LedgeDrop

Thanks for the write-up and I too bought it before it was delisted (ie: paid < $7.00 for the deluxe edition)... and tbh, I felt I still paid too much.

As you mentioned that campaigns are simple, but I was surprised (and amazingly board ) by how simple the campaigns were. (disclaimer : I did only play for about 2 hours before I got board and never came back). I was hoping for some sort of brawler type game, but the enemies are few but often respawn. I was hoping for something like Shadows of War, but was greatly disappointed. The campaigns were disconnected from each other and the objectives are simply: defeat this enemy, then destroy these targets... there is no real flexible or room for thought, outside of the prepared script you need to follow until the campaign ends.

... and the controls, I found, are quite janky. I was iron man and I found that the movement never really "flowed" into each other, there was always a delay between animation... I really didn't find it fun. It wasn't a brawler, it really was a Pay-to-Win platform... even with all the pay gates removed.

People often mention that Guardians of the Galaxy is better... and it is on my wish list, but I'm really suspicious (I hope they improved the controls).

Sounds interesting. Is there a non-paywall link available?

Oh my favorite is Crystal. It's a statically compiled dialect of ruby.

It supports:

• Most of the ruby goodness: custom DSLs, patching classes/mixins (monkey patching instances is not supported)
• Compile time type checking (but it also uses duck typing)
• Coroutines / fibers that work across multiple threads (multi-thread support is still experimental, but from my experience works well)
• Possible to create small self-contained binaries (like go-Lang apps).

As much as I love the expressiveness of crystal, there are a few cons:

• It's slow to compile. Due to the dynamic nature of the language, the compiler needs to parse a lot of files (think C/C++) before it creates a binary.
• The number of libraries is very immature at the moment. Crystal is a young language and is missing support for things like aws.
• The library management mechism (called "shards" akin to ruby gems) is not great (in my opinion). There are helpful tools to create the scaffolding, but if you're pretty much stuck with the defined structure. For example you cannot have a single git repo that provides a library and an application that uses it.

Other than that, the type checking but with ruby-like syntax is awesome!

edit: fixed formatting

Others have given a good description of what a launcher is.

But my reason for why I use a custom launcher is simple : I want a consistent UI experience, regardless of whether my current (or future) android phone is a Google, Samsung, OnePlus, ect.

For me a phone is tool, nothing more. I don't have the time or interest to "explore" the difference in UI's. In fact, Samsung's Launcher (Bixby?) inferriates me the most as the default "back" and "apps" Buttons are inverted compared to many other launchers... so it messes with my muscle memory.

With a custom launcher (I use Nova), I can restore/import my settings on any device (or custom version of android like lineage) and I've got the same familiar interface. Actually, Nova is quiet nice as it'll also show you greyed-out Icons for all the apps you has on your home screen. As the apps are installed, you can start to use them. This (for me) makes moving to a new phone much easier.

In the US, they're the same.

Are you sure?

I've always thought of universities as educational institutions funded (in part) by the state. So, tuition for "The University of Colorado" is partially subsided by the taxes people pay to the state of Colorado.

Colleges are not funded by the state, therefore have a higher tuition than universities.

At least that's the theory. However, both universities and colleges have become so profit focused, I don't know how much cheaper universities are now-a-days.

I'd also argue that a university in the U.S. is more prestigious than many colleges (the exception being Ivy league schools), because universities being cheaper means a high demand for being accepted, which means applicant need "be better" to gain admittance.

In the job market, however, you are absolutely right: college VS university - it doesn't matter.

Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.

We would have liked to have kept all this "on-prem". Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.

The "force" that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don't know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it's not cost effective - I wasn't involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization's size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem "for free" (or at a deep, deep discount).

This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for "on-prem" exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since "on-prem" exchange isn't available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won't integrate seamlessly into outlook).

Wow, 12 - you're living the dream ;)

Could you share your setup? I'm on Linux, but I've tried both Edge and Brave. Both only show 4 people.

When a 5th person joins, I need to switch to the "group view" (?), which has a auditorium background and crude attempts by Teams to "crop" people from their background.

It's such a perfect summary of my Teams experience : you want something simple (ie: see 5+ people) and MS delivers the most useless feature... I cannot even call it half passed, cause I'm certain the "group view" took far more engineering effort than it would have taken to just show 5 or more people on the screen.

Oh, it's worse then that: you want to scrape some content, cut and paste content, save an image, save a stream of music/video - "oh... sorry, you can't do that Dave cause the command line tool/3rd party website/gui isn't trusted, but if you subscribe to our ultra premium package you can have some of that functionality unlocked (but just for our site) or you can watch some ads. "

I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.

Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS' cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.

The migration was painful... going from "I have the exact tools I need for the job" to "jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking".

Yup, it's kinda annoying when Google offers links to Reddit that won't work.

I'm curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn't come at the expense of effecting your high availability?

If the server were on-prem or in the cloud... and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?... cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid... and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.

You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn't perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also "plug in" the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. ... and if Vault were restarted there's quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.

My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at "the whole life cycle / workflow" - it's much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself "does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?"

I really think the "simple" approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of "value".

However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what's broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the "what's hot" algorithm would reduce/remove many of these "workarounds" (like the one you're suggesting).

(I'm just thinking out loud) but a better "what's hot" would have each post weighted:

1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of "what's hot".

Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like "average number of comments per post" could be precalculated daily, but I think it'll be "good enough" and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.