Mini Motor Racing might be a good match. It has some DLC available (additional cars), but none of it is necessary to enjoy the game.

MineTest is an open source game engine that allows running various open source Minecraft clones.

The approach I've seen most is using semantic versioning for releases, and having a continuously upward counting (not bothering to reset) build number for everything in between.

Sweet. Welcome to the cult of Debian.

We (Debian users and contributors) are inevitable. Our quiet satisfied computing cannot be stopped, only delayed.

We should consider getting some fancy robes and a few club houses, though. The only thing that can make Debian better is cookies and tea.

I wouldn’t trust them as a lone voice on something, but if other groups come to the same conclusion, sure.

As a Privacy nerd, I agree with the conclusions in the article, for what it's worth. We do see a lot of "privacy" law proposals lately that are anything but.

I don't think things will get better, on this front, until the average person better understands privacy rights and risks.

Would you trust this "wallet" tho lol

Hell no. I just kicked Google out of my life for the same crap. Ugh. But I'll laugh too, because it's either that or cry.

I can't say I'm shocked. But I am disappointed.

My comments are pure Internet gold. I'm actually only here to read my own comments. It helps me remember how brilliant and humble I am.

My posts help people discover MineTest. It's pretty great, and it's free.

You're not alone in that.

I also reread your comments sometimes with a deep sense is satisfaction.

(I'm kidding. Although I did check your comment history to make sure you weren't a monster before even making that joke.)

True. I don't post the license prominently, but my comments are Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike

Okay, I'm actually kidding about misunderstanding which bit of my comment your reply was to.

Yes, it's great that MineTest is open source! And the mod community is impressive.

I'll take "Organizations that made it to the top by doing something different, only to fall under leadership that doesn't understand what made them successful and descend into ruins" for 200, Alex.

Seriously, Jeopardy team - this is a rich category:

• Netflix advertisements.
• Zoom mandates staff return to offices.
• Microsoft forgets what the "P" in "PC" stands for.
• Toys R Us implements a shitty holiday gift returns policy.
• Sears decides to sacrifice reputation for quarterly stock price gains.
• Walgreens decides bottom-of-the-barrel incompetent pharmacists can uphold their "get it all done in one visit" secret sauce.
• Radio Shack decides that once-every-two-years cellphone contract sales are the future for holding passionate electronics hobbyists' loyalty.

will tell you if a game supports the controller you currently have plugged in

Today I learned that. It never came up for me since I do most of my game shopping on my phone. That could be really helpful later.

Thank you!

"No deviations will be approved from this year's Agile product roadmap!"

Netflix can't do what got them to the top.

They can't grow that way but they could easily hold on and remain profitable, popular and successful.

They were well on their way to enjoying "Kleenex" or "Oreo" stable market success, but their leadership and shareholders apparently aren't satisfied with winning.

That's heartbreaking. Radio Shack was so fun, while it lasted.

Oh. That makes sense, I play mainly on SteamDeck, but I've been thinking of getting a Steam Controller for my PC, since the majority of what I've bought in the last year has been "SteamDeck Verified".

It's been tickling my brain that "SteamDeck Verified" badge also makes it a lot easier to tell how a game will act with a controller on PC.

If we're stretching the joke further (and by all means we should, this is a delight), there's also always "Final Fantasy TicTacs: Advance"

The Halo Anniversary collection shines on SteamDeck. It was my first purchase after getting mine, I think.

We're in a "fuck around" cycle where they pretend that the problem was we didn't have "copilot", and not that all of our development managers are wildly unqualified.

The "find out" part comes next.

Which is fucking impossible to fathom, because my fucking grocery store's app can't even implement search reliably, today.

I'm not sure how they're going to manage to make things worse.

Actually, I'll make a guess. My guess is we will go under the critical skill level needed for building safe hospital equipment, and we will get a rash of that stuff killing people due to lack of programmer skills.

I hope the asshole CEOs are the ones that die, but there's not enough karma in the world for that.

I hope I'm rocking that hard at 84.

My next non-alcohol bubbly drink will be in your honor, Larry.

Oof. But yeah. Fair.

I want to go on record that sometimes I just wear sandals with socks.

Spray painting a wall is fine,

Yeah. Particularly when private bank walls are right there prominently on many corners just asking to be painted.

I’ve not worked with a marketing team where that would work, but maybe it will for some.

I've never been anywhere that I thought it would work, but it ultimately did, almost everywhere.

