There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn’t corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I’ve heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don’t sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.

Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there’s no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren’t allowed to do). If it’s on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn’t much you can do about it. That shouldn’t stop you from writing or blogging, just don’t post very personal data.

Also, feel free to join us on !blogging@programming.dev!

Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

It’s a two part story:

1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn’t published by a multi-billion dollar company so you’re unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn’t “a problem” to a company like Google because they’re making bank off of all these ad spaces.

Anyways, most good games are paid, but here’s a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed playing on mobile:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Bloons TD 6

• Dicey Dungeons

• Dead Cells

• Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1

• The Enchanted Cave 2

• Let’s Create! Pottery

• BAIKOH

• Data Wing

Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.

Has it ever been better?

Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you’ll be lucky to find just one of them that isn’t filled to the brim with MTX or ads.

Your Inception is a great choice, but I also low-key wished pizza tower’s music got in to meme on the other instances

Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.

There should be an option in your OS to disable the trackpad while using the keyboard. My laptop also has a trackpad to the left and I often have my hand over it when playing but never had this issue.

Make sure you get a laptop with a modern Ryzen processor since the battery life (and performance on battery) is often a lot better than Intel. There are a lot out there that fit the bill like Lenovo’s yoga/ideapad lineup. Just be weary of two things:

• Some 14" laptops may have soldered RAM or SSDs making them impossible to upgrade
• Don’t go off of processor names, they’re often pretty misleading. For example a Ryzen 7 7730U is significantly worse than a Ryzen 7 7840U.

A mod launcher is a program that lets you set up and configure mods for a game, then launch the game with everything set up for you. They exist because configuring everything yourself can be a real pain.

This is really cool. It seems to be getting hugged to death though, I’m getting a lot of server errors when I attempt to open most apps.

It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards.

It doesn’t help that AMD isn’t competing that much price-wise. Their only saving grace is higher VRAM, and while that is nice, raw performance is becoming less relevant. FSR also does not compete with DLSS, it’s strictly worse in every way. They also barely exist in the laptop market, I was just considering buying a new gaming laptop and my options are an RTX 4060 or paying more for the one laptop with a weaker AMD GPU.

I would argue Intel is shaping up to be the real competitor to Nvidia. They had a rough start but their GPUs are very price-competitive. Their newer integrated GPUs are also the best currently, they’re good for gen AI, their raytracing performance trumps AMD, and XeSS is a lot better than FSR. If I were in the market for a new GPU I’d probably grab the Intel A770. I’m looking forward to their next generation of cards.

That just because I’m a programmer that must mean I’m a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.

“Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?”

“Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird”

“My mobile data isn’t working. Fix this.”

My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn’t work and everyone was disappointed.

Thanks again for managing such a great instance. The effort put into everything really shows.

The iceshrimp instance looks neat too

Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It’s open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don’t use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren’t many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you’re looking for.

Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it’ll show the equation.

That has been merged into another project called Sublinks

Wow, nice. Does this mean Pangora will be the official front-end for Sublinks?

TL;DR you’ll enjoy it if you like casual puzzle games lol.

Voxelgram is a spiritual successor to an older game called Picross 3D. Picross 3D is a 3D version of a popular logic puzzle called Nonograms.

Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can’t recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there’s still a massive backlog of online levels to play.

Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It’s a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there’s a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there’s split-screen too).

Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest roguelike out there, it’s a lot of fun and very unique. It’s essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I’ve played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.

Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.

I still can’t understand why Google keeps hyping up Bard and then releasing it at a poor state just to ruin their reputation. First, we had:

• Bard 1, which was hyped up to be the ChatGPT successor. It turned out to be really bad.

• Bard 2.0, a massive update that was hyped up to make Bard so much better. It turned out to still be pretty bad (but in fairness it was a minor improvement).

• Google Gemini, their massive response to GPT 4 that was, on paper, the best LLM in the world. They finally integrated it into Bard last month and… It’s still not great. I could not tell an immediate difference between this and the old Bard. Oh, and the videos they used to advertise Gemini Ultra were fake.

I’m not going to armchair analyze a hugely successful company, but from my point of view it really shows how mismanaged Google has been in the past decade. Failed projects upon cancelled projects upon increasingly frustrated employees.

/rant. Anyways, you should consider using Perplexity if you want something with search capabilities, I’ve had decent success there. Claude is also significantly better than Bard, but they made free usage very limited lately. Might be a good option if you’re willing to pay.

Total missed opportunity to write this in Emojicode, but I love it nonetheless.

Competitions where individuals or teams try to solve complex programming problems as fast as possible. Websites like Codeforces even have weekly online competitions and leaderboards. It’s great for learning problem solving.

I generally agree they’re very dramatic but defederation isn’t necessary. If you’d like you can block it at a user level, there’s no reason for bad blood between instances and users getting caught in the crossfire.