Silent Hill 2 is not fun. It’s beautiful. It’s immersive. It’s engaging. But it’s not fun. Everything that happens comes back to your decision to do this to yourself. No one forced you to go there. To ignore the warnings. To follow a fog-enshrouded vaguely human but not quite shape through a gore-smeared hole in the base of a wall. You chose to. And now there are consequences.
It’s excellent and you should totally play it. I can’t say you’ll exactly enjoy it, though.
Python 3.13 launched today. I’ve done it. I’ve lived long enough to see a less-GIL’ed Python released to the public. Until now there’s been an unvirtuous cycle:
Python isn’t good at running CPU-intensive threaded code. → No one writes code like that. → There was no pressure to remove the GIL because no one writes code that would benefit from it. → Repeat.
I hope this is the first giant step toward good Python multithreading.
Ugh, “walkable” cities. 🙄
To get dinner, we had to:
Simply intolerable.
From “Google hails move to Rust for huge drop in memory vulnerabilities”:
In Google’s own shift towards using memory safe programming languages there has been a significant drop in the number of memory-related vulnerabilities, with memory safe vulnerabilities down to 24% in 2024 - a stark contrast from 2019 [76%] and well below the industry norm of 70%.
Memory safety is not the same as safety. You can still write bad logic in any language. It “just” gets rid of the majority of bugs so that programmers can concentrate on the more interesting parts.
Also, yes, of course you can write safe C code. No one with a large codebase ever has in practice, but it’s at least hypothetically possible. Wouldn’t rather not have to, though?
It astounds me that in 2024 there’s no canonical way to select which CSS to use for a web browser on a phone screen. You have to guess at how many CSS pixels wide your target device is. If next year’s device is any larger than a hardcoded threshold, they may get your desktop layout instead.
I know there are people who’ve made their careers out of memorizing all the edge cases of this monstrosity. Those are lifetimes lost to toil because no one can agree on an official way to look nice on a cell phone, or the one true way to center an image. It’s madness.
The fine folks who make iA Writer wrote about their challenges supporting Android.
My first impressions:
I hear “why would devs ever tolerate Apple’s App Store shenanigans when Android is right there?” Well, because the grass isn’t always greener.
Ideally, both Apple and Google would make it easier for devs. Nothing about this requires either’s processes to be more complicated than they inherently are. As it stands today, both shift a lot of extra effort and compliance guesswork onto developers.
My Raspberry Pi 4 started running hot when I moved it from a freestanding case to a fanless server rack. I’d often SSH in and see idling it at 65C or warmer, with log messages showing it had been thermally throttled. That’s not great.
I just bought a Argon Fan HAT. I installed it and fired up a large Rust compile with 4 concurrent jobs. 20 minutes later and the RPi averaged about 54C with no throttling.
Get your Pi a fan. It wants one very much.
So we were all talking about Palm Pilots, and someone mentioned that they’re available dirt cheap off eBay.
Sigh. I didn’t need this, but it arrived today anyway.
Frankly, a lot of the IIIxe’s assets hold up well. One hardware button press and the relevant app is open and ready half a second later. My fingers remember how to write Graffifi. No notifications, except calendar event reminders I configured. I’ve used less productive devices all too recently.
I have a 32" monitor and a 27" monitor on my desk. Don’t ask. But although they’re different sizes, they both have the same native 3840x2160 resolutions. The 27" just has smaller pixels.
This is fine 99% of the time. When I’m working away with different windows open on each screen, all is peachy. It’s only slightly annoying that the menu bar on one screen is a tiny bit larger than on the other, but I’m tough. I can live with that.
What I can’t tolerate is that it’s impossible to exactly line up graphics across the 2 monitors. If I flick my mouse cursor from one to the other at the top of the screen – I have the physical screen tops aligned at the exact same height – it flies smoothly over the gap. If I try the experiment near the bottom, the cursor jumps in altitude as it crosses the border because “2000 pixels down from the top” is a farther distance in inches on a 32" monitor than on a 27" screen. And if I dare drag a window from one screen to the other, its position and size change as it crosses over. This will not do.
A friend recently nudged me to look at BetterDisplay Pro, and my life is better for it. It has exactly one feature I care about: the ability to enter a custom screen resolution, which I can then select from the normal Displays system setting. I did these things in order:
Wow, wow, wow. After many long months of mortal anguish, that annoyance is completely gone. My monitors play nicely together as I always wished they would.
Note: Yes, now there’s a slightly different nit, in that it slightly irks me that my resolution has a very strange non-integer scaling factor of 180:103. I don’t care. I can live with it. macOS still sends a 3840x2160 signal to the displays, and the pixels are so tiny that I can’t visibly tell it’s not running at native resolution. Of course, that non-integer scaling might slow the display down very slightly, but this is on an M1 Max system and why pay for the TFLOPS if you’re not going to use them? It’s totally worth the tradeoff.
When we got this kitty, she was darn near feral. Now she won’t leave me alone.