I've found it takes a few iterations, but the marketing folks in on it love being the ones who actually can reliably deliver on their promises.

It doesn't work for the marketers that promise whatever they please without talking to dev, but I don't find them to be worthwhile professional allies, so I don't sweat it.

It doesn’t change the “massive customer will only renew if” scenario, though.

Very true. It doesn't help with that case, and that one does happen. I've had the best luck saying "we don't do that, but we're scrambling to add it" in that situation.

The stupidly easy solution is to just give them stuff that has already been successfully delivered to production to market, 9 months from now. There's invariably a huge backlog of years worth of successes that marketing wasn't even aware of.

Incidentally... https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.

We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.

Let's see if I can save you some energy:

• Yes, it made my job massively easier.
• No, it didn't replace me.
• Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
• No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.

It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn't solve that.

Now... Am I talking about...?

• AI?
• Web frameworks?
• English like programming language syntax?
• A compiler with built-in type checking?
• All of the above.

Edit: Formatting for readability.

I could use some honest advice from experienced programmers and engineers.

Old man programmer checking in.

if you sat me down and asked me about algorithms or anything else I did to get my job in the first place I would be clueless.

Don't sweat it. No one knows how the fuck computers work.

Anyone who thinks they actually know, isnt educated enough to understand about the bits they don't understand.

I can solve problems and always get my work done, but I don't even know the language/framework I use daily well enough to explain what's going on, I can just do things.

Nice. You've got the important part. Ride that until the end.

I don't think I have imposter syndrome, I think I really might have let any skill I had atrophy.

It's not impostor syndrome when you're only 2 years into your career.

If you feel like you don't know jack shit compared to what I know, after decades... that's because you don't know jack shit compared to what I know. There's nothing wrong with that. Someday I'll be pissing myself in a nursing home run by automation you maintain. We all get our turn.

I'm the meantime, lucky for you, I can't be arsed to work more than 40 hours in a week, so there's plenty of work left to do while you learn.

And I'll retire soon, and I'l promise I'll do you a solid and leave decades of my own mistakes and missteps out there for you to earn $$$$ cleaning up after. You're welcome... I guess.

I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I've opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.

This is very normal. Welcome to the big leagues. If you do something you love for your job, eventually it's still just a job.

People talk about all the side projects they have, but I have none. I feel too stressed out from the job to do any programming outside of work, even though I love it.

This is very normal for your current stage of your career.

If you stick with it, it gets better when you get to someday become a self-important slob like me who only works on really interesting problems.

And how do I only work on really interesting problems? I make my boss hire a few junior developers and I delegate all the boring stuff to them.

It's a pretty sweet deal for at least one of us. (Who for, varies by the day, really.)

I feel like I can't level up from a Junior to Senior because I either don't have the headspace or the will to do so.

I guarantee that you've learned way more than you think. If you stick with it, you'll have a random moment sometime soon when someone else just can't wrap their head around a concept you take for granted.

It doesn't help that the job I've had has taught me very little and my dev team has been a shitshow from the beginning.

That sucks, sorry. There are more shitty developer teams than good ones. If you stick with it, and do some strategic job hopping, you can find the good ones.

This is a tough time to switch jobs in tech, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to mess with it.

At the moment I have an offer on the table to do a job that isn't engineering (but still tech) and it surprisingly pays more.

Hell yes! Fuck your current employer for underpaying you!

And you already admitted your current team is shit.

Go take that money!

but I fear I might go down this route and never be able to come back to engineering. Not that I'm sure I want to.

Your developer skills won't vanish. Trust your future self.

If someone asks why you spent time as a non-developer "those assholes weren't paying a fair wage" is a fine answer.

It might sound defeatist but I don't think I'll ever be a top 5% or even 25% engineer.

As a top 5% engineer (with a trophy for humility), it's not all they promised.

It turns out there's still plenty I don't know, and I spend much more of my time confused and frustrated than I did before. The cool part is that I'm now confused and frustrated by really interesting problems.

I could be average with a lot of work, but not great.

I pay top dollar for average programmers. I'm not hiring right now, but let's stay in touch.

There's a lot of coders out there without the self awareness to realize what they don't know. Those programmers never get any better, and never reach average.

(Contrasted with myself, who, as I said, have several awards for excessive humility in spite of my undeniable genius. /s)

I could potentially be great in the new field I'm being recruited for, but that's also hard to say without being in the job.

Go find out!

Beware though, when they find out you can code, they will find a way to add that to your job duties.

