I don't know where you live, but if you have a Hado arena nearby, then a taster session might be a good gift. It's an augmented reality sport which can be played casually or professionally. There are arenas all over the world.

Unfortunately their world site is a little out of date. I know quite a few kids in my area of the UK, at around that age, who are getting into it.

Hado UK
Hado World Site

Looks very neat! Not sure I could fit it in my backpack though 🤔

I've not come across Arteck, thanks for the tip.

Good question. Too large would be something larger than the deck itself. I need it to fit into a regular day backpack with other stuff.

Too small would be one of those Rii style keyboards with built in trackpad that you need to hold in your hands and type with your thumbs.

Thanks for the comprehensive rundown, adding LP switch keyboards to my search

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll look into these.

I use a trackball regularly. What's the make + model and how well does it work for you?

I'd not considered that, thanks

Nice, thanks

So he's saying that people who get hit by bullets are losers? Noted.

How much do you want to bet that they don't even have a contingency plan to evacuate and secure their inmate population?

But what news of the console legs race?

Upskill. I'm not 'upskilling' someone, I'm training them.

Let's not be too hasty to call it garbage when it could in fact turn out to be rancid dog shit.

It depends, I think. If it's a scurrilous, untrue rumour about your sexual habits, then it will be preserved indefinitely. If it's some critical information, that is only published in one place, and you need to cite it for a paper, then it's either gone or modified beyond recognition.

Google speed running enshittification over here 👉👉

Not a big one. In my 20s, asleep in bedroom, girlfriend asleep next to me. I wake up and see dancing, glowing blue filaments, about 20cm long, moving through the bedroom. No sound, bedroom is otherwise completely dark. It was a similar glow to Cherenkov Radiation, but at a much smaller scale, and clearly defined, glowing threads.

Wake girlfriend who grumpily agrees they exist before falling asleep again.

5 minutes later they just stop and I never see them again.

We were the only people in the house, in a room with blackout curtains and with all electrical items turned off at the wall (UK plugs rule).

Still no explanation to this day.

God-tier joke, bravo.

How about, 'no'?

Critically panned, across the board, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It could have done with another couple of rounds of script polishing.

RIP Admiral Fitzwallace

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don't need to drive sales and consequently also don't need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they're lagging behind the competition.

What I've consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I've been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you're less likely to see is 'AI' added to everything, because it isn't generally a good solution to most problems in it's current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term 'luddite' as it is quite pejorative.

Certainly on the jetty, near the jeach

Vampire iPhone, stake through the CPU

It's Hugh Jass

Civ 2 is still peak for me, although I did like Leonard Nimoy's contribution to Civ IV.

If you're all ears, how would you propose to use the soap?

He truly is the Holy Farter

I'd say it's time to push the argument that the Library of Congress needs to be preserving games as part of the cultural history of the USA. If the legislative branch won't abide private efforts then it's time to make the government do it.

I am not renting my corporeal existence from a megacorporation. There is no way this is ever affordable to the masses without some pretty huge caveats

I don't get the RCS hype. I already have apps for rich messaging and RCS offers nothing for me over those apps. What I do appreciate is SMS, which is posed to be killed-off by RCS. I can rely on SMS even when there is no data signal, can't say that for RCS. I wish I had a way to permanently disable RCS on my Pixel 6a, instead I have to keep rejecting the 'upgrade to RCS' dialog.

My face, screaming in horror, but in words instead. I've only really worked with projects in homogenous languages on the application side, so hadn't considered that. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Book: The Rama series, Arthur C Clarke
TV: The West Wing
Movie: The 5th Element

Jean-Luc Picard, of the Jeanterprise, NCC-1701D(enim)

It's this not the kind of scenario the founding fathers foresaw when drafting the second amendment?

There are conspiracies after all, but they're just the usual 'capitalist assholes screw the rest of us over' kind rather than the 'three-assed aliens kidnapped me and forced me to watch naked while they fed pineapple on a pizza to my dog' kind.

In that case it should be the original on the Amiga 500 😄, but I still prefer the improvements in Civ 2.

Who's out there putting hands on the rim of toilet bowls? 'fess up.