Random drafting is only part of the problem. My biggest gripe was the lack of in-run saving. When a run can take an hour, that's just disrespectful in a single player offline game.
And another (smaller) issue is the step limit. End game has you running to pretty far away areas. The walking itself quickly gets old, but you sometimes waste the entire run because you didn't have enough steps for the required back-and-forth.
That being said, I greatly enjoyed how note-taking was rewarded. By the end I had over 600 screenshots organized in different folders.
Mid-run save is a legitimate gripe. Practically the reason it doesn't have that is that the internal game state is probably horrendous and restoring it would be a nightmare. The engineering in Blue Prince is terrible. Imagine the terrible spaghetti you've seen from self-taught programmers, now, imagine nobody more senior is in charge and remember it's a video game so there's time pressure. So yeah, that's a quality issue, and definitely a fair gripe, I could imagine a hypothetical "fixed" version where this works.
The step limit is an important resource. There's a reason one of the early goals of the game (in Bequest and to some extent Dare modes) is to have more steps at the start of each day and why an important penalty of Curse mode is that you only have 13 steps. As with other resources like keys, you can learn to make better use of what you have and also how to get more of it within reason. I don't think it's as good of a game without Steps. They're not (outside Curse mode) scarce enough to commonly end a run, but they matter.
Drafting is already a limited resource, the step limit feels like a hat-on-a-hat. The early game could limit on available draft pulls without the step limit.
But also, I am one of the people that the drafting mechanic directly conflicted with my interest in progressing the game. That lack of being able to focus on a particular thread of my choice affected my interest in the game. I didn't want to juggle every thread all at once, especially without knowing which threads are the most interesting to pull ahead of time.
Drafting doesn't cost steps. That is an important early game realisation.
I think this sort of "If I just keep banging my head against it, then it will break" attitude is a problem and Blue Prince was a much nicer experience for discouraging that but of course each person is different.
Yeah, I noticed the engineering issues. One of the few PlayStation games I've played where crashing was a regular occurrence, which made the lack of saves even more infuriating.
I wouldn't suggest removing steps entirely, but maybe something softer than abruptly ending the day. After exhausting my steps, let me walk around without drafting rooms and picking up items, for example.
And the late game puzzle quality was very hit-and-miss for me. I loved the sigils, for example, and appreciated the permanent upgrades/changes. Other puzzles required putting disparate items/ideas together, but by then the game had expanded too much and it was unclear what paths were exhausted, still useful, or simply fluff, and the randomness made every check time-consuming.
The Reddit community of Outer Wilds maintains an extremely comprehensive list of recommendations, in the style of "if you liked this aspect of the game, try these other games":
It asks for a very different skill level than Outer Wilds, for sure.
On the other hand, it gets extra points for the in-game manual booklet. The mechanics, the metaphor, and the gorgeous execution should be required material in game design classes.
Yes, but I wouldn't be surprised if the change is rejected. The crypto library is very opinionated, you're also not allowed to configure the order of TLS cipher suites, for example.
That is a completely valid threat model analysis, though? "Just hope no bad guy ever gets into the safe" is rather the entire point of a safe. If you have a safe, in which you use the contents of the safe daily, does it make sense to lock everything inside the safe in 100 smaller safes in some kind of nesting doll scheme? Whatever marginal increase in security you might get by doing so is invalidated by the fact that you lose all utility of being able to use the things in the safe, and we already know that overburdensome security is counterproductive because if something is so secure that it becomes impossible to use, those security measures just get bypassed completely in the name of using the thing. At some level of security you have to have the freedom to use the thing you're securing. Anything that could keep a bad guy from doing anything ever would also keep the good guy, ie. you, from doing anything ever.
Perhaps figuratively? I manage several servers where the majority of (LDAP) accounts have no special privileges at all. They get their data in the directories and can launch processes as their user, that's...pretty much it.
Though the upstream comment is gone and I am perhaps missing some important context here.
When the question is "how do I communicate securely with a third party," there's nothing you can do if the third party in question gets possessed by a demon and turns evil. (Which is what happens if an attacker has root.)
Random sysadmins who have access to your server have the permissions to steal whatever is communicated between third parties unrelated to this sysadmin.
Just because some random outsourced nightshift dude has the permissions to do "sudo systemctl restart" shouldn't mean he gets to read all the secret credentials the service uses.
As it is now, the dude has full unfettered access to all credentials of all services on that machine.
I managed to add a Shazam Now button using a Shazam widget, not a shortcut. Give it a try!
I just installed Octopi on this thread's recommendation. Pretty good so far, and I'm happy to remove the useless Google search bar from the bottom of my Pixel (I use Kagi and Firefox, neither of which can be configured on that bar). Also satisfied how you can resize widgets to any size, regardless of what the widget asks for.
That's similar functionality, but it's not a Shazam Now shortcut. I really don't want any widgets -- at all, ever. And I need labels -- remembering arbitrary iconography is a silly task when phonetic written language exists.
Just a shortcut is fine. Or at least: It had been fine for nearly a decade.
(Besides, Shazam is just a singular example. I had other shortcuts that I also used. I'm really rather disinterested in finding individual workarounds for each of them.)
As an unfortunate reply to myself, I'd like to ask a question to nobody in particular: Do y'all not use shortcuts? I think that they are pretty neat, and we've had them on Android since around version 7.1.
