vandahm

I liked Veilguard when I played it, and as soon as I finished I started up a new playthrough and then said "Nah, I'm done" and haven't touched it since. It's the only time I've ever finished a Bioware game without finishing it twice. It was ...adequate? Parts of it were well-written, and the rest of it was just really tone-deaf, for lack of a better way to describe it.

Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the Dragon Age games in spite of its problems. I liked the characters and the tone of the game, and I really enjoyed the more focused personal scope of the game -- just zeroing in on one person and following them through the different chapters of their life. I do remember chuckling at how baffled the questgivers were whenever they needed to find the SECRET HIDEOUT of smugglers/cultists/runaway mages or whatever the quest was about. The maps were so small and you keep going back to the same ones over and over again, so it's not this big mystery.

I generally like ORMs but recognize that they have a lot of problems. The most common problem that I've seen is when an ORM makes it easy to select records in a way that looks efficient but really is not. Strictly speaking, this isn't a failure of the ORM itself -- it's the fault of the developer who is using the ORM and also the developer that didn't catch it in code review. But it's a case where the ORM is making work for everyone and obscuring legibility into the code instead of saving time and providing clarity.

I've written complicated stuff where an ORM isn't appropriate, but if I'm honest, a large fraction of what I've done in my career is just making boring software to automate menial clerical work, and ORMs are good enough for those kinds of projects.

I think the last time I emailed a stranger when I had no business reason to do so was to thank someone for creating an excellent set of instructions for running OpenBSD on the exact model of laptop I wanted to use. I didn't expect a response and I didn't receive a response. I just thought he should know that something he did helped someone else, and now he knows.

I read Persepolis in French, and I don't speak French as a native language, so I worry that I missed some of the art and the nuance of it. But, even so, I thought it was beautiful. She was an extremely talented storyteller, and I'm sad that she left us so soon.

This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.

I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.

I've used React on projects and understand its usefulness, but also React has killed my love of frontend development. And now that everyone is using it to build huge, clunky SPAs instead of normal websites that just work, React has all but killed my love of using the web, too.

What are the consequences of simply disregarding the UK ruling? Does Wikipedia have British employees, offices, or financial assets?

I wish I had thought of this.

But if you don't trust Apple, how to you get the key into the Secure Enclave to begin with? Doesn't Apple control the software on your device that provides the interface into the Secure Enclave from outside of it?

I love the game, but I know a lot of people who don't, for a variety of reasons. They were very opinionated about what kind of game they were trying to make, so you'd expect it to resonate strongly with some people and not at all with others.

Honestly, my .zshrc file started out as a .kshrc file that was passed down to me by an older developer about 20 years ago, when I was still in university. I've added and removed a lot of things over the years, but there are still a few parts of it that I don't totally understand, simply because they work and I've never had a reason to think about them. The guy I got it from, in turn, got his from someone else.

In the old days, I had a .fvwm2rc config file that I got from my boss in the university computing center. I had no idea how it worked! And neither did he -- he got it from a professor when he was in university.

Your kid is awesome and, even with help from adults, this is an impressive accomplishment.

I made a RNN for a college project because I was interested in obsolete historical technology and I thought I needed to seize the opportunity while it lasted, because once I was out of school, I'd never hear about neural networks ever again.

Mine worked, but it was very simple and dog slow, running on my old laptop. Nothing was ever going to run fast on that thing, but I remember my RNN being substantially slower than a feed-forward network would have been.

I was so confident that this was dead technology -- an academic curiosity from the 1980s and 1990s. It was bizarre to see how quickly that changed.