Yes. In the past you could just not connect to a network and run installer offline, but now it requires a network connection unless you search for instructions on how circumvent it.

We may be laughing now, but Microslop is going to roll out 10-factor authentication on Shithub because of this.

Microsoft has been trying very hard to phase out local accounts for a while now. It is impossible to install Windows without a Microsoft account unless you escape from the installer and run a series of commands in the terminal. It is approaching the “install Linux with ZFS as your root filesystem” user experience.

Now, I’m usually a fairly level-headed Windows enthusiast

Absolutely demonic.

Oh shit I forgot, lmao

Yeah I don’t think Moonworm turned up (which is fine). The schedule is running on the assumption that people just want to keep playing forever, which isn’t necessarily true. This week it would be @Doubledee@hexbear.net’s turn.

Last week when I played I got the feeling that this fort was really running out of steam (might just be I wasn’t in the right mood though). Things have gotten quite disorganized and keeping things running is very micro-managey, which makes starting long-term projects difficult (let alone the one year turn limit). I kinda lean towards retiring it and applying what we’ve learned to a new fort after a bit of a break, but I don’t want to pull the plug unilaterally if anybody sees potential in pressing onward.

I sincerely love reading academic papers on rendering techniques and trying to implement them and adapt them to my needs. All commercial studios know these days is import UE5 open world FPS template, asset flip, eat hot chip and lie.

CNC lathes are definitely less complex than 3D printers. They operate in 2 dimensions and as a result the G-Code is simple enough to write by hand in many cases (while there is NO practical way to program a 3D printer without CAM software). They’re just a lot more expensive than an Ender 3 and require shop utilities like compressed air.

You can get mired in selecting appropriate tooling and work holding, but there are a million things which can go wrong with a 3D print also. 3D printers typically don’t eject projectiles in case of an operator/programmer mistake though.

The only thing that makes 3D printing seem simple is that the slicers are really damn good, to the point of providing a better experience than commercial CAM software.

As far as I can tell, there are skeletons and empty coffins, so these dwarves need to get off their asses and put the bones in the boxes already. Also, defenses can be perfectly impenetrable until somebody decides to send a miner to dig a shortcut between two places. I think the cheif medical dwarf died at some point (it was Doubledee in the beginning) because none was assigned, but I’m still not sure where the zone is. I put two beds down next to the workshop and called it a hospital.

We definitely do have a problem of chronic depression, but it seems there is enough churn and immigration to keep it from becoming terminal for now. Although there are 30-40 people who are at red unhappiness, only one tantrum occurred this year. The spread is modestly better than it was a year before.

Afterword:

I didn’t get much done as far as construction goes. Explored the third cavern layer, and that’s about it. This fortress is completely labrynthian and I only began understanding what is located where by the end of the year. I tried to get as much steel armor production done as possible, but it is slow-going. The Baron’s rooms are nearly good enough. There are ghosts fucking everywhere lmao. Good luck.

The save file also seems to be corrupted. DFHack gives me a warning about “missing nemisis records.” I guess we’ll play it until it breaks, though I do get the feeling this fortress is beginning to stagnate.

Beardrenched: Episode 7

Granite

As the calendar ticks over to 207, Beardrenched finds itself in a state of bedlam. Undead creatures drag their endtrails through the taverns, and the dwarven economy seems to rest unsteadily on the outlook of the mortuary and stone coffin industries. Some dwarven scholars speculate that this might indicate an economic bubble.

Mayor Udib Abantat looms over a shale desk littered with codices. Her head rests on her right palm as she nervously coils her brown hair around her index finger. She flips through the pages of various fortress ledgers with her left. She would ordinarily be sleeping at this hour, but the coming and going of unsettled spirits makes this an impossibility. The residents of the fortress are to modest to speak it out loud, but she gets the sense people are losing confidence. Not only in her leadership, but in Beardrenched itsef. Hell, things aren’t looking to great for The Emerald Rag itself.

“We need to get our shit together,” she mutters, “or we won’t last another year.” She works through the night, taking stock of inventory, of survivors. Scribbling plans, to-do lists. The next day, she calls a combined meeting of the fortress nobility, clergy, and guild leaders.

A number of immediate tasks are agreed upon. Something must be done about the gore pile. The Necromancers are to be placed under house arrest. And the militia needs some goddamn armor.

A few days later, the Bookkeeper Zuntir Gusgashlikot emerges from the caverns covered in blood. “Another blind cave ogre. He’s dead, but Solon didn’t make it.” The gate is hastily sealed behind her, silencing the cacophony of an approaching crundle herd.

A week later, the Elves arrive to trade. We sell them as much tattered socks and underwear as they can carry in return for a bounty of fruits and nuts. Then they started complaining about all the trees we’ve been cutting down. Or something like that, I stopped paying attention.

Slate

The odor of miasma becomes overwhelming. We have a big pile of coffins which haven’t been placed in tombs yet. They are lined up and many of them are filled. At least one ghost has been released to the afterlife.

A pair of kobold thieves are spotted by a goblin on the service. They’re scared off.

The tavern is closed indefinitely. There is to much work to do in the fortress.

Some 20 or so migrants have arrived, “despite the danger.”

