confident_inept

I've been using a somewhat low-spec PC to play games and for general desktop usage. Finding stuff in this form factor, that you can guarantee will be well put together and worth the money is a rarity.

Highly likely this could replace my desktop, as I don't need something much more powerful, just with more modern hardware. I don't do much AAA gaming and nearly game in my Steam library would run on this just fine. My regular daily computing needs can reasonably be satisfied with the compute power of a Raspberry Pi. I can swap flatpak based immutable SteamOS with plain Arch without losing the advantages (i.e. custom hardware settings integration) that one might sacrifice doing so on the Steam Deck.

This is going to be a no-brainer for my next upgrade.

I'm really curious to see if these still rely heavily on resizable BAR. Putting these in old computers in linux without reBAR support makes the driver crash with literally any load rendering the cards completely unusable.

It's a real shame, the single slot a380 is a great performance for price light gaming and general use card for small machines.

If you look at their previous devices this company's whole shtick is having weird, quirky, or niche features. The MicroPC had a dedicated serial port on a device released in the 2010s. People often buy these devices for the whimsical nonsense they do.

I've purchased and used a number of the GPD products and even contributed to the Arch Linux wiki on the various small caveats of the devices. They generally have good (community) linux support quickly after launch. Build quality is decent as well.

If you're looking to get any GPD device, it's best to wait a few months after launch and they will be on the used market for a decent discount. Lots of early adopters buy these and ditch them because they aren't flawless, but they make fun toys.

Is there anyone who can break down the advantage of something like this over a typical open source model? I read through the page and FAQ for fair source and still don't quite grasp the angle here other than making software less free for a temporary amount of time.

Directly filing your taxes in the US was currently mail-in only until this pilot originated.

Intuit and the likes have lobbied with their millions to make sure the average citizen can only e-file with a few select proprietary options and it has been that way for as long as most anyone remembers.

This opens the gates for what might be (I didn't look much into the site) an easy way to e-file directly with the IRS.

I had an AMD APU setup that I used for a while as a light gaming rig. I'm impressed to see these chips continue to grow in capability and be offered at reasonable prices.

I'm curious how the FOSS video driver for these fares on Linux. The newest discrete cards have random full system lockups and driver crashes that make them unusable for anything that stresses the GPU.

Emulation aside, the Steam Deck has been compared to the Switch in some capacity or another in almost every single review I have ever seen of it. While I wouldn't think it's had any negative impact on Switch sales, it's a absolute fact that the Deck can emulate a multitude of games at performance parity or better than the Switch itself. The deck is constantly lauded as an emulation powerhouse and the Switch appears frequently in the discourse.

Emulation legality aside, Nintendo would certainly be the company I would expect to pressure Valve for a case against enabling and abetting piracy given their history of legally attacking perceived "competition".

What a good story, and a good mindset to have. A great deal of learning comes with failure and I've learned to look forward to messing things up over the years.

I recently started painting models. I wasn't happy with the brush look so I went with airbrushing. Thinning paint to the correct consistency for the tool is a pain. Priming parts is not only required but time consuming. Testing products and finding brands that produce good results is a headache. I learned the hard way even a mild topcoat can keep your work from getting destroyed by just touching it.

I had my first successful paint job just the other day. It's not perfect. I threw out three complete failures getting to this point but I have learned so much about the process and gained an appreciation for just how hard it is for all those people on Youtube to get it right.

I have a short tuta.io address that always gets odd looks when I spell it out to people, who tend to react weirdly when not hearing a major domain when typing in an email address.

Anecdote aside, I've had several people not receive my emails at all, some I've been able to actually test, using Tutanota for outbound messages. I've created or helped create Teams accounts for others several times in the past and have never run into anything like this with any other provider. Microsoft is setting a precedent by singling out one provider. I hope it's not a sign of things to come. Virtually all email is de-facto controlled by a Microsoft/Google duopoly.

I looked into running a personal email server on a home machine once and was put off by how many people told me my messages would be undelivered without numerous hoops to jump through.

What a mess.

I'm not terribly interested in podcasts but I do love seeing what people create, so I gave it a click... and then couldn't back out to HN.

Why is your site back-button trapped?

Glad to see PS1 style rendering that simulates the affine texture warping side effects of the console. The original Playstation was very much not designed with 3D in mind, lack of perspective correction on textures lead to the aforementioned warping.

Vertex coordinates were rounded to whole integers, giving that hallmark polygon jiggle effect from the rounding that 'snapped' them in place. The complete lack of a z-buffer also lead to lots of z fighting, as the system rendered polygons strictly in the order they were calculated.

At a very young age I ventured into taking apart my personal computer to better understand it. When I was in my early teens I could build a whole computer with off-the-shelf parts without any help. My older peers would poke at me for being some sort of "tech wizard" because computers were something a lot of the older generation didn't grow up with at the time. I would take every opportunity to show interested parties just how straightforward it was that I did; Certain cards fit in certain slots, cables only fit in one way, and there were a few internals you had to be a little more careful with than others. Many of those people were surprised to see just how simple "building a computer" was, more akin to building Lego than something that needed a college degree and high amounts of technical skill.

Code boot camps tend to be a bit one-dimensional and only give the students a slice of the basics, most often including setting up a work environment and focusing on lessons that produce immediate results and/or feedback. People interested in software development don't realize how easy it can be to get started making small projects, often needing their hand held at that critical entry point. Boot camps can help lift the veil of mysticism and show that software development isn't sorcery.

You can crash people quite easily in game without any mods by just loading an overly-complex avatar. There is the content gating system, but quite a few people just turn it off, hence the crashing.