Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes is a supremely good book to start with for an absolute beginner, and I would recommend it over Automate the boring stuff (that would be a great followup though!).

It assumes absolutely no prior knowledge, explains concepts extremely clearly, never presents too much to overwhelm and frustrate beginners, and includes a good range of projects that should interest any perspective programmer.

Have they tried raise VAT and kill all the poor?

Not a terribly insightful article for people who aren’t deeply familiar with what those policies actually do, which is what I was curious about. All I could gather is that most of the country is electrified and they invested in maintaining and building paved roads.

For minor things it works alright. For slightly advanced things, like making making curved text, it’s not intuitive compared to Photoshop. Though personally, even for minor things I found Krita more pleasant.

A UI designer made this little short about Gimp, which I think captures the sorta things that can be frustrating.

I’m extremely pleased to hear they will be taking UI seriously.

That’s extremely sad to hear, I hope they recover someday :(

There’s a few areas where it’s lacking, the text tool being one of them, and it also can’t export to PDF for professional book cover printing. But I’m not a professional photo editer either, and almost exclusively use Krita for editing anyway, since it’s so my h easier to use.

gimp isn’t being held back by money, they have over a million in bitcoin just sitting there from an old donation that grew in value. In over a decade, no one has figured out how to pay the taxes on it if they start using it to fund developers.

I read on reddit a long time ago that a UI designer tried to help improve gimp, but the devs were hostile to it (i may be remembering that wrong though). Considering how long its been with no UI improvements, I don’t think gimp will ever revamp its UI. Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.

I agree that Bethesda’s RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can’t dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn’t care much about any of the character’s struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can’t recall a single character’s name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).

There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there’s a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought “Why isn’t this game about that?”, because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game’s story was in comparison. So in that way you’re right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.

I should mention that I’m pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don’t think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.

I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.

He posted this update a few months ago, it seems to be progressing well!

That sounds similar to this quote:

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” — Edsger Dijkstra, 1975

But there’s been a good deal of programmers who have said that BASIC, and its ease of use and seeing almost instant results is extremely useful to not turn people off learning to code to begin with. Python is functionally the new BASIC in that regard, and while the language itself may not teach you to become an expert programmer, it may have gotten more people in the door than otherwise would have.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

Ahh, the ol put the rum in the banana shipment from Karamja method. A classic.

A while back I put together a pretty big list of free Linux games, along with their license info. A good amount of them are FPS games, hopefully one of them interests you 🙂

I guess for tactical shooters, Urban Terror might qualify?

I used to see hordes of these around my house growing up, until we finally decided to do something. We put up a bunch of beetle trap bags and caught hundreds, and (perhaps more importantly) treated the yard to eliminate their eggs.

After that, I didn’t see more than 2 or 3 beetles.

The same Turkey that continues to attack and slaughter the Kurds of Rojava unprompted? That Turkey?

Bit hypocritical, eh?

ROCm is it’s own hell (unless they finally put some resources into it in the past couple years)

For those interested in an alternative, and especially if you are a programmer, the Ladybird browser appears to be the most promising independent browser that could someday take Firefox’s crown.

In the comments of that second link you provided, someone made a salient point:

At the end of the day, it all comes down to content residing on someones hard drive. That will cost, either directly through cloud services, or indirectly by decentralized storage like the libry app where users donate their disk space and bandwidth. It is not clear to me how the new system works, and who carries the cost?

Odysee’s response was this link, which another commenter then pointed out:

I love how Arweaves biggest flaw (bandwidth) is only mentioned as a cliff note “Notably absent from Arweave’s formulation of the Kryder+ rate are bandwidth costs. Arweave covers this using a separate set of karma-based incentives – see here.” And the article linked just dodges the actual question at hand by throwing an empty promise to incentivize people to give their bandwidth for “karma”

So Arweave is literally just Peertube with another brand new crypto on the backend to incentivize people to start using it and ultimately ‘sell’ their hard-drives to the blockchain to be used to host the video content. Otherwise, you need to pay to ‘permanently’ store your content on the blockchain for a baked in 200 years worth of storage time (so, I imagine that will be rather high).

It should also be noted that in the FAQ regarding what will happen to LBRY Coins once this new crypto replaces it, they simply say “It’ll still be yours to do with as you please!”, I.E, this shit is worthless now since nothing will use it, but hey, it’s your shit, and that counts for something!

Again, I would highly recommend viewing Folding Ideas video on the subject if you haven’t yet. This is ultimately going to be another thing that makes the creators a tremendous amount of money, but will ultimately crash and burn for everyone else.

So they were bought by Forward Research.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arweave-adds-over-7m-users-140000864.html

Foward Research is a crypto blockchain company that owns Arweave, which as far as I can tell is trying to incorporate crypto into a cloud data storage service. It’s all very vague, but that’s what I sussed out.

I wasn’t aware that odysse was originally a crypto video sharing platform, I thought it operated more like YouTube.

Forward Research also bought solarplex, which they boast as having sold “over 120,000 NFTs”, which tells me all I need to know about their intentions.

I’d steer way clear of this, nothing good can come of it, and if you have any doubts, watch Folding Ideas NFT video.

Stick with Peertube.

Love me some computer chronicles!