For most cases you can use Rider, which has a native Linux version. It doesn’t do database projects so if you use MSSQL without an OEM you’re gonna want at least VS Code, but other than that it works fine.

Of course if you’re a .NET developer in a corporate environment you probably don’t have a choice as you’re already using a Windows VM through Azure Virtual Desktop just so that your company can chain itself harder to daddy Microsoft.

I’d like to point out that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared them a “proven right-extremist endeavor” back in May – until the AfD got a preliminary injunction against that. Until that is resolved they’re not officially considered dangerous.

Of course the injunction hasn’t been resolved yet and the AfD will probably try to stretch it out until the next general election.

Due to highly effective social media work (probably with some help from abroad) and the traditional media continually being goaded into talking about their preferred topics (and not, for instance, their laughably terrible fiscal policy), they currently stand to be the most powerful party after the next election. And you can guess how much that “proven right-extremist” declaration would mean if they get to form a government.

Until systemd-pussy is released, that is.

That’s what happens when you get distracted while posting. Thanks for the correction.

Mind you, changing the sleep logic to “if there is no signal and the menu isn’t open” shouldn’t be all that difficult. Neither should be waking up when a button is pressed.

To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.

A shorthand for 000a:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:000s. It’s part of the alphabet v6 spec.

Oh, AI can be very useful. Just not the generative stuff that is currently trying to consume all resources of the entire solar system for nebulous potential benefits.

A good example of AI that just works is document scanning. Get a picture of a document, locate text, OCR it, figure out which parts of the text correspond to entry fields, auto-populate the fields. That works pretty well and can greatly speed up manual data entry. It’s not perfect but the success rate is pretty good due to the constrained problem space and even if you have to check all fields and manually correct 10% of them you still save a lot of time.

An early example of this is the automated parsing of hand-written postal codes. That iteration of the tech has been in productive use since the 90s! (Yes, that’s just OCR but OCR is considered a field of AI.)

It’s one of those unexciting applications of tech that don’t make major waves but do work.

And not only is she capable of scaring Picard and Odo, she also becomes one of very few people who truly accept all of Odo’s weirdness and social awkwardness and just let him be himself.

Sure, Kira also accepted him in a similar way but that took years of time and romantic feelings. Lwaxana was just cool with it pretty much immediately. DS9 did a lot to show us that there was more to her than just an incredibly loud personality.

I predict incremental quality increases. Qwen4 will probably be a somewhat better Qwen3 (and a dud if we’re unlucky). I do agree that it’ll probably come out; there’s not enough life left in this AI boom for a Qwen5, though.

The biggest change will probably come from figuring out where LLM use will actually benefit us. Right now the industry zeros to answer that with “everywhere” and concludes that it’s prudent to spend money equivalent to the GDP of an industrial nation on compute-only data centers.

For example, I expect the use case for coding to be more like “autocomplete a code block based on known patterns” rather than “build a public-facing web application from a prompt”.

Gotta be honest, though, a locally hosted 70B model with basic RAG functionality isn’t exactly playing in the same league as the market leaders, which can be bigger by two to three orders of magnitude. And a model that size is already around the limit of what a beefy gaming PC can do with reasonable performance. We’re unlikely to ever beat the big players on quality with local models.

What might happen is that the market collapses, the big players all go bankrupt, further LLM development ceases, and locally hosted Qwen3-80B will be the pinnacle of available text generation for the next thirty years.

I love the suggestion of “Picture a sunset” at the bottom.

“Gemini, I want you to picture a beautiful sunset… and then fuck right off into it.”

Old men are the future!

I’m not complaining about a hero having some kind of advantage that allows them to go on an epic quest. I’m complaining about the devices of a) fantasy universes inexplicably having game mechanics like character levels and numeric stats and b) the protagonist being ridiculously overpowered, usually without expending any effort.

The former feels like a lazy shorthand so the author doesn’t have to be able to actually depict power differences well; just pretend everything is Dragon Quest and throw around a few numbers. The latter is instant gratification wish fulfillment that may be nice every once in a while but feels wildly overused.

Heroes can win without being overpowered. They can start out weak and grow with their challenges. They can even stay weak but persevere through it all. I think a heavily condensed Lord of the Rings clone would probably make for a more compelling story than yet another cookie cutter story à la “I Got Reincarnated In Another World And My Cheat Skill Made Me Level 9999 Instantly”.

