sale price of the house (or buy it outright), and then you use that money to pay off your mortgage’s remaining principle.

So, if you have a $400,000 house where you’ve only paid $50,000 towards the principal over 10 years, out of a 50-year mortgage, and you want to sell it, The buyer pays you $400,000, then you use that to pay the remaining $350,000 of principal, leaving you with $50,000 to go buy a new house. Likely you’ll need another mortgage of your own, but you can probably use that $50,000 as a downpayment, to knock down the monthly, or take a shorter term.

So, that’s 10 years of mortgage payments, totaling say $250,000, and you only have $50,000 worth of value to show for it. Contrast that with a 15 or 30 year term, and you’d be getting a MUCH larger chunk of your payments back in value.

Having a mortgage isn’t the same as renting (it’s starting to get pretty comparable with this 50-year shit, though), you are actually building value for yourself as you make payments, no matter how long you live there.

° Technically, Mortgage Assumptions are a thing, but they’re EXTREMELY rare. It has to be an option written into the mortgage agreement, from the beginning. In the US, it basically only exists for military personnel and veterans, as a perk that the government mandated to make it easier for military families to move across the country at a moment’s notice. Also, it’s really just about keeping the interest rate, the buyer still has to come to an agreement with the seller to buy out their accumulated value.

As in, they’re going to end operations in the US? Great news! Wish it could’ve happened sooner.

…

I’m aware this likely means nothing of the sort.

I fail to see where in this article they present “The Real Reason Kim Davis Never Stood a Chance”. Unless they mean the whole bit about “Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans”, in which case, that’s horseshit. This SCOTUS has shat on much older and much-more-popular precedents than this, with no hesitation, and no valid reasoning.

“A lot of players were like, ‘That’s not the voice I hear in my head’.”

Dude completely missing the point, as usual lately.

The complaint was “That’s not what the dialog option on the screen was, that’s something completely different.”. It had nothing to do with the voice.

Also, the fact that, for all the dialog, there was almost never any actual CHOICE for players to make.

Y’all remember the mod that re-wrote the on-screen dialogue options to actually match the spoken dialogue?