I have both. I do not think the OLED version is twice as nice, though it is noticeably improved.

If the cost is an issue, but doable, consider getting the LCD deck and putting the extra cash toward a TV dock and Bluetooth controller. The deck is awesome on the go (just took mine on vacation - 10/10) but it's also a fantastic console in its own right. I play a lot of PC games on my couch, even though my I have a decent desktop PC available.

Either one you purchase though, the Steam deck is the best gaming device I've ever owned. Access to the vast Steam library (even if not all titles are compatible yet), access to install whatever else TF I want - even competing stores, emulation nevermind.

It's just... 🤯

My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It's taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

Balatro came out two months ago.

I have 93 hours in it.

Yup. Zorin's another great Debian-based distro. I've been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I'm a fan.

Man... Anybody remember "Back Orifice"? The late nineties were weird.

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I'd still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it'll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you'll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a "family" (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

• Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

• Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven't used it in a decade, so I won't say much about it here.

• Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. ... Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros... But not necessarily in distros from other families.

I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. ... And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.

My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.

Ho-ly shit... I had forgotten this particular bit.

But yeah, me too. Undead Mummy Ernie...

Just saying.

.... Saying what, exactly?

I said that we should

• design for change
• "within reason"
• because we can't know what exact changes are needed.

And you argued... The same thing? Just in the reverse order?

USA: Real barbeque. I don't mean braised meat slathered in a sticky sauce, either. I mean tough cuts of meat, cooked slow and low over woodsmoke until it is fall-off-the-bone tender. No sauce required.

Much easier to find this in the southern US, with Texas, Missouri, and the Carolinas all being particularly famous BBQ regions. In the northern states, your best bet is gonna be to find someone local with a smoker - not just a grill.

Bro - no mention of Texas BBQ? Beef brisket with Texas-style BBQ beans (savory, not sweet for those who haven't had them) is amazing.

Have you ever been in an old house? Not old, like, on the Historic Register, well-preserved, rich bastard "old house". Just a house that has been around awhile. A place that has seen a lot of living.

You'll find light switches that don't connect to anything; artwork hiding holes in the walls; sometimes walls have been added or removed and the floors no longer match.

Any construction that gets used, must change as needs change. Be it a house or a city or a program, these evolutions of need inevitably introduce complexity and flaws that are large enough to annoy, but small enough to ignore. Over time those issues accumulate until they reach a crisis point. Houses get remodeled or torn down, cities build or remove highways, and programs get refactored or replaced.

You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict. But the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems.

... And can you fix it?

That sounds amazing - OMW to check it out!

Oh, for sure. I focused on ML in college. My first job was actually coding self-driving vehicles for open-pit copper mining operations! (I taught gigantic earth tillers to execute 3-point turns.)

I'm not in that space anymore, but I do get how LLMs work. Philosophically, I'm inclined to believe that the statistical model encoded in an LLM does model a sort of intelligence. Certainly not consciousness - LLMs don't have any mechanism I'd accept as agency or any sort of internal "mind" state. But I also think that the common description of "supercharged autocorrect" is overreductive. Useful as rhetorical counter to the hype cycle, but just as misleading in its own way.

I've been playing with chatbots of varying complexity since the 1990s. LLMs are frankly a quantum leap forward. Even GPT-2 was pretty much useless compared to modern models.

All that said... All these models are trained on the best - but mostly worst - data the world has to offer... And if you average a handful of textbooks with an internet-full of self-confident blowhards (like me) - it's not too surprising that today's LLMs are all... kinda mid compared to an actual human.

But if you compare the performance of an LLM to the state of the art in natural language comprehension and response... It's not even close. Going from a suite of single-focus programs, each using keyword recognition and word stem-based parsing to guess what the user wants (Try asking Alexa to "Play 'Records' by Weezer" sometime - it can't because of the keyword collision), to a single program that can respond intelligibly to pretty much any statement, with a limited - but nonzero - chance of getting things right...

