Dude, I feel a lot of what you’re saying. I spent years making awful wages at terrible jobs, then fell ass-backwards into a six-figure career. The whiplash is really hard going from thinking you’ll die young and poor into having more than you know what to do with.

With that being said, I have advice to share if you’re interested in such things:

• Six figures isn’t rich, but it certainly is more than enough. After this point, finding even more money isn’t really going to make you much happier, so start prioritizing other important gains you can make in your career (hours, day-to-day job satisfaction)
• Focus on improving emotional intelligence. You can afford stuff now, so you can no longer hide behind notions like “this stuff isn’t for poor people like me” – you need to find actual reasons to say no to things and that requires the skill of knowing why you want something.
• Lots of problems can be solved with money, but you have to be super careful about it or you’ll just end up wrecking yourself! Feeling mixed up? Don’t buy self-help books – get therapy. Feeling lonely? Don’t buy friends – take some classes at the local community center. Feeling self-conscious? Don’t get a face-lift – hire a personal trainer and maybe a stylist.
• Money guilt is real and it’s OK. Use that feeling to keep yourself down on Earth. Obviously look out for #1 first – pay off bad debt, max out your 401k, set aside enough cash to max out your insurance deductibles and still live a few months without income – once you’ve done that, dial back on the money hoarding. Be better than the assholes who kept you down: tip well, give back to the people who make the things you love, be charitable. Sharing is caring.

It’ll take you straight from pre-diabetes to post-diabetes

Nice. Flagship features like these so often feel overlooked in the Linux GPU discussion. I like to think that’s because we’re all very serious pragmatists who don’t care for such frivolous addons, even if the simple truth is that vendors are indifferent towards Linux as an end-user platform.

In light of that, features like these coming in with 1st-party support is a welcome sign that things are (slowly) changing. Emphasis on “slow”; I don’t find it terribly impressive that Nvidia’s partially reversed the proprietary own-goal which they call NVAPI, especially considering the still ongoing parade of new (also proprietary!) standards which they insist on shoehorning into it… but I’ll acknowledge that they’re making progress nevertheless 😤

I’ll have uhh… a #9 double democracy supreme, with cheese

Male A to Male C is abolutely possible. It’s the Male A to Female C adapters which are evil. There is no pinout mapping that will turn an A host into a “real” C host and that’s exactly what a Male A to Female C adapter purports to do.

In any case, if you know what you’re doing then all bets are off the table. Hack away freely because at the end of the day it’s all just copper and bits anyway. With that being said, anyone who knows what they’re doing does not require my permission to… vague gesture know what they’re doing.

Like I said: in order to do it the non-evil way you need to cram in an onboard USB chip. Female USB-C from a Male USB-A plug-in is explicitly not possible to implement in a spec-compliant manner because of the pinouts.

You can brute-force a smaller passive adapter like those online but it’s a devil’s bargain. Nobody targets these janky adapters when designing products. USB-C things will just break without any rhyme or reason because you’re fundamentally breaking the hardware contract and “lying” about the capabilities of your port.

No, it’s because I read an expert opinion on the subject: https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/m7rcu5/any_reliable_usbc_female_to_usba_male_adapters_yet/grducjr/

If you hate Amazon you can buy it on the CableCreation website instead.

EDIT: that monoprice adapter isn’t even active lol!

First thing’s first: all such adapters should be considered evil by default. The only way to make a compliant adapter is with active circuitry in the adapter essentially providing an entirely standalone USB controller interface.

With that being said, here’s an adapter which does exactly that. Back when I researched this topic in October I found that the linked adapter is essentially the only one of its kind on the market right now.

It’s cultural. I’ve experienced many times accidentally making others uncomfortable with my silence during a conversation. That specific phenomena is known in linguistics as backchanneling (see also: the Japanese art of aizuchi)

Much like backchanneling, some cultures demand interruptions while others look down upon it. It’s important that we don’t overly invest ourselves in the virtues or lack thereof lest we accidentally wander into the territory of cultural imperialism. Sometimes things are the way they are just because and you have to roll with it as best you can.

Making a mental note is often impossible for me, I frequently forget and need to address something immediately in order to remember it, unless I can pause the conversation to make a physical or digital note (can’t focus on what they’re saying while writing it) which people would probably find even more rude either way.

I sympathize as a person with (catastrophic) ADHD. Trying to hold in a thought feels like smothering it. The concept of a “mental note” feels like some sort of cruel joke – my working memory is 6 words long and people expect me to somehow hold a question in there without tuning out the rest of the conversation? Agonizing!

Even so, I try (and frequently fail) to behave as expected. I find that most people can come to appreciate the effort once they get to know you and your shortcomings. Never forget that people are not monuments; if you mean well and try your best others will bend the rules for you.

Both of my parents died this year and now I’m about to spend my first Christmas alone. It’s a little heavy NGL

A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.

Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.

This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.

I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.

Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.

I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)

Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.

Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames

When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.

In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.

Exactly. Making the game WINE-compatible is not the same thing as committing to support. In reality, the only thing stopping WINE from working is Epic Anti-Cheat and the absurd thing about this is that Epic already gave EAC a WINE-compatibility mode – they’re just actively choosing not to turn it on.

What Tim’s really saying is this:

I don’t want our flagship game to be used as a way to highlight Steam’s better Linux support, so the game won’t come to Linux until EGS on Linux is at parity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense for us to bother doing that right now because the Linux usershare is too small to matter.

Yup, that about sums it up: fun, but shallow. Nevertheless I think it’s worthy of a recommendation because it has a great honeymoon period before falling off.

I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
• ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

I present for your consideration the case of September 3rd, 1967: the day Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right side. One would expect that the incredibly distracting process of overcoming a lifetime of learned habit would be a recipe for chaos, but in fact there were significantly fewer accidents than average on the day of the change ^[1].

As it turns out, the danger of complacency outweighs the danger of distraction. It does not particularly matter where one directs their focus if they are not driving mindfully. In a more natural environment, we’re good enough at identifying dangerous situations to pay attention when it matters, but roads are not a natural environment. For every alert person briefly annoyed by an audio notification there will be at least as many pedal-pushers too relaxed to even form coherent memories, let alone engage in defensive driving.^[2]

Um excuse me time actually already ended in 1991

What an incredible postdiction

I used my WF-1000XM4s daily for 2 years until the batteries gave out. They were already out of warranty, but Sony replaced them anyway. I still use mine daily and am quite happy with the performance. They’re great IEMs if you’re fine with the batteries croaking after a couple of years – not a big deal if you’re comfortable installing aftermarket cells.

It’s not ideal, but I’ve had worse exeriences with other IEMs. My worst experience was actually with the GalaxyBuds, which unfortunately I developed an allergy to (Don’t roll your eyes – I’m not the only one! It was an issue with the rubberized coating in a few specific batches). Those assholes accepted my in-warranty RMA, but then never sent anything back. I literally only wanted a replacement, not even money back! Support completely stonewalled me even though I had the UPS receipt from their return slip 😤

Wow