Need, I did not realize there was an Android version of super tux now. Definitely going to try it out. Would be really cool to see it added to f-Droid!

Have you looked at super tux kart? I haven't played it, but my kids were obsessed with it for a while. I didn't spend much time watching, but just walking by it gave me major Mario kart vibes. I guess much closer to Mario kart 64 then super Mario kart, but if you haven't tried it out it's definitely worth a check out

Last I checked it didn’t have Battle Mode arenas at all. Not interested in races.

It has a battle mode nowadays (and has for several versions now). Somewhat more recently, they added support for network multiplayer in version 1.0. I recommend you take another look and see how much it's improved if you're still interested.

Also, the engine has gotten a lot fancier, and there are new tracks that take advantage of the engine capabilities pretty well.

Oh cool thanks will take another look!

Super Tux Kart does have battle mode somewhat similar to the Mario Kart balloon fight though not as polished (and many of the arenas are a little too large in my opinion). It also has a unique soccer mode.

I've had the same thoughts, also I sure don't miss the theater experience of having your shoes sticky with soda. God forbid you drop something on the floor like your phone, and have to feel around for it in the dark.

The last time I went to a theater, I went to the first showing of the movie for the day. We were the only people in the theater. 30 minutes into the movie, the projection suddenly shut off and all the lights turned on. After sitting there for about 10 minutes, we went out to talk to a staff member about it, and they told us that the computer said there was no one in the theater so they should shut it off. Long story short, they did not end up turning it back on, and referred us to the customer support hotline to try and get our money back. And this might be a little ageist, but there's something infuriating about a condescending teenager acting like this is somehow our fault. Yeah, no thank you.

Wow, that’s really a never again experience. Regardless of whether you got your money back or not, your anecdote makes clear that the movie theater business is on autopilot with extraction set to high. Last time for me the pre movie high volume advertising shower totally put me off from ever set foot in a movie theater again. The volume was so cranked up that it was distorting the sound so badly it was all unintelligible. There was nobody in charge to turn that down and it went on like that for 10 minutes. That was to me a never again experience.

I remember when I was watching Kick-Ass in the theater, there were some teenagers trying to be funny the entire time.

I initially very politely asked them if they could stop talking because we're trying to watch the movie, but they didn't take that very seriously.

After another ten minutes of their commentary I yell very loudly "SHUT THE FUCK UP!". Extremely loud, I suspect everyone in the theater heard me pretty clearly. I'm a pretty big guy and I have a very loud and deep voice, and of course the theater is dark, so they might have assumed I was more threatening than I actually am. The teenagers shut up for the rest of the movie.

The thing is, though, it kind of ruined the rest of the movie for me. The entire time I'm sitting there, kind of worked up and annoyed that I had to yell at some kids and ruin their Friday night.

I've certainly had good times in theaters too, I like movies, but I've grown a bit tired of it. Now generally the only time I go to the theater is the live showings of The Room.

I used to live near a town called "Knik" which all the locals pronounced with a hard "K" like "Kuh-nick". It launched a terrible habit of intentionally pronouncing silent K on all words, which was way more fun that it should have been. I started using all sorts of phrases just so I could pronounce the hard K, like "Don't get your kuh-nickers in a twist". I also started using a handle of "The Knight of Knik" which I of course pronounced as "The Kuh-nite of Kuh-nik", which then I shortened to "The Knik Knight" (pronounced "Kuh-nik Kuh-night"). I likewise applaud the author's restraint.

Sadly, I came to the same conclusion. This is also why I no longer buy raspberry pis.

How many kids do you have? What software do you use for this continuous monitoring? How do you balance spending 18 hours a day continuously monitoring your children, with also working full-time and being a human yourself? Please elaborate on your personal system because I think you could help out a lot of people.

I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.

I have 2 kids. I choose to limit when they have access to electronics and monitor when they do.

No software is going to stop kids with constant access to electronics, kids are resourceful.

It's a choice, there's no getting around that.

having children is a choice. Therefore, the difficulty of that choice is not really a factor in our lawmaking nor should it be.

Is it, though? The trajectory right now is to remove the choice of parenthood. If some people in power have their way, it will not only be illegal to end a pregnancy, it will also be illegal to prevent it to start with. If a male and female have sex (and I doubt a sufficient number of people will give up having hetero sex), the result will often be a child, and there will be no safe, legal choice in the matter.