This tech is raw and not really production ready, but I'm using a few LLMs in different contexts as assistants... And they work great.

Even though LLMs are not a good replacement for actual human skill - they're fucking awesome. 😅

What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can't talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don't.

But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.

That's a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!

Now... Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog... That's another question.

Yup. And that's a great example of not relying on Deus Ex Machina - we watch Ender go through all his brutal training, learning to be the best and becomes a truly terrifying weapon of war. By the time Ender is, well, ending things, we've seen his growth and understand why he can do the things he does.

In the early days of Superman comics, dude couldn't, e.g. fly. He could just jump really high. He didn't have laser vision. Over time, the writers kept adding new powers until the only story they could tell was about Supes vs his own conscience. Nothing else (okay, besides Mr Mxyzptlk) can actually stand in his way.

History of Superman power creep

Man - that's wild. Thank you for coming though with a citation - I appreciate it!

All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just "digs a little deeper" and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it's also a good way to give you hero power creep until there's nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.

While I agree with you on the whole, there are some real world places with names that go hard.

Like Dead Man's Pass, Oregon. Or Devil's Gate, Utah.

...Maybe it's just a Western US thing.

a quick web search uses much less power/resources compared to AI inference

Do you have a source for that? Not that I'm doubting you, just curious. I read once that the internet infrastructure required to support a cellphone uses about the same amount of electricity as an average US home.

Thinking about it, I know that LeGoog has yuge data centers to support its search engine. A simple web search is going to hit their massive distributed DB to return answers in subsecond time. Whereas running an LLM (NOT training one, which is admittedly cuckoo bananas energy intensive) would be executed on a single GPU, albeit a hefty one.

So on one hand you'll have a query hitting multiple (comparatively) lightweight machines to lookup results - and all the networking gear between. One the other, a beefy single-GPU machine.

(All of this is from the perspective of handling a single request, of course. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia would run this service on only one machine.)

This looks less like the LLM is making a claim so much as using an LLM to generate a search query and then read through the results in order to find anything that might relate to the section being searched.

It leans into the things LLMs are pretty good at (summarizing natural language; constructing queries according to a given pattern; checking through text for content that matches semantically instead of literally) and links directly to a source instead of leaning on the thing that LLMs only pretend to be good at (synthesizing answers).

In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don't have to allow it. But given that there's no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe

As far as we're concerned, yes. It literally would travel at the speed of light. But since the light from the momentarily-ago-normal universe would be traveling just ahead of it... Everything would look normal until it collapsed

That's a question no one has yet been able to answer definitively though both neuroscientists and philosophers are trying.

I'm of the opinion that "I" am a pattern, encoded in the physical interactions of my brain and body. I'm not certain if I have free will or just like to think I do. But I do believe that whatever makes me "me" is fully contained within the dimensions of my physical being.

I love this concept. A purely memetic threat. An idea that could destroy you merely by knowing it...

(If a specific set of improbabilities are true)

You cannot step into the same river twice - Heraclitus, ~550 BC

We are all a series of continuous evolution, alteration and change. "I" am not the same person who began this sentence. The idea that "I" cease to exist overnight and begin anew in the morning is meaningless. There is no one version of me. I live - and to live is to change!

Thank you for responding! I really liked this bit

with a (decently designed) UI, you merely have to remember the path you took to get to wherever you want to go, what buttons to press, what mouse movements to execute.

I think that's very insightful. I certainly have developed muscle-memory for many of my most-frequent commands in the CLI or editor of choice.

I agree about Visual Studio as a preference. I've used (or at least tried) dozens of IDE setups down the years from vi/emacs to JetBrains/VS to more esoteric things like Code Bubbles. I've found my personal happy place but I'd never tell someone else their way of working was wrong.

(Except for emacs devs. (Excepting again evil-mode emacs devs - who are merely confused and are approaching the light.)) ;)

I hope you take this in good humor and at least consider a TUI for your next project.