I know that some people just aren't cut out for being engineers.

True. Some people's ego or laziness blinds them to what they need to learn.

I have a huge ego, and I am deeply lazy, but I occasionally put both in check for just long enough to learn.

Maybe I have the aptitude but not the mentality to do this for 30+ years.

Take it a year at a time. Once in awhile, take out some cash and spread it on the ground and sort of roll in it.

Hopefully you've noticed, but while this job is usually a pain in the ass, it also pays really fucking well.

I want to know if that's what it sounds like to people who've seen that before.

I've had this conversation with all of my very top people, if that's any consolation.

If you were in my position, would you walk away and just be a hobbyist programmer or stick it out and hope to be a mediocre engineer one day?

If you told my younger self how much money I could make as a mediocre engineer, I would be all over that deal.

I would've agonized about the trade-off if I knew I would stop loving my hobby, but taken comfort that I would later love it again.

Everything happens in seasons. Some seasons I code for fun. Some I don't.

A cool side effect of being paid to code is that when I do find the mind space to hobby code, I am a fucking badass hobby coder.

I think you should take this job because your current employer is running a shitty team, and underpaying you. Then take another programming job later when the next opportunity arrives (and it will..it really will.)

"asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined"

Evidence whether the company saw them as a person, or felt any ethical obligation...

It's an interesting era when an organization can have a single user, and choose to leave that single user with 85% of the promised functionality no longer functional. But is happily pursuing it's second user.

"Pay attention to details..."

"Having hired over 500 engineers personally in my career, if your resume came across my list, I would definitely pass."

Heh.A job seeker with three FANG companies on their resume does not give a shit if this random person would bin their resume.

Also, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally, in a single career isn't embarrassing.

Edit: "You think you suck at retention? Let me tell you how my year went!"

It's interest rates.

Loans are more expensive, but critically, so are eggs.

Tech workers like eggs, and see no reason to buy fewer, so they're asking for more money, unionizing, or hopping jobs to increase their salaries.

Notice how the big players are releasing press releases each layoff? No attempt at secrecy. No payouts to NDA the laid off employees. It's an intimidation tactic.

It's working at the moment, but tech workers get over their job change discomfort fast when there's a 100% raise on the table. The market rate vs curent pay gap just creates pressure to change jobs until they do, even if they're scared.

And the shareholders are all fucked.

Every tech layoff is a lottery ticket toward a company ending event. And then every employee who leaves because they realize the company is incapable of loyalty. Then every worker who leaves because their suppressed wages aren't keeping up with their expenses or hobbies. Another chance to end the company. Nobody knows which perl script is the lynchpin of their company, or which random person will leave with all knowledge of it.

The CEOs are positively aggressively collecting chances to bankrupt their shareholders.

But the CEO will get a nice payout next quarter. So that's nice.

"the analysis revealed that RTO mandates are more likely in firms with poor recent stock performance and have had no significant impacts on firm profitability or stock-returns."

I've had my eye on Helldiver's 2, but I'm not creating a PSN account. (Serious)

I know my $40.00 is pretty important to them, so I thought I would mention it here. (Sarcasm)

Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.

IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.

Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they're on about.

"Fuck you, I'm doing library stuff." should be a valid legal defense.

How dumb does one have to be to intentionally drop support for the hottest game console of the year?!

It boggles my mind.

Also, as a non-pirate (by laziness, not by conviction), I feel like I'm being offered an eye patch, a hook and a parrot every time I interact with a AAA game publisher.

Edit: I keep half expecting EA or Capcom to publish a press release outlining their favorite ways to obtain their games without paying, in order to work-around their own bullshit DRM. It's bizarre that they really think this crap is helping them.

For those also learning about Yuzu thanks only to Nintendo's lawsuit, let's save you a search:

https://yuzu-emu.org/downloads/

I think we should all try to support anything that lets rich old bureaucrats kill themselves faster if unwanted side effects can be minimized.

I'm in club "cool sticker", if you can get something to stick to it.

I had a teacher advise me to make a habit of occasionally seeking out embarrassment, to stay in the habit, and prevent being paralyzed by fear of embarrassment.

I've followed that advice for years, and it's like a super power.

I've done so much cool shit that a previous version of myself would have been afraid to try.

I don't even remember all the embarrassing stuff, even though there's plenty. The cool stuff is what sticks in my memory, even though I'm prone to remembering my mistakes.

But I'm guessing we will have to.