Meanwhile in Europe, trucks have a flat front so drivers have great visibility.

And also, you can sort of brute force things to look good it with shaders.

Same boat… But I had some success with low poly 3D models which I found are pretty easy to make. Learning a bit about color theory, how to match colors, as well as learning a bit about level design goes a long way. You can make a great looking game this way.

But my dream game is 2D pixel art, and I really suck at it.

Skill issue of the developer to fix it or skill issue of the submitter?

If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.

Did you even read my post? I said that you need plates to drive, but you don’t need plates if you are parked (or on private property). If a car is parked, you have plenty of time to read the VIN. Driving on public roads without plates is illegal and you risk jail time.

I highly doubt cameras would be able to recognize this as a valid plate.

Where I live, you only need valid plates to drive on public roads. If the car is parked or you drive on private property, there’s no problem. The procedure for getting plates requires you to not have plates for like 2 or 3 days.

Cars can still be identified by the VIN which is on the windshield.

Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.

Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).

PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

With all the recent hype around AI, I feel that a lot of people don’t understand how it works and how it is useful. AI is useful at solving certain types of problems that are really difficult using traditional programming, like finding patterns that aren’t obvious to us.

For example, object recognition is about finding patterns in images. Our brains are great at this, but writing a computer program capable of taking pixels and figuring out if the pattern is there is very hard.

Even if AI is sometimes going to misclassify objects, it can still be useful. For example, in a factory you can use AI to find defects in the production line. Even if you don’t get it perfect, going from 100 defects per 1M products to 10 per million is a huge difference and saves the factory a lot of money.

Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.

And then use AI to take some bullet points and turn them into a well formatted response.

AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.

On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.

Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.

The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.

It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.

And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.

Google isn’t any better. And there aren’t a lot phone operating system options you can choose from.

Let’s go back to binary blobs. Everything being xml and json is boring.

While in this particular case I agree with you, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for “best linux distro” to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren’t making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren’t being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

He didn’t have the support of the people he though he had. The odds of a successful coup were extremely low.

What is baffling to me is how he didn’t see the obvious target on his back, and continued doing business in Russia like nothing happened. Why didn’t he try to hide?