Absolutely. I see what you did there... 😉

But seriously, thank you for your response!

I think your comment about GUIs being better at displaying the current state and context was very insightful. Most CLI work I do is generally about composing a pipeline and shoving some sort of data through it. As a class of work, that's a common task, but certainly not the only thing I do with my PC.

Multistage operations like, say, Bluetooth pairing I definitely prefer to use the GUI for. I think it is partially because of the state tracking inherent in the process.

Thanks again!

No - but it is the game based on the anime that inspired the phaser design! Er, more directly both the phaser and the Zillion game were based on an anime named Zillion.

The Master System phaser was such a slick design. Perhaps not as iconic as Nintendo's blaster, but I think it's much cooler looking.

As someone who genuinely loves the command line - I'd like to know more about your perspective. (Genuinely. I solemnly swear not to try to convince you of my perspective.)

What about GUIs appeals to you over a command line?

I like the CLI because it feels like a conversation with the computer. I explain what I want, combining commands as necessary, and the machine responds.

With GUIs I feel like I'm always relearning tools. Even something as straightforward as 'find and replace' has different keyboard shortcuts in most of the text-editing apps I use - and regex support is spotty.

Not to say that I think the terminal is best for all things. I do use an IDE and windowing environments. Just that - when there are CLI tools I tend to prefer them over an equivalent GUI tool.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear your perspective- what about GUIs works better for you? What about the CLI is failing you?

Thank you!

Lots of little quality of life things. For instance, in Kotlin types can be marked nullable or not. When you are passing a potential null into a non-nullable argument, the compiler raises an error.

But if you had already checked earlier in scope whether or not the value was null, the compiler remembers that the value is guaranteed not to be null and won't blow up.

Same for other typechecks. Once you have asserted that a value is a given type, you don't need to cast it everywhere else. The compiler will remember.

Let's start a patent troll company that exclusively deals in dark pattern bullshit. Then sue every company that implements any of our terrible patents for as much money as possible. Use the proceeds to bribe lobby congress to pass stronger consumer protection laws.

Kotlin is Java with all the suck taken out.

It's a modern, ergonomic language that runs on the JVM and removes as much GD boilerplate as it can.

It's fantastic.

Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren't already in the thread:

• Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.

• Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly "mature" game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)

Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.

True, true... yet still more reliable than LoZ's "hold the reset button and hope" method of saving the game...

GOLVELLIUS

This game is a blatant... homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.

The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can't even dress himself.

After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.

Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.

The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it's a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.

The game's characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.

I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. ...I think it's about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.

Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It's seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.

I'm thinking my kids Necromancer may learn a thing or two about the dangers of powerful, undead underlings...

Liches are a big responsibility. You can't just create unlife and walk away!

Argh. I hate that argument.

Yes - "Rewriting history" is a Bad Thing - but o argue that's only on 'main' (or other shared branches). You should (IMHO) absolutely rewrite your local history pre-push for exactly the reasons you state.

If you rewrite main's history and force your changes everybody else is gonna have conflicts. Also - history is important for certain debugging and investigation. Don't be that guy.

Before you push though... rebasing your work to be easily digestible and have a single(ish) focus per commit is so helpful.

• review is easier since concerns aren't mixed
• If a commit needs to be reverted it limits the collateral damage
• history is easier to follow because the commits tell a story

I use a stacked commit tool to help automate rebasing on upstream commits, but you can do it all with git pretty easily.

Anyway. Good on you; Keep the faith; etc etc. :)

I DM for my kids. Our first dungeon ended with an ogre-mage sending undead after the party.

The heroes made quick work of most of the zombies and skeletons - and critted the ogre-mage so fast that the dungeon was cleared in record time...

And then the party's necromancer (My oldest) decided to raise the ogre-mage. And made them his undead lich-thrall, with instructions to rule the dungeon until the necromancer's return to the region...

Huh.