“Young people enjoying their youth in ways that make older generations scornful and jealous” - the perennial headline

Damn! Matchmaking is definitely really hard at high MMR levels, and I remember back when I read reddit about how many people would post angrily about matchmaking - there’s no easy solution to that problem at that point. I remember watching a twitch stream after TI9 where Ana was fountain farming an opposing team until they got an abandon. (The deserved it for being asses in the allchat to be honest, but the skill gap was still obscene.)

But at the same time, your experience is exactly how I figured things would go if I ever tried to play Dota seriously. When I played football in my teenage years, I realized that eventually, you reach a point where getting better stops being fun because everyone else is equally talented and trying their hardest to get to the next level too. At that point, I realized that I just wanted to have fun and stopped competing. Still played recreationally in my regional league though. We had terrible results, but losing on a bad team was a lot more fun than winning on a good one.

Glad to hear that Dota helped you kick all your bad habits. It’s always good to find a silver lining, no matter how crappy the situation is.

In my case, it’s age. I only have so much free time during a day, and ruining it on a shitty Dota2 pub match just makes me feel like trash for weeks later. Even today, I cringe when I think back on some of the stupid things I did in that game.

The last thing I need is more embarrassing memories running through my brain when I’m trying to sleep at night.

I got to about the same level of ascension in Slay the Spire. Eventually, I realized that dying 10 times in a row before getting the dream deck for finishing a high ascension level just… wasn’t that entertaining. When a game has too much RNG, it becomes about as much fun as flipping a coin and trying to get heads 5 times in a row. Oh and also, when you do get that perfect deck, it becomes even more stressful making sure that you don’t screw it up and have to start from the beginning all over again!

Now I just play with ascension off entirely. The A20 achievement is the only one I don’t have, and probably never will.

I feel this. I can’t even play a game of chess online without feeling stressed out. I love playing against friends, but against anonymous strangers, I just can’t do it. It’s a damn shame - I sank about 3000 hours into Dota 2, and about 98% of it was against bots.

I do enjoy co-op games these days though, but again, it’s still better with friends.

It’s hard to be a contrarian in these kinds of positions (I’ve been there, and it didn’t end well), so I wouldn’t be too outspoken, but at the same time, try to innocently point out the issues with approaches like this. I would just try to point out the flaws in this approach, the same that we would for any other kind of programming fad - without making it seem like it’s an agenda, of course.

For example, any time teams are looking for feedback - code review, retrospectives, etc. - just point out the flaws on why vibe coding is a bad idea and bring it up casually when the time comes. It doesn’t hurt to be honest as long as you don’t come off as being an ass about it.

“I don’t have time to read through that much bullshit.”

Maybe phrase it a little more kindly, but that’s what I’d try at the very least. “I have other priorities at the moment” could work too.

Super Metroid. It’s supposed to be a classic but I can’t stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.

The Metroid prime series were great though.

I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.

So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!

Why are root privileges needed to move and search for files in the home directory?

Yes, of course the codemopolitan directory could be owned by root, but why??

The user is able to install new certificates.

That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.

If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.

I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.

I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.

Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.

I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.

Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.

He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.

Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?

Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.

I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:

Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?

Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.

That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.

Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…

But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

It’s mostly Gnome 2 frozen in time - there have been small improvements here and there, particularly in Caja (the file manager). I think that’s great though personally, and use it on most of my machines.

Wayland adoption has been slow, but it is getting there.

It was developed and released during a time where people obsessed with touch interfaces thanks to deficient computing devices like phones and tablets. So many people were wholly convinced that these things were going to completely replace general purpose computing, so projects like Gnome, which were being run by Red Hat, had to follow along one way or another, though they probably did so willingly.

In any case, I am SO glad those days are over. It was far, far worse than the AI hype that we have to put up with today.

I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re suggesting.

Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there’s likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.

Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It’s not a feasible suggestion to make at all.