The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:

Hey, I see you’re having problems with <copy-paste key words from OP>. Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.

Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".

I hope this helps!

(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)

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[default,curl-cffi]"

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).

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.

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.

The best sandwich I ever had was a panini I randomly threw together for a snack at three in the morning. The next day I went to make it again since it was so delicious, but realized I’d forgotten some of the ingredients I used. I was in the middle of a sandwich-making phase at the time so I had like a dozen types of bread, meat, and cheese to pick from.

This was a decade ago and I’ve never been able to recreate that perfect sandwich despite several attempts. It’s my culinary white whale. The only ingredients I am sure of are the spread (light mayo in one side, applewood-smoked bacon mustard on the other) and the meat (honey-smoked turkey), and that it was only a simple meat-and-cheese. The bread and cheese continue to elude me.

To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.

Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.

Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.

Megumin’s other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion’s damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It’s why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.

Half-Life, and more recently Abiotic Factor (which is basically Half-Life reimagined as a survival crafting game).

Day one patches exist because the devs continued to work on the game after the physical editions went gold, so the data on disc versions will be behind. They’ll stick around even if the industry goes entirely digital due to online stores offering encrypted preloads that won’t have the patches either.

Day one DLC usually (fuck Capcom) exists for a similar reason - the art and asset pipelines finished their work months before launch, so rather than lay them off or pay them to do nothing, the studios have them work on DLC for the last few months before release.

No arguments about P2W. That and the death of persistent lobbies in favor of matchmaking destroyed my enjoyment of multiplayer games.

I’ve never heard anyone else mention Dungeons of Dredmor! That’s the game that taught me how much I loathe total randomness in roguelikes. Without it I wouldn’t have discovered Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a host of others where your skill actually matters, so even though I hated DoD I’m glad I picked it up after TB’s video.

(And the artist of Dredmor later ended up on the development team of my literal favorite game ever, Starsector. Weird how things turn out.)

I followed Shamus Young’s blog in 2007, and kept following him long after I dropped every other blogger. I didn’t always agree with him (*cough* Dark Souls *cough*), but his reviews were the best and most in-depth in the business (seriously, his Mass Effect retrospective covers the entire trilogy and is longer than most novels). He had a way with words where even when he was arguing for/against something you hate/love, you’d still be entertained by the read.

His death left a void in my consumption of media criticism. I don’t think anyone I follow is as articulate or entertaining as Shamus was. RIP Shamus.

The power grid does have a major point of failure, in that vital components are on backorder for years out so most places don’t have the spare parts to get back up and running if widespread attacks on the grid occur.

Burger King chicken nuggets from the 90s, before the recipe changed to crap. If I had to pick a flavor that I associate with my childhood, this would be it.

The Angus Mushroom & Swiss burger from McDonald’s. The Angus was the closest thing they ever had to a real burger, but they were too expensive for most people and were eventually discontinued. Fun fact: wages have stagnated yet their basic burgers now cost more than the Angus did.