Sounds good but can we set it in a world that inexplicably has explicit game mechanics? And can the protagonist be absurdly strong because of some technicality that somehow nobody else has run into? I feel that would really set it apart from the competition.

Those two studios for the game because it was Hardsuit’s idea to make the game in the first place and TCR barely kept Paradox from canceling the have after they kicked Hardsuit out of the project.

I think it basically went like this (simplified):

Hardsuit: “Hey Paradox, we wanna make Bloodlines 2. We have everything worked out, we have the best possible writers involved, and it’s a real passion project; here’s our pitch.”

Paradox: “Wow, that pitch convinced us completely! You get all the green lights in the world!”

Hardsuit: “Now keep in mind we’ve never done a project on this scale before so we’ll need plenty of time—”

Paradox: “We set you on an extremely aggressive schedule. Surely that’ll motivate you into delivering perfection!”

Hardsuit: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we need.”

Paradox: “But it’s the exact non-opposite of what you get. Now chop chop, we already gave the release date to the press.”

Hardsuit: “We’re not getting the game done in that timeframe.”

Paradox: “No problem; we’ll delay a little bit. Surely nobody will mind.”

Hardsuit: “It’ll take more than ‘a little bit’. We told you that—”

Paradox: “Okay, sure, whatever, the game’s canceled now. Don’t call us back.”

TCR: “Hey, can we try to salvage this? We really wanna see this made. But we’d like to throw away all of the writing, characters, and gameplay. Everything except the setting, really.”

Paradox: “Okay, sounds reasonable. But make it snappy.”

TCR: “We’d also like to change the name because what we can deliver won’t really be a proper sequel to—”

Paradox: “Bloodlines 2 it is. Good discussion. Glad we talked about this.”

TCR: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we asked for.”

Paradox: “Can’t hear you; too busy launching the sequel to one of the most beloved cult classics in the action RPG genre.”

Customers: “Well, this is a pretty bad sequel. Decent game but they really shouldn’t have called it Bloodlines 2. We’re disappointed.”

Paradox: “The only logical course of action is to swear to never release a non-strategy game ever again because nobody appreciates our art.”

As has been established in the previous strip, that’s what her school provides instead of familiars. She wasn’t happy about it back then and it doesn’t look like her opinion is going to change anytime soon.

Oh, I am aware that this dynamic doesn’t quite work. Both sides of the equation get it almost, but not entirely, right. Because getting it right is challenging.

The older generations do get lazy as soon as their own needs are met, especially those of them who wield power. And that doesn’t just mean politicians but also CEOs, large investors, etc. Working for the common good is difficult and most people follow the path of least resistance, leading to the dynamics young people complain about.

But young people fall prey to the very same dynamic. It’s easier to get disillusioned and complain on the internet than to consistently go out and exert pressure. Sure, maybe they go on a protest march or two but few have the energy to consistently go on marches, be active in politics, stay on top of which companies are toxic, openly defy the law, and do a myriad other things that don’t directly benefit them in order to fight for a better world. You can do that if you’re rich and isolated from consequence but in that case your life is cushy already so you’d be fighting for abstract principles.

There are few people of the caliber of Bernie Sanders or Greta Thunberg because it’s really hard and carries a real risk of ruining their own life. Most people who do try end up like the people who glue themselves to highways: They get ridiculed and fined and effect no change whatsoever.

So for most people all that remains is resignation. Gen X said “whatever” when they weren’t listened to because they weren’t willing to sacrifice their personal future to escalate things until change is inevitable. Millennials say “OK Boomer” as they find themselves in the same situation for the same reason.

(I’ll gloss over the “young people are lazy” part but it boils down to young people actually being lazy in terms of failing to apply themselves in ways the older people did, with the caveat that some of those ways no longer apply and young people are applying themselves in new ways the older people don’t realize are necessary now. This perception dynamic is at least as old as recorded history.)

It’s exact opposite of a trend. The younger generations criticizing the older ones for not living up to their responsibilities has been just as much a constant throughout human history as the older generations criticizing the younger ones for being lazy by their parents’ definition.

The world sucks, as usual, and by now Gen X are old enough to be in charge. It’s sensible to call them out, just like in a decade or two it’ll be sensible to call out the Millennials for the same thing.

systemctl disable activationcheck.service