I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”

Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.

If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.

Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.

That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p

It’s at the level where, after spending hours there, I feel like it has to be a conspiracy to waste your time. Because there is no way there could organically be that many posts about a topic without there being any useful or correct information.

Seems suspicious. There probably is such an option hidden somewhere. Because whenever you get a clear answer there, it’s invariably wrong.

That’s what all the coffee and wine is for!

Is this how people can claim that Arch is stable, they just redefine breaking to exclude anything that might actually happen?

Debian in particular is rock solid, even Debian Unstable has been very reliable for me if you want a rolling release with newer packages.

But I’ve also had very few problems with Ubuntu. My mother has used it for ten years at this point and will happily apply any dist upgrade she’s presented with, and rarely does she need support.

A pro tip is to check out the alternative desktop environments. A lot of people rightly hate Ubuntu’s awful default DE, but it’s not a core part of the distro, there are other complete desktop “flavours” available in the repositories and installers that will give you them from the start at https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavours

(Switching an installed system from one DE to another is in principle as easy as uninstalling one desktop meta-package and installing another, but you got to make sure you get the right packages, or you might run into annoying conflicts, so I would not recommend it for a newbie)

Why does blocking ads not seem like a sustainable solution?

Another important point is the flexibility of wind and solar. The minimum investment to get some power out of them is very low, and a park can start generating power before fully completed and can easily be scaled up or down in capacity during construction if estimates change.

Nuclear on the other hand is a huge up-front cost with little flexibility and no returns until completion, which could take a decade or more.

Even if it wasn’t more expensive, nuclear would still be financially risky. Many things can happen that effect power consumption and prices during the time it takes to build a nuclear plant. It can still be valuable for diversification though.

We have! Thermoelectric generators that make electricity directly from heat exist, they’re just often not very good compared to the spinny wheel.

We even use them to make nuclear reactors with no moving parts, which I think is really neat. They’re used in places where maintenance or refueling is difficult or impossible, like space probes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

It’s essentially just a bunch of pre-made css classes that do a specific thing that you mix and match from.

AFAIK the programmatic part is so your served CSS file will only include the classes you actually use, rather than all available ones. You could always just not do that.

It always seemed to me like one of the least overengineered front end tools.

You can run systemd (or cron) inside a pod for scheduling and call the kubernetes API from there to run jobs and stuff. Not sure if this helps you, but it can be easy to overlook.

I use macros to solve most of the same problems. You just on-the-fly record a sequence of regular vim commands that you can then replay as many times as you need. Great for formatting a bunch of data without having to deal with the misery of regex

Really? Not that I’d notice, but I assumed ed was so tiny that there wouldn’t be any reason to not include it. (Ubuntu has it and it’s 59KB)

Asking for vi and getting vim is just a pleasant surprise :)

Just type :!bash (or whatever heathenous shell you prefer) and you never have to leave the warm embrace of vim ever again

Yeah the tech labor market has really proven that the idea of employment contracts being negotiated between equal parties isn’t true even in the best of circumstances.

Even when companies are desperate for talent, and willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on salaries and perks, they are not willing to negotiate on anything outside of that. They still have terrifying contracts with non-compete and damages clauses they could use to wreck your life, no workplace democracy, unpaid overtime and whatever other shit is legal.

But hey! You get free snacks and enough money to buy the dinners you don’t time to cook and save up to survive your inevitable burn out!

Unless unions work differently where you live, they are a democracy that will pursue whatever issues its members vote on. If members don’t think pay is a problem, why would they try to change it?

For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.

It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.

So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.

It does have a vim plugin, so it’s a perfectly fine editor

tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

It’s extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it’s incomprehensible to newbies. It’s focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.

These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.

For example:

w is a movement command that moves one word forward.

You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so 3w moves three words forward.

d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes the next three words.

f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So f. will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.

Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing d2f.

Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think “I wish there was a better way to do this” there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).

It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to salvation efficient editing.

Unless you wanted to learn to use ed (which you don’t)