The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don't know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn't strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

In the early days it was an abortion-adjacent topic, which made it an easy target to vilify to rile up support from single-issue voters. Now a large portion of society will hate anything involving stem cells forever, regardless of facts. Once the culture war starts, it's hard to get it to stop.

Back on Reddit there were people who set up scripts to automatically delete comments after a set amount of time to prevent people from looking at their history. As you could probably guess, they were usually the most stubborn and argumentative sort on the platform.

Though I've upvoted that user before and I normally don't do that to people being disruptive, so who knows? If only there were some sort of history that would tell me what kind of user they were...

It's a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

I just updated to the newest Ubuntu LTS, which puts pip into system managed mode so you can't easily install packages outside of a virtual environment anymore.

If you (or anyone who stumbles upon this comment in the future) run into this problem, the new recommended way to install yt-dlp through pip and keep it in your path and up to date is via pipx (sudo apt install pipx). The syntax is a bit gnarly for pre-releases, so I figured I'd post an update:

To install the nightly: pipx install --pip-args '\--pre' yt-dlp

To update the nightly: pipx upgrade --pip-args '\--pre' yt-dlp

I alias the update command and run it before every download session.

(You may need to delete your old yt-dlp binaries before it'll let you install the new one - use type -a yt-dlp to find them.)

The main problem with Java (or garbage collected languages in general) as a first language is needing to unlearn the bad habits it ingrains when you move to a systems programming language with manual memory management. Other than that it's a pretty good first language, though I'd suggest learning a bit of C at the same time just to get a basic grip on things like pointers and stack vs heap.

Edit: it occurs to me that C# would be the perfect learning language. It's very similar to Java and an easy first language, but you'd also learn about stack allocation through structs, and can teach pointers using unsafe (though I think unsafe code is still GCed, so this wouldn't help with the memory management side of things. Haven't touched C# in fifteen years so I'm not sure how it works anymore).

It was lapsed for years at a time, multiple times.

I can't run Doom, but I can run Level 9, "Fuel Station Launch", from Dark Forces 2, down to which extra enemies spawn and what items are removed when playing on each difficulty level.

It was on an old demo disc and I must have played that level a hundred times as a kid.

Yeah, I remember my parents talking about how badly they were hit in the late 00s. They were considering retirement just as the recession struck, and they lost a huge chunk of what they'd hoped to retire on.

They still haven't retired fifteen years later despite declining health.

I've owned my personal domain for five of the last fifteen years. Should I be happy or embarrassed that no squatters grabbed it during any of the several times I let it go unrenewed?

And regular mail has been basically carried by spam for decades. It's a real problem - how do you fix an industry if it's entirely dependent on the problem you're trying to solve? Everyone involved will fight you and the consumers will lose no matter what, short of public funding or other options that will be labeled "socialist" and never pass in this political climate.

It makes sense Bethesda would do it. They're owned by Microsoft, who started the trend of pseudo-currency sold in packs that don't match prices twenty years ago.

That could take a lifetime!

I've seen code with binary data (such as icons) baked into constants. I can't wait for the three hour narration of base64 encoded pngs.

"You cannot kill me in a way that matters."

They canceled the GTA V story DLC after seeing the success of GTA Online, and their long-time head writer and producer resigned. I have little faith that GTA6 will capture the same spark that their earlier games had.

It's fixed in the development versions. If you installed yt-dlp using pip, update with the prerelease flag: pip install --upgrade --pre yt-dlp. If you manually installed it, run yt-dlp --update-to nightly or grab the latest dev from their nightly repo.

In pog dog form!

The right-hand wing leading edge suffered a serious dent.

That's a bit of an understatement, going by the photo.