I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet, but a reason might be that providing an API is cheaper than web scraping.

If people really want access to your data, they can just scrape your website, but that requires loading all the data through the website itself which requires loading millions or billions of video thumbnails, comments, descriptions, recommendations, etc. It’s much cheaper for them to send a JSON through an API, even though they might know that some people are trying to undermine them by using that data to circumvent their advertising.

An investigation from a neutral third party is a good thing, but in this case LTT hired the third party investigator so the investigators obviously have an incentive to find LTT innocent of all charges since LTT is paying them through Linus Media Group (LMG). It’s better than nothing, but it’s like when there’s an internal affairs investigation into police misconduct… by the police… Nobody believes it and for good reason.

I’m not surprised, to be honest. The first game was a success largely because of the interesting hook, which is that Senua is schizophrenic and they immerse you inside her mind by having voice constantly whispering in your ears, or sometimes a voice will rise above the murmur with something helpful, or not.

The actual game play though is not very good, it’s actually pretty boring. So even if you were interested in that hook you probably played the first one but you’re over it, and if you weren’t intrigued enough to play the first one then you’ll probably miss the second one too.

Oh interesting! I must have mixed my facts up or something, my bad. You’re right that it’s attributed to Zhuge Liang, but it seems like Wikipedia thinks it was a fictional story when attributed to Zhuge Liang, but it looks like he wasn’t the first to use this strategy and he wasn’t the last. Regardless, I was wrong about Sun Tzu having done it and I learned more about history, so thanks!

Here’s the Wikipedia article I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Fort_Strategy#Zhuge_Liang

Yeah, I was gonna say… Calculus is all about saying it’s infinitely approaching zero so let’s assume it is zero.

On a somewhat related note, that Sun Tzu quote reminds me of something he did. Sun Tzu had a rivalry with this other general who he often got into skirmishes with and always defeated him or outmaneuvered him with some kind of trickery. So one time this rival general actually had Sun Tzu on the ropes and had chased him into a bit of a corner. Sun Tzu was in a smallish fort with the enemy general closing in and he definitely did not have enough soldiers to hold the fort for long.

So instead of trying to intimidate his rival with a show of force or making his army seem bigger than it was or whatever else he might have tried instead when his rival arrived at the fort he found the front gate fully open and nobody in sight except Sun Tzu himself sitting on the battlement playing an instrument somewhat akin to a lyre I think.

His rival was so wary of trickery that he assumed it must be a trap, or a distraction while a larger army moves in to reinforce him, so he left and Sun Tzu and his army survived.

I think upgrading the RAM as you mentioned is going to make a big difference. While the physical RAM might be soldered to the motherboard, you could buy a fairly cheap SD card or USB and set the system up to use that as virtual memory. It won’t be as fast as actual RAM but it might help and large SD cards are honestly really cheap these days.

I love Eric Barone! He sticks to his convictions in the way I wish more video game developers would. He’s made so much money from Stardew Valley that he never needs to work a day for the rest of his life, but he chooses to put in the time to continue releasing free content and working on new passion projects and giving back to the community. He could have monetized the hell out of Stardew, releasing DLCs and hired a huge development team to crank out new content to make him richer until the original game became unrecognizable.

So many game developers have gone down that route, or simply sold off their creation to a company that they know full well plans to do just that.

Also, I just love his mentality about things. He knows that nobody really asked for Haunted Chocolatier, and he doesn’t really care if it’s successful, he just wants to make something new for himself. I hope it is successful, but I’m glad to see that he’s not hinging his hopes on it’s success but instead just enjoying the process of making something, which is really beautiful and I think more people should focus their energies on those kinds of exploits and outcomes.

Doorbell?

If you like what’s on offer by Spotify, there’s a free alternative that I like called Spotube. It uses your Spotify account for recommendations but then uses YouTube’s (and YouTube Music’s) backend to get the songs. You can also change the backend use a Piped instance instead of YouTube.

Or just switch to Linux. It works flawlessly with everything except games that with anti-cheat that refuse to support it.

It seems like this vehicle comes with (as far as I know) the first solid state battery in a commercial vehicle which is HUGE news if true! I’m slightly skeptical because of this claim coming from the Chinese government, but who knows, it would be a huge boon for all of humanity if they’ve figured out solid state batteries.

The huge benefits we’ll all see are increased capacity so batteries last longer, and INSANELY fast charge times. You could recharge your car to 100% in the same time as it takes to fill it up with gas currently.

The thing about time is that any likely division of an hour that you’d like, there’s an easy and even division. /2 = 30, /3 = 20, /4 = 15, /5 = 12, /6 =10, /10 = 6 and vice versa.

It’s pretty easy to get in the mind state of thinking a half hour is 30 minutes, or more specifically you can think 1.5 hours * 60 minutes / hour. The hours cancel out and you get 90 minutes.

Are you using the dedicated GPU as your primary GPU or the integrated GPU? I’ve found using the dGPU as the primary can sometimes lead to suspend/resume issues.

Choosing to love Jesus makes that man happy, and that’s great as long as he doesn’t try to ruin other people’s fun. Why is that so hard for some people to understand? Just live your own life and leave other people alone.

It’s like the old saying, “If you think everyone around you is an asshole, just remember that you’re the common denominator in every situation”. So if your teammates are trash, it’s time to look inward at whether you’re actually the problem, or if you’re not, what you can do to help your teammates succeed.

If you have an unusual setup, it can be annoying trying to give programs permissions and sometimes it just outright doesn’t work. For example, I mainly game on a laptop which has a pretty small hard drive, so I tend to put most of my games on an external hard drive. Flatpak really doesn’t play well with that.

My steps in engaging in polite conversation on the internet are:

Explain my point as clearly and concisely as possible.

Try to be respectful of differing opinions and keep an open mind.

Realize that mistakes happen, apologize for my mistakes and admit when I’m wrong. Also, be forgiving of the mistakes of others, point out any mistakes but do so as gently as possible.

Ignore people that are either intentionally misunderstanding you or aren’t making an effort to understand you.

I think the first two points are obvious and most people follow them, it’s the last two that a lot of people struggle with, even myself at times, but I’m working on it. I think the worst thing you can do on the internet is trash someone’s entire idea just because they made one tiny mistake. And putting in effort with trolls will quickly exhaust you, so you need to learn to identify and ignore them.

Yeah, I’m saying that I agree that version numbers are harmful to mass adoption and I go on to explain that it’s not really a version number at least in Ubuntu, but a “YY.MM” formatted date. I think making that more clear would help people that are unfamiliar with versioning and development.

I would use Heroic Games Launcher personally. You can add any game you want, and before it creates the prefix for you, you have the option of running installers on the prefix first. Then you can add the game executable. If the game requires proton fixes which it very likely would, you can search the game on SteamDB to find the AppID then make sure there’s a file called steam_appid.txt next to the game executable with the game’s app ID from SteamDB. That will tell Proton to apply any fixes that it has on file automatically.

If you’re a fairly advanced user, you can also just look at what files are included on the game’s SteamDB “Depots” page. For example, GTA San Andreas looks like it requires “DirectX Jun 2010 Redist”. You can either download that from Microsoft or you can run winetricks (through Heroic, or through terminal) on the prefix to add d3dx9.

Heroic Games Launcher: https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher
Steam DB: https://steamdb.info/