I certainly want people to have easy access to contraception and abortion. However, I also think that it's still a choice. I never said it was a good one (I agree, you'd be hard pressed to stop folks from having sex)

If we make laws that make it impractical to have children, I'm sure this will have no consequences for the country's future.

If it makes you feel better to turn people who disagree with you into cartoon villains, then more power to you. But you'll lose the debate because you will only engage in strawman arguments. There are real arguments in favor of this that should not be dismissed, but should be embraced and we should explain why those arguments are weaker than ours.

I feel extremely strongly that this is a Trojan horse that will expand surveillance and control by governments and giant corporations, and ultimately be used to lock us out of our own devices. I think many people supporting this are well-meaning but extremely naive. Meta is not naive of course, they expect to come out on the top of this as a giant corporation. But there are millions upon millions of people who do support this that are not going to come out on top. Those are also the people we need to convince. We're not going to change meta's mind, but we might be able to change others minds.

It was pretty decent in the mid and late 00s. The community started turning toxic in the very early 10s and by about 2015 was quite poisonous. The saddest part is that the problem was known and spoken about frequently, but the response to that from staff and/or high-level mods was to just double down and dig in.

I'm too old, but it seemed like it would be decent for a beginner in the mid-to-late 00s. But it never handled advanced, difficult topics very well.

For sure, advanced difficult topics were never really their forte', although it was really common to get great book or blog recommendations via comments. For me, the golden combination was a good book on the language/framework/topic I was stuyding, supplemented with specific Q&A from Stack Overflow. I have extremely fond memories learning C++ and Qt that way (although that Qt book was a little rough, but at least there was a Qt book. Nowadays every book just seems too outdated to be helpful).

I could not agree more with the lutris creator here. This fight over whether we should use AI or not is needlessly binary in my opinion. In the hands of a skilled programmer, AI can be a huge boost. I've had it help me narrow down extremely obscure bugs that I spent days trying to figure out myself. There's a massive spectrum between vibecoder and totally human controlled, and in so many of these debates people peg someone on one side of the extreme or the other. Either you're a vibe coder who doesn't even look at the code, or you're all human. The rest of us who are sane, are somewhere in between. AI tools can be a godsend, especially for open source where you're doing it in your free time not as a professional gig. I love and use lutris, and I'm extremely grateful that the creator took the time to build it and continue to maintain it. I'll judge the progress forward based on quality, not on ridiculous ideological stands like AI or not AI. There's no doubt that AI can build a lot of slop, and there's a lot of spammers out there throwing slop all over the place. But that does not mean that everyone who picks up a paintbrush is a vandal. At the end of the day, it's humans making the ship or not ship decision, the merge or not merge decision. Let's judge on outputs and results, not on method.

If strycore is reading this, thank you for making an amazing product that for me has made using GOG actually feasible on my Linux machine. You've measurably improved my life, and I'm grateful for it. Where AI can help you, I am glad for it. Keep up the good work!

I am/was a huge Ruby fanboy, and I used Rails a lot and loved it (though had some criticisms around too much "magic"). I made the jump to Elixir/Phoenix around 8 years ago, and have loved it. Phoenix to me basically "fixed" all the things I didn't like about Rails (basically opacity and hard-to-find-where-it's-happening stuff due to someone metaprogramming aggressively). I will admit that I've been a functional programming fan for a very long time too. I always write my ruby code in a functional style unless there's a good reason not to (which is increasingly rare).

I still love and use ruby a ton for scripting, and still reach for Sinatra for super simple server needs, but Phoenix is my go-to stack these days.

I've also found the Elixir community to be amazing in the same ways the Ruby community is/was. It's not all roses, for example there's not as many libraries out there. Distribution is also not awesome so for example I currently use ruby or rust when writing CLIs. But for anything distributed (especially web) Phoenix is amazing.

This is a self plug, but I did a conference talk introducing Ruby veterans to Elixir/Phoenix some years ago. It's probably aged a bit, but should still be pretty accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWMBDTPMkQ

The original conference talk is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoz7q37KGE), though the made-for-youtube version above is better because it's slightly updated, and I didn't run out of time :-)