Felsite

Tun Kilisash is taken by a fey mood

Three months into the year, the manager has not approved a single work order

Tun created llama wool trousers. wow.

Hematite

Turns out the “office” I assigned to the manager was furnished with a bed.

After three months of training, the reconstituted Copper Claw is deployed to explore the third cavern layer. The cavern is fairly open and sprawling, with walls of marble. There is a considerable amount of quartzite and malochite down here as well.

The Copper Claw discovers two unusual volcanic columns studded with gems, as well as another subterranean pond.

No magma

A human caravan bypasses our inaccessable trade depot. We still manage to speak with their diplomat, who compliments our digs.

That ramp is a clusterfuck

A herd of rutherers enters the fortresss from the second cavern level. The Copper Claw begins hacking them up before they can cause any trouble.

Malachite

The farmers want a grand guildhall. We’ll see about that…

The fortress is attacked by Ithithe Torchgleamed the Venerable, a giant humanoid monster with two heads. The Copper Claws dispose of her before she even reaches the fortress. The children thank the gods that there will be no need for them to drag this hulking pile of gore to the pit.

Limestone

The dwarven trade caravan and mountainhome lliason arrive. Followed by a Goblin ambush!

The ambush is defeated, a weaponsmith is dead.

Whatever I did back in Hematite allowed the wagons in, but there is no way to seal the enterance.

We give them several tons of tattered clothing and carved bone doohickeys.

Sandstone

Lolor Bornmirror inherits the position of baron. Alas, we still have not found any magma, so we resign ourselves to preparing luxurious quarters.

We are visited by Ovus Ingtaksethal, a forgotten beast taking the form of a enourmous hairy scorpion with wings. It has poisonous gas, and it appears those wings are not ornamental. Commander Oreb takes two squads and establishes a defensive position near the chasm. The hammerlords and marksdwarves wait for the beast to fly up the chasm.

Mistem Olongutid withdraws from society (a kind of strange mood)

Context falls in battle, but not before wounding a number of the beasts limbs and cutting one of its wings. Ultimately the beast is slain, but the fortress mourns the loss of its most legendary miner. A true working class hero.

Commander Oreb’s survivor’s guilt sinks to new depths, but they have proven themselves an adept military leader, and importantly, hard to kill.

Mistem Olongutid crafts an iron buckler. wow. (legendary armor is actually pretty cool though)

More migrants arrive

The baron prohibits the export of war hammers. We can live with this. We like war hammers.

Another forgotten beast. Adag. A huge quadruped composed of vomit. At least this is a meme beast. Not worth our time. We decide to wait for it to trip over a crundle and splash onto the cavern floor.

Timber

An ambush! (a cat stumbled into a kobold. The kobold flees in terror)

A number of kobolds are cut down in the halls.

Apparently we don’t have a hospital

Oh well, the guy died

Moonstone

Obi has become a lord.

Opal

A Minotaur arrives. The marksdwarves outrun the hammerdwarves and it is turned into a stinking pincushion without even being given the chance to land a blow.

A theif has stolen “Understanding the Tree.”

Now the herbalists want a guildhall

Onesh Risel has been stolen

Obsidian

Besmar Lorbelal withdraws from society

In a lot of cases, providing instructions to run a specific command in the terminal is the least ambiguous way to do something. Like if you want to give somebody instructions on how to add a line to the end of a configuration file, you need to consider that they might be using one of a number of desktop environments, file browsers, and text editors, and that maybe the file browser doesn’t display hidden files, or maybe the user has a different locale / language activated and the menu options are named differently. Or you can tell them to run echo "fluffy_cat_mode=on" >> ~/.config/some_app.conf which will work regardless of all these possibilities.

Obviously there are tasks which can only be accomplished in the terminal, but there are also many tasks which are trivial to do through some settings menu or application which are still given as terminal commands for the sake of specificity.

You can create a Windows USB install from Linux, but it’s easier to just make one from Windows before formatting.

Annoyingly, you cannot just flash the Wiindows installer .iso image to a USB like any other .iso image. There is a tool called WoeUSB for this though, which does essentially what the Windows installation media tool does on Windows.

who runs oracle 🤔

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

The QA happening here is real, but it is being done by the device manufacturers, not the OS developers.

I never ended up adopting docker. Tried a couple times, but always thought it made things more complex rather than simplifying shit.

Yes

For a LONG time, the conventional wisdom was to shun the packages provided by Nvidia (as well as AMD in the proprietary FGLRX days) in favor of distro packages. These hardware companies used to ship distro-agnostic installers which would install the drivers and tweak the config files once, but they did not integrate with the package manager at all, and would inevitably break the next time you update your OS. The only way to use these drivers reliably was for distro maintainers to re-package them.

Nowadays, AMD support is automatic (built into the kernel / Mesa3D), and Nvidia actually hosts their own package repositories instead of just a self-destructing installer. You should still prefer a distro package if its available, but the knee-jerk “never download the Nvidia driver from Nvidia” advice is not as true as it used to be.

but the amount of time and effort to QA at the scale the major companies do for their OSes is on another level.

As somebody who uses Windows and iOS daily at work, I assure you these companies are not doing QA anywhere close to this level.