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Ephera

@ Ephera @lemmy.ml

Posts
29
Comments
1841
Joined
6 yr. ago

  • Why are there so many bloody roguelikes or roguelites, and what really makes a game roguish?

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  • I would argue that a substantial reason for their popularity is also just that devs have fun when developing them.

    With most other genres, you've seen the story a gazillion times, you've done each quest a thousand times etc.. It just gets boring to test the game and it becomes really difficult to gauge whether it still is fun to someone who isn't tired of it.

    Meanwhile with roguelikes, the random generation means that each run is fresh and interesting. And if you're not having fun on your trillionth run, that's a real indicator that something needs to be added or improved.

  • What would be a valuable thing to have memorized by heart?

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  • I find that it's mainly frustrating to those learning German at an advanced level, since using a wrong article immediately exposes you as a non-native speaker. Because yeah, as the others said, it hardly ever happens that native speakers use a wrong article...

  • Dry Shampoo is the teenage girl equivalent to teenage boys' Axe Body Spray

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  • Yeah, I just thought that's called "dry shampoo", but not sure where I got that idea from. Might've just been a brainfart. 😅

  • Dry Shampoo is the teenage girl equivalent to teenage boys' Axe Body Spray

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  • Huh, I thought, dry shampoo is a bar soap with additives. Sounds like it's pretty much the polar opposite...

  • S&Box went open-source and the comments are very calm

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  • Man, at $DAYJOB, if we open-source something, they tell us to check for checked-in passwords and whatnot, and force us to throw away the commit history, which always feels stupid when we've known upfront that we're going to open-source it and so kept things clean from the start.

    But then, yeah, you see a post like that and just think that it really wouldn't have been too difficult to search for swear words before publishing.I mean, I also don't really care, since it's code rather than an official communication channel, but I can understand why management might care.

  • KDE Going all-in on a Wayland future

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  • The description in the ticket isn't too bad:

    allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

    It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn't spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

    It is a niche feature, if you couldn't tell. But it isn't some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

    And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.Don't think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.

  • I went to a grocery store in the morning that I normally go to at night and they had dimmed lights, soft music, as well as no sounds coming from the cash registers

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  • There's a store in the next town, which has only organic foods. Rather expensive to shop there, but I still go there more often than I need to, just because everyone's friendly and relaxed.

  • I went to a grocery store in the morning that I normally go to at night and they had dimmed lights, soft music, as well as no sounds coming from the cash registers

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  • Yeah, if I ever catch a calm hour in the store, I'll actually look through the aisles and check out products I wouldn't normally buy. If the store is busy, I grab the usual and flee as quickly as possible.

  • Any opensource alternatives to imgflip/kapwing for creating memes?

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  • I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that's typically used for memes, Impact, isn't free either. Well, and it isn't done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

    If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it's not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.You would "just" need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project...

  • Any opensource alternatives to imgflip/kapwing for creating memes?

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  • It's mostly about ease of use. You don't really want to spend more than a few minutes on a silly meme. As such, having a database with meme templates, the right kind of font and easy text placement, can make the difference, whether you'll bother creating a meme or not...

  • What are some of the worst code you have seen in a production environment?

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  • One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I'm not giving myself overly broad access. And because it's an Excel, they can't really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything...

  • How did bittorrent fail to become essential technology?

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  • Still works well as a concept for PeerTube...

  • It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's...

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  • They have breaking changes in their minor versions...

  • It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's...

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  • Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don't want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.It's just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it's been a few versions, so maybe they've fixed it. It's always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.

    To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that's supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn't work.The second time, I couldn't click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

    Instead, I've slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it's definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.

  • functions

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  • Bash fucks me up so much, too. You just put the parentheses there to say that something is a function, not for actually declaring the parameters that can be passed in...

  • Would making software with old hardware expectations work as a way to write lightweight software?

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  • I've seen it argued that the best way to create lightweight software is to give devs old hardware to develop on.

    Which, yeah, I can see that. The problem is that as a dev, you might have some generic best practices in your head while coding, but beyond that, you don't really concern yourself with performance until it becomes an issue. And on new hardware, you won't notice the slowness until it's already pretty bad for those on older hardware.

    But then, as the others said, there's little incentive to actually give devs old hardware. In particular, it costs a lot of money to have your devs waiting for compilation on older hardware...

  • Why isn't it considered vegan to harvest animals who die naturally?

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  • Then those indigenous people need to figure out their morals. Chances are, they are embedded in a context where this is a lot easier, because they don't have factory farming. They are part of the food network and take only as much as nature can recover.

    You want me to be the arbiter of all morals? Well, there's my take. Indigenous people hunting are not the problem. Other parts of the hivemind might have a different view on that, though, and I'm not gonna apologize for their take.

  • The Final Final Layer_new(3)

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  • Would making software with old hardware expectations work as a way to write lightweight software?

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  • It should be said, though, that this really is just a general rule. Some frameworks and programming languages are definitely less efficient than others without providing more versatility.

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Me, when doing error handling

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Underappreciated top

    friendo.monster /posts/underappreciated-top.html
  • Rust Programming @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Everybody's so Creative! (about library abstraction design)

    daymare.net /blogs/everbody-so-creative/
  • Memes @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    When the webpage doesn't want you opening new tabs

  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    What's up with FUTO?

    drewdevault.com /2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html
  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Escaping a string when passing through multiple tools

  • Dad Jokes @lemmy.world
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    When your Dad gives birth to you

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Wish granted

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    I don't know why this exists...

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    TIL last-modified timestamp of a dir updates when a file/subdir is added/renamed/deleted

  • Rust Programming @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    When I have an Option<Result<T, E>> but need a Result<Option<T>, E>

  • Rust Programming @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024

    blog.rust-lang.org /2025/02/20/Rust-1.85.0.html
  • Memes @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Argh chives

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    IEEE 754

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Still wild to me that we built webpages like this

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Valid LilyPond syntax

  • Dad Jokes @lemmy.world
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Cyanide and Door Business

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?

    meta.wikimedia.org /wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F
  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    When you're asked to sprinkle software engineering onto data science projects ✨

  • Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml
    Ephera @lemmy.ml

    When you're supposed to use Rust, but you only know Python...

    crates.io /crates/inline-python