And the reason I ask this is because when I Google up different combinations of nouns, verbs and word usements for my problem of Android shortcuts and Octipi Launcher, I fairly-consistently find my own recent comments on HN (above, in these threads; within the bounds of this posting) in the top 5 results.
And that tells me that I am not only preaching to the choir, but the choir only exists of one member. And that member is me.
So I guess I am thus preaching to myself.
Awesome!
And thus, perhaps I am much more of an outlier than I ever imagined.
So the question stands: Am I really looking in from the outside with my quest for Android shortcuts that we've had for almost a decade? Is this lack of functionality really a thing that others just simply don't notice in a modern Android ecosphere? Is it a forgotten relic of the past?
(Whatever the case, it presently doesn't work with Octopi Launcher -- and I'm going to keep using it anyway.)
I do use shortcuts, even with Octopi. WhatsApp has shortcuts to chat with specific contacts, and Termux has shortcuts to arbitrary snippets, and I love both. I mentioned the Shazam widget only because it seemed to have the exact same functionality, only lacking the label.
A widget is a thing that runs. It's an active process with a channel to create its own on-screen display, and the mere existence of it consumes non-zero CPU even if never invoked.
A shortcut is more like an icon on a Windows desktop, or perhaps a unix symlink. If it is never used, then it never really does anything at all.
Anyhow, Octopi. It does support shortcuts, but it seems like there's two different pathways for them and they do not work the same at all.
One pathway: Long-press the wallpaper and there's a list of them a tap or two away for some apps and it's easy to add them to the home screen. Home Assistant is in this list, but Shazam is not.
The other pathway: Long-press an app icon and a list of named shortcuts may appear. These are impossible to link to a home screen icon. And the per-app behavior is opposite: Long-pressing Home Assistant does not present this list, while long-pressing Shazam does.
Same here. On yesterday's puzzle I got into an unwinnable state on my very first move, using the topmost word (spoiler: I made "hut" instead of "out").
For me the best benefit of nushell is not the easier syntax, but the static type checks. It catches most typos before running the script, which is a godsend when the script is slow and/or has destructive operations.
The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things:
1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number.
2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come.
It's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out.
The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals.
We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scope is "programming languages" as compared to "literally anything that is notable".
I’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has always been awful to novices.
On the other hand, if you are experienced, it’s really not that difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO, you don’t need to worry about offending an overly sensitive user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is destined to be reduced to a database of well structured questions and answers that are gradually going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing reasonable answers is another matter.
Can you really not think of anything that hasn't already been asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea, it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me figure it out.
Until "AI" gets to the point it has run software for years and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before.
And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on reddit.
All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"
For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic?
Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?
I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB.
The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it.
If SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2 people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the number of bored people still scouring the site for puzzles to solve.
SE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...
If SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that would be a loss.
I'm also surprised by people's defense of VLC. It's a nice project, especially when it was created, but the bugs I regularly encountered were numerous and in seemingly common use cases.
My main problem with VLC is that when I accidentally hit the wrong key on my keyboard (usually in the dark, because that's how I watch movies), it is quite often almost impossible to get the settings back to what they were without restarting the player.
Honestly, I'm absolutely not. I still vividly remember those times when we have to install codecs separately. And every month something something new and incompatible pops up on a radar, which sent all users on a wild hunt for that exact codec and instructions how to tweak it so the funny clip could play. Oh dear I'm not loking back to times od all versions of divX xVid, matroska, mkv avi wma, mp4, mp3 vba ogg and everything else, all thos cryptic incantations to summon a non-broken video frame on a modern hardvare, for everyone but few people in anime community who drove that insanity on everyone else.
I'll die on a hill of VLC, despite all its flaws, because it gave an escape route for everyone else - if you don't give a F about "pixel perfect lowest overhead most progressive compression that is still a scientific experiment but we want to encode a clip with it" and simply want to view a video - vlc was the way. Nothing else made so much good to users who simply want to watch a video and not be extatic about its perfect colour profile, loosless sound and smallest size possible.
All other players lost their plot when they tried to steer users into some madness pit of millions tweaks and configurations that somehow excites aughors of those players and some cohort of people who encode videos that way.
I istall vlc very single time, because this is a blunt answer to all video playing problems, even if its imperfect. And walked away from ever single player who tries to sell me something better asking to configure 100 parameters I've no idea about.
Hope this answers the question why VLC won.
Love these "lessons learned" posts, keep the coming!
My only feedback is about the Quickstart of passkeybot, "feed this example into a good LLM with these instructions". I undeerstand the idea, but I was a bit shocked that the first time I see these sort of instructions is for an auth framework.
Counterpoint, I have definitely taken them into consideration when designing my backup script. It's the reason why I hash my files before transferring, after transferring, and at periodic intervals.
And if you're designing a Hardware Security Module, as another example, I hope that you've taken at least rowhammer into consideration.
And another (smaller) issue is the step limit. End game has you running to pretty far away areas. The walking itself quickly gets old, but you sometimes waste the entire run because you didn't have enough steps for the required back-and-forth.
That being said, I greatly enjoyed how note-taking was rewarded. By the end I had over 600 screenshots organized in different folders.
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