Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Valve’s Artifact Classic card game. I actually found the basic formula to be really fun.

    I think this game died for two reasons:

    A) The game was review bombed for its monetization (IMO a lot of this was the non-target audience trying it and leaving a bad review)

    B) Valve said following the review bombing that they were going to make major changes. This resulted in a lot of Artifact fans (IMO) leaving the game because … why invested and learn a game that’s going to undergo major changes.

    So Valve worked on Artifact Foundry (and never finished it) … before eventually everyone at Valve gave up and released both Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry for free. The original Artifact Classic is still a great time with a friend and all cards are now totally free so you can build whatever decks you want.

    It’s basically a AAA studio card game, with cross platform support, released in complete, for free … because of some poor decision making. Some things may be unbalanced but if you’re playing with friends anyways … just have a friendly agreement to not use the cards that cause problems in your decks. It also could bounce back into active development if it starts to acquire a player base again (because Valve).


  • s/you/one/ I don’t think it’s really about YOU in particular, just “you” the author or “one that is saying things like this.”

    Another example, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime” isn’t about “you” it’s about the concept of “an individual (that might be the reader).” This phrasing seems to be more agreeable with some people and possibly there’s different tolerances geographically.

    I’ve tried to use “one” in place of “you” to remove this ambiguity but it’s at times uncomfortable to type lol




  • FOSS isn’t inherently left wing. It is often charitable work but that’s far from unique to the left wing. That can also just stem from “I wanted this program to exist and it didn’t, but I don’t want to put even more effort in to monetize it.” Plenty of FOSS projects start as someone wanting to learn something early on in their career as well (which is both a pro and a con because … if you’re learning you might be making some bigger mistakes).

    Anarchism … I just don’t really agree with that at all. Lots of larger FOSS projects do very much have governing bodies that decide what to do and how it shall be done. In many cases FOSS authors are a one person governing body making all the big decisions.

    Organized charitable work is far from anarchy even though anarchism dreams of everything being organized charitable work.




  • I strongly disagree, email is a train wreck for secure communication.

    Proton has done a pretty good job of making an implementation that’s actually secure but PGP email has fundamental flaws like the subject line and recipient being clear text on the message, user error/key management complexity, and it’s also just a high-friction means of communication vs “texting” or “IRC”-like approaches.







  • Kopia uses content addressable storage. So basically when it copies things, it only copies what data is new. Files that haven’t changed will not be overwritten.

    You kind of need to run the verification command on both the source and the “backup copy” for maximum paranoia. If you’re running it on a local copy, that should be a relatively fast process as you don’t need to download stuff.

    You’d basically connect on the command line to the copy you just updated via sync-to and then ask kopia to verify 100% of the file integrity … it should then run through everything and make sure it matches what’s supposed to be there. I’m not sure how you fix it if it detects something wrong, I’ve yet to run into that … I’m sure there’s a way 🙂

    You could also use two backup drives and sync to both, then if you get an error restoring a particular file from one, you could in theory restore it from the other. A ZFS cluster with redundant copies and/or a RAID-1, RAID-5 or RAID-6 style setup could also help … but most people aren’t going to run an entire NAS just to turn it on periodically and backup their data “offline”. Most people are going to be better served (IMO) by using cloud storage like B2 (where bitflips aren’t really a concern) or a NAS (where bitflips similarly are a minimal concern, ideally in another location) with a periodically updated offline copy (on say an external hard drive) should be enough to protect most people’s data well.

    Also going to like to what I’m talking about: