The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

At least orcas don’t do to whales what they do to sharks - eat their liver and leave them to die in agony.

It boggles the mind that any language - let alone a systems programming language that most of the world’s infrastructure is built upon - wouldn’t adjust their specification to eliminate undefined behavior wherever possible. And C++'s all seem to be in the worst possible places, too.

Control shares the same universe and is more actiony, from what I’ve heard. It might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Google started work on Carbon due to the difficulty of getting the C++ standards committee to accept any real, fundamental changes to the language. If Google, a grandmaster at manipulating standards committees, couldn’t get something passed, I don’t foresee this proposal getting anywhere.

Null safety is orders of magnitude simpler than memory safety. Kotlin is a null safe language by default. Java is infamously not. Anyone who has worked on a mixed-language Kotlin project can tell you how quickly null safety becomes a pain once guarantees break down - and that’s in a language where these issues are flagged instantly and you can “fix” the problem in a couple of characters! Mixed memory safe/unsafe codebases would be a nightmare in comparison.

Also, C++'s ecosystem consists of deeply entrenched libraries with ancient codebases. Safe C++ might be useful in a decade or two if library maintainers could be pushed to make the switch (good luck with that, if it’s half as much of a paradigm shift as Rust), but by then there will probably be multiple competing language features that claim to solve the same problem. It’s the C++ Way™.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

Yes. Some (not all species) female mosquitoes drink blood for the protein, which they need for egg production. Their actual diet is nectar from flowers.

Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.

If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.

It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:

Hey, I see you’re having problems with <copy-paste key words from OP>. Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.

Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".

I hope this helps!

(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)

It’s a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

I just updated to the newest Ubuntu LTS, which puts pip into system managed mode so you can’t easily install packages outside of a virtual environment anymore.

If you (or anyone who stumbles upon this comment in the future) run into this problem, the new recommended way to install yt-dlp through pip and keep it in your path and up to date is via pipx (sudo apt install pipx). The syntax is a bit gnarly for pre-releases, so I figured I’d post an update:

To install the nightly: pipx install --pip-args '\--pre' "yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]"

To update the nightly: pipx upgrade --pip-args '\--pre' yt-dlp

I alias the update command and run it before every download session.

(You may need to delete your old yt-dlp binaries before it’ll let you install the new one - use type -a yt-dlp to find them.)

The main problem with Java (or garbage collected languages in general) as a first language is needing to unlearn the bad habits it ingrains when you move to a systems programming language with manual memory management. Other than that it’s a pretty good first language, though I’d suggest learning a bit of C at the same time just to get a basic grip on things like pointers and stack vs heap.

Edit: it occurs to me that C# would be the perfect learning language. It’s very similar to Java and an easy first language, but you’d also learn about stack allocation through structs, and can teach pointers using unsafe (though I think unsafe code is still GCed, so this wouldn’t help with the memory management side of things. Haven’t touched C# in fifteen years so I’m not sure how it works anymore).

That could take a lifetime!