It is exactly my case, as HomeKit by itself is way too limited for automations.

All of my HomeKit devices are actually exposed through HomeBridge, so I can still use HomeKit stuff if needed, and devices that do not support HomeKit can still be added to HomeKit.

My current challenge is on the Smart Dashboard side, I don’t really want to buy a Google Pixel Tablet for this, and the Nest Hubs I have don’t really integrate with HomeAssistant except through Google cloud services.

HomeKit dashboard is fine but too basic.

I am not convinced bots would fill the list with hypothetical purchases, I don’t think scalpers are interested in waiting or having money tied up in backorders.

The point is to eliminate the scalper advantage by ensuring one can buy the product « at some point ». If you need it by Christmas or whatever then you are kind of screwed.

I remember for the SteamDeck OLED, stock was enabled in waves over at least a month, so even though the first batch was sold out in minutes, there was no rush to refresh the store page to try and finish the transaction before it ran out. This is in direct contrast to (say) the PS5 which sold out in minutes then still wasn’t available anywhere over a year after it launched.

I don’t really understand how Valve solved the problem, it should have followed the same pattern of being sold out in minutes then scalpers would be the only option for months, but interestingly that’s not what happened.

It seems everyone forgot that not too long ago, you could back order something and the store would call/ship whenever they got it.

Just let me give you my credit card number in exchange for a spot in the waiting list, then the scalpers lose and I get my new launch thing whenever they get around to it. But no, that would be too simple, gotta get the crowd riled up and race for the available units!

I suppose this could be abused like everything else but it wouldn’t be worse than what we have now with fucking scalpers buying up the little stock that trickles in via automated bots.

It’s not about getting your fix sooner for the new shiny, sometimes you really need a new GPU to replace the one you’ve had for 5 years! Why should you settle for the previous generation if the new one just came out and you are willing to pay launch MSRP for that privilege (not 2-3x MSRP for scalpers!!).

It was the same for me, eventually I uncovered too many scenes at once so I was constantly going over the same scenes without progressing, there were too many possibilities and even guessing failed. Perhaps I should just start over.

I was in a similar boat (heh!) with Outer Wilds, eventually I stopped progressing and gave up, the repetition without discovery wasn’t fun anymore.

It just makes me feel like I am too stupid for these games? And that’s no fun.

I was being a bit facetious, thanks for the corrections and insight. Cheers!

They became a poster child for why you should never “start over from scratch” even if your current codebase is awful. Because when you do that your competitors keep going, then they have years on your now stale product. Netscape lost all on their own…

Also: selling a browser? Man, the 90’s where wild.

I look forward to the delay announcement in two years.

Same for me, though I did splurge a bit ($150 I think) to get the game on a USB key shaped like one of the starships in the game. I will never get that USB key…

If they ever get done I will consider spending more time with it, I don’t really care for early access into an unfinished game.

I should have asked for a refund when we had the chance…

That is my recollection as well. Also I remember Psycho Mantis would make some comments about the content of your memory card before the fight.

Another favorite of mine is The End in MGS3: Snake Eater, he is a sniper hiding in the woods and it takes like an hour of game time to beat him down. I seem to recall if you save during the fight and change the date forward a few years on your PS3, when you reload he has died of old age waiting for you to come back.

Yeah it was not a surprise, and I understand someone has to pay for the bandwidth those features use up. But I still resent them for making remote start app-only.

I am otherwise happy with the car itself, but this does leave kind of a sour aftertaste. I feel like it’s only going to get worse with my next car…

Subaru does the same thing, on my car it was free for three years then you pay or lose all connected features. That includes remote start, there is no way to start the car from the keyfob.

What bothers me the most here is that those are 64 bit instructions, which did not exist when PS/2 was a Thing. But I still chuckled, nice work.

Back then our registers were 32 bits wide, and we liked it 🤣

Vulkan and DirectX could already share shaders, because the input for both was already HLSL. The difference is the intermediate representation of the compiled shaders that will now be the same in the future (SPIR-V for both).

The real winners here are driver programmers at NVIDIA/AMD/Intel, since they will no longer have to develop support for both DXIL and SPIR-V (which are similar in concept but different in implementation). How much of that will be true in practice remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.

There are tools to analyze, process and transform SPIR-V bytecode already, presumably those will work for DX12 shader model 7 too. It might make performance analysis easier, same with debugging via a tool like RenderDoc that supports SPIR-V but not DXIL.

As for the overhead of DirectX, with DX12 this is largely not true anymore, both are high performance APIs with comparable overhead (i.e. as little as possible).

I was quite amazed reading NopHead’s blog a while back because he uses OpenSCAD exclusively, even managing to design an entire printer and its upgrades in there. I didn’t think any sane person could do this.

I should have prefaced that I did not actually run this myself, but I did take a note of it, it looked promising. Sorry for the false hope!

I would expect it to work after a lot of fussing about, and then break at the slightest update. Easier to run it in a VM (which is also not easy in order to get GPU acceleration without dedicating a card to it - I never managed to get Intel GVT-g nor GVT-d to work reliably).

It looks like Fusion 360 runs fine on Linux these days, I don’t know how reliable that is in practice (I would expect not very much).

OnShape is a great option if the licensing terms are compatible with what you are doing. They used to have similar licensing terms as Fusion 360 where you could still get paid for your work with a free version (i.e. YouTube) but changed the terms to remove this loophole. Fusion still allows this with the Startup license but of course could change their mind at any time, then you’d be out of luck.

I dislike the lockdown of Fusion 360 but its mental model works with my own (I can’t “get” SolidWorks and never remember how to do anything). Speaking of SolidWorks, they added a reasonably-priced license for DIY/hobbyists, but it’s the same lockdown as Fusion 360 and still Windows only.

I’m in the same boat as you, just a hobbyist doing this for my own use, I have no interest in becoming an industrial engineer. For now I will keep using Fusion 360, and when that stops being an option I’ll move on to something else. I can whip out models for my prints easily enough and the 10 documents limit is just an annoyance, not a real limitation.

At the very least whatever you design in Fusion 360 or OnShape won’t be stuck in there, you can export it out via .step files. You lose design history (if applicable) but not the model itself.

I thought the main issue with NordVPN was, good luck trying to close your account once you’ve signed up.

I don’t really remember, I use another provider and would avoid NordVPN if only due to their aggressive YouTuber push, they must be a scam!

To be fair, USB-C didn’t exist when Lightning was introduced, and it was vastly superior to Micro-USB.

It doesn’t really have any reason to exist now…

Agreed with your other points though!

I have an old iPad that I try to reuse for another purpose and all the locks to stop me to keep using it make it such a pain in the butt, when the alternative is simply to enable developer mode on an Android tablet.

Thankfully I remembered when buying a laptop and skipped the very enticing M-series hardware, because in 5-7 years that thing is a brick destined for the landfill.

This is the way! I did this recently with a recent Win11 Pro installation.

This is also the proper way to name the user’s folder yourself instead of letting Microsoft decide. The auto namer often makes poor choices and renaming it breaks a lot of stuff unless you wipe and reinstall.