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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Given the revelation that it hooks into Spotify to get playlists etc, I really wish there wasn’t that strong of a dependency on Spotify, and that I could just search for songs and start playing.

    I was hoping for more YouTube music player, and less Spotify.

    I have Spotify Premium which I pay for, and the desktop client is very fast and snappy to play songs. SpotTube is OK, but it isn’t as snappy as Spotify. For something that is free, that is absolutely fine, but the fact it requires Spotify for playlist etc…

    I definitely get why. Spotify does playlist generation like no other, and it is the biggest platform by far. But I kind of wish I had a version that wasn’t all about the algorithms.

    Also, the way you “login” to Spotify on the desktop is incredibly user un-friendly at best, and incredibly brittle at worst. Copying and pasting a cookie that Spotify uses shouldn’t be used as a way to login to any service, like, at all. And if Spotify are smart, they’ll break this functionality within a month or so using something like Fingerprint.js to identify which device the session belongs to, thus invalidating the session.


  • It’s a fork bomb. Specifically it’s a piece of code that recursively calls itself and then it calls itself to run the code.

    Thank goodness it did not work, but please do not actually run code like this!! Do your best to figure out what the code is doing before you attempt to run it!




  • So a few weeks back it’s been officially confirmed I’m being made redundant.

    I had a job interview last Friday - late stage. I’m hoping they come back with some positive news. The interview went okay. I think I did well with the Java stuff, but when I was asked about Javascript Event Loops, I was completely befuzzled.

    Back at work, and we all have to act like we give a shit. Not too great, I wish I was done with the company overall.

    Luckily I have another job interview next week - something to look forward too!

    Overall, a pretty resounding “meh”.










  • I don’t think folks realise how much effort and investment Valve has put into making Linux a viable gaming alternative for modern-ish games.

    Most distributors use Windows because it is easy to install and setup for gaming. Is it perfect? No. But any vendor can pay Microsoft and get a viable OS for gaming.

    Linux will need a lot of custom graphics card drivers and a lot of tweaking (think power as well as graphical features, memory, CPU etc) to get the optimum performance. Most OSes out of the box have OKish performance for gaming, which is OK for any hobbyist but would be a disaster for a consumer product.

    And before Valve came along, Proton wasn’t even a thing. Proton is now a thing, and the way Steam utilises it makes it effortless, but it will need a fair bit of custom args to get it working well.

    Each of these things separately can be quite painful in its own right, but altogether it would be a headache for any company not well versed in Linux. Not only that, but having to provide customer support for a Linux OS would put the fear in most companies.

    I would imagine most vendors would just slap Windows on their machine and be like “you know what to do with this” and let them go nuts.





  • I didn’t really consider 2D indie games. For 3D indie games, some games are cut down while others are “good enough” to the average Switch end user.

    At the end of the day, if the ability to play 3D games from about 5-10 years ago in 30-60fps sounds like a dream to you and you are willing to jump through some Launch Properties/Proton version hoops for some games in order to get that perfect gameplay (for example, I have GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas OG games, and I spent days modding the games on the SD to get it running close to flawlessly as possible) rather than settle for compromised ports - which for the average person playing video games, they wouldn’t care too much about framerates or graphical fidelity as so much as the convenience to push Play and just go), then Steam Deck is for you.

    Otherwise, Switch is perhaps preferrable. OR, if you care more about visual fidelity more than anything, maybe consider getting a PS5/XSX. I say this as I do love my Steam Deck for GTA5 sessions, but for RE games I often go to my XSX.