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Morrowind is overly Morrowind
  • I heart vanilla is a good modlist which has some basic bugfixes and minor but faithful graphical improvements. If you wanna make the game look even better, then Volumetric Clouds, Remiros Groundcover (or some other groundcover mod) and Normal Maps for Everything are some of my top recommendations. If you wanna go crazy then there is also a modlist on the same site called graphical overhaul, but I think that it's worth sticking to a more vanilla aesthetic for a bit just so you have that as a frame of reference.

    OpenMW (or, alternatively MGE XE if you want to use the original engine for whatever reason) already have some nice graphical improvements baked into them though.

  • Morrowind is overly Morrowind
  • I don't think that the driving the empire from Morrowind ever happens in game, but maybe it technically comes true as a concequence of the Red Year which in turn is a concequence of the Tribunal losing their power because of the ending of the main quest. It's interesting that Uriel Septim sets the prophecy in motion knowing that this is part of it.

    The Tribunal where losing their power anyway, but I suppose that Dagoth Ur could have kept Bar Dau in its place if he'd won, but then everyone would have been transformed into a corpus zombie instead.

    The Red Year isn't part of Morrowind lore, but "what is going to happen with Bar Dau now?" is kind of an open question at the end of the game so it is an event that absolutely builds on things set up in Morrowind

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  • It's weird to have something that verbose for using in the shell. I don't want to use verbose commands when just doing stuff interactively, so I never learn how to really use its features as a concequence. Bash, while it has more footguns, is more readable to me because I'm more familiar with the individual commands. For most programing you spend more time reading it than writing it, but that's not the case for the shell so there it's the wrong tradeoff imo.

  • open letter to the NixOS foundation
  • Don't know anything about this particular case so while "social engineering to create a backdoor" is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it's dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.

  • Fallout 4
  • I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I'm exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.

    It's set before fallout 1 I think and it won't have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.

    The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.

  • I've never played games. Suggest a couple of addictive games I can play on Linux
  • You should, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in the Morrowind community and now is a really good time to get (back) into the game. Province: Cyrodiil, which has adding cyrodiil as based on Morrowind-era lore to the game as a goal, is set to release have its first major release later this year. I've also been getting into tes3mp lately which is a fork of OpenMW for multiplayer.

    As a big fan of the neverwinter nights community,

    You might appreciate this April fools joke from the OpenMW team then :D

  • I've never played games. Suggest a couple of addictive games I can play on Linux
  • This might not be what you mean when you say "addictive", but since I've been addicted to it for the last half year or so, I'm gonna suggest it anyway: Morrowind.

    While the original came out in 2002 for Windows and later Xbox, there's been a fan remake of the engine which runs on linux (and windows and macos) called OpenMW.

    It's an open world role playing game about exploring the island of Vvardenfell, which is a strange and alien place that's easy to lose yourself in. Most of the wildlife is made up of insect- or dinosaur like creatures. There are forests made up of giant mushrooms, and ancient wizard lords who use magic to grow mushrooms into buildings that you have to be able to fly to navigate. It's a world with a rich history, featuring several different religions, cultures and overlapping and competing political structures.

    Despite its age, it is to this day a game with a very active modding community which can extend and improve the games mechanics and visuals. It also features what is probably the longest running active modding project, Tamriel rebuilt which seeks to add the rest of the province of Morrowind to the game. It's about half way done and has basically another game worth of content in it at this point.

  • Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change?
  • Like you say, there are always gonna be particular cases where gui/cli is better but for the general case I think it has to do with if your workflow is more terminal or gui oriented in general. I think that many of the tradeoffs in gui/cli git aren't really unique to git so I think sticking with your general preference in that are makes sense.

    Since I'm a vim user (shocking, I know) I actually use git through the fugitive plugin a lot, but it's a fairly thin wrapper around the cli interface so most things are pretty much just the same as using the cli except that you can call them as vim commands instead (:Git push instead of git push and so on)

  • Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change?
  • There are diff plugins that have syntax highlighting, I use delta for example.

    For viewing and searching logs, I prefer the terminal because that's usually where I am anyway so alt-tabbing to a gui window means more context switching which isn't a big deal but is enough for me to want to stay in the terminal.

    You can just diff two commits on the cli with git diff commit1 commit2 but I guess that what you mean is that you might not have any specific reference two either of the commits so you have to browse through the log to find the commit message that describes the commit, which I'll grant you is easier in a gui because you have two variables that you have to copy and paste if you're in the terminal.

  • Steam is a ticking time bomb
  • I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It's probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.

  • Steam is a ticking time bomb
  • One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it's practically dead now.

    Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.

  • Piracy was NEVER stealing
  • The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.

    I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the "destruction" of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn't really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.

  • Table of various levels of piracy
  • I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn't pay money to but that I've pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don't lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it's a net win.

    When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I've pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn't really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It's not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.

  • Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax
  • Since the diffs are tree-sitter based, it's interesting to think about what a tree-sitter based patch would look like. Probably wouldn't double as a human and computer friendly format like normals diffs. I suppose that you could create patches that are more robust to the source code changing since it wouldn't care about linebreaks and maybe you could have it so it doesn't care if you move code around since you could have it so its going by e.g. what the parent function is and not the line number. I gotta wonder how useful that actually is though.

  • C++ creator rebuts White House warning
  • There is a lot of fanboying in discussions like these, so I understand if you're weary of that. That said I don't think static analysis tools are a very good point of comparison for (what I'm assuming that you're referring to) Rusts ownership system.

    While static analysis tools certainly can be useful for some classes of errors, there are types of errors that they can't catch that the borrowchecker can. This is because the language are built around them in Rust. Rusts lifetime analysis is dependent on the user adding lifetime annotations in certain situations, so since c++ doesn't have these annotations static analysis tools for c++ can't benefit from the information these annotations provide.

    Furthermore, c++ suffers from being an old language with a lot of features. Legacy features can allow for various loopholes that are hard for a static analysis tool to reason about.

    C++ static analysis tools can find errors, but Rusts borrowchecker can prove the absence of errors modulo unsafe code.

    That said, I don't have any good data on how much of a problem this is in practice. Modern c++ with a CI-pipeline doing static analysis and forbidding certain footguns is safe enough for most contexts. Personally, I'm exited about Rust more because I think that it's a nicely designed language than because of its safety guarantees, but it doesn't really have the ecosystem support for a lot of things, like gamedev or ui at the moment.

  • C++ creator rebuts White House warning
  • There will be plenty of jobs in c++ in the foreseeable future, so it's not a bad language to know from that perspective. I don't know if it's the most pedagogical language to learn otoh, python is a better language for getting comfortable with the basics, c is better when it comes to learning a (slightly wrong but close enough) mental model of how a computer works under the hood, and there are many better languages to learn if you want to learn good approaches to thinking about problems.

    Maybe you are leaning c++ because you want to work on something specific that c++ is primarily used in, and in that case go ahead with that project. I think having something tangible that you want to work on is great when it comes to learning programing and that's worth more than picking the "best" language. Besides, you can always learn different languages later in your career if you want/have to.

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    zygo_histo_morpheus @programming.dev
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