This sounds like an important step toward fully working the right think algorithm.

Clever, since checking Steam reviews for SteamDeck compatibility has definitely slowed down my impulse game purchases.

I don’t think it’s super useful for production (I prefer chef/vagrant)

Yeah!

Docker and OCI get abused a lot to thoughtlessly ship a copy of the developer’s laptop into production.

Life is so much simpler after taking the time to build thoughtful correct recipes in an orchestration tool.

Anything that makes it less painful for a dev to destroy and rebuild an environment that’s corrupt or even just a bit spooky pays for itself almost immediately.

Exactly. The learning curve is mean, but it’s worth it quickly as soon as the first mystery bug dies in a rebuild fire.

This is great stuff.

My comment from the peanut gallery today is just that there’s no law that CI/CD can’t be kept under control and run in ten seconds.

Given the choice between a slow out of control CI/CD mess, or a shell script, I too will take the shell script every time.

But I am living my best life today, and have a simple shell script in my CI/CD pipeline.

Oh cool! I haven’t tried in some time. Thanks for adding your experience. That’s great news. (I’ll add a correction above, as well.)

“Heeeey… What!”

Sure! Feel free to ask for clarification. I’ve been in your shoes. I’ve had debloat software help a ton (and I don’t recall it causing issues.) I’ve also reinstalled Windows fresh (from a recovery disk) to buy time. And of course I’ve switched older computers to Linux, too.

Edit: I just saw:

including my Windows 11

No. Windows ships already well compressed. There’s no way it’ll compress further by 50%. Correction: Someone who has actually tried it says it can!

Also, as I mention below, backing up and restoring a full copy of Windows can set off anti-piracy tools that keep you from restoring your own copy of Windows. It can be done, either by waiting on the phone with Microsoft, or (presumably) by having an accomplished software pirate friend.

But look for the Windows tool “create a recovery disk”. You’ll need another separate drive than your 63GB one, but it probably doesn’t need to be as big as a full Windows install.

Otherwise, yes.

Yes, if your drive has 133GB occupied, and you’re running Windows, it is likely that Windows, itself, is over half of that.

I’ve not, personally, seen Windows, itself, occupy less than 70GB, in recent years. (Usually much more.)

So what’s left, your files that you care about, is likely 133-70=63GB or less. (Probably much less. Windows is usually huge - usually around 120GB.)

Note that you can’t just blindly backup the whole drive. You’ll have to go find the files you care about and just back those up.

Backing up entire copies of the Windows operating system has gone very poorly for me, when I tried, anyway. Windows, itself, does not like to be relocated, because it tends to decide it has been stolen. I ended up on the phone with Microsoft waiting for permission, last time I moved a Windows install. So if I had a big enough drive to backup the whole Windows drive, I wouldn’t bother.

There may be a utility for Windows that backs up just your files. Mac has had one for awhile. Something like the free tier of Crash plan would probably do a nice job guiding you to where the files you care about are.

Beware, file compression doesn’t go far, today. The days when we stored our files in ludicrously inefficient formats are over.

I’ve only seen 10%-20% differences with compressed files, in 2024.

So, in your shoes, I would backup my files to the 63GB USB drive with something like CrashPlan. I wouldn’t bother with compression since I don’t think it will help much and I don’t think you’ll need it.

I would also accept that this is probably a one way trip. If the debloater works, fantastic.

If it corrupts your Windows install, you’ll need to reinstall. You can use a recovery disk or download Windows 11 install media from Microsoft, which will take less space than a full install, but still takes space.

Personally, I wouldn’t hassle with reinstalling Windows in 2024. Especially on a small hard drive. That’s more work for a much worse outcome. I would switch to Debian. I’m fact, the first time I switched, was so being new life into an older computer.

Debian does most of the same things, takes dramatically less space, doesn’t grow in size over time, is completely free, and is now much easier to install than a Windows reinstall. (Neither is pure sunshine and joy, but I would rather search for correct UEFI settings for 15 minutes than wait on hold with Microsoft for an hour.)

However you do it, resurrecting an old computer that Windows has mucked up is totally worth the effort. It’s easy to forget how faster a Windows computer was when it was new.

Yeah. I agree it’s rough to lose existing recognition, but I think the test in the name was hurting adoption quite a bit.

When I tried mineTest last, I was thinking, “what the hell, this will amuse me for an afternoon.”

I did not expect a feature complete game engine with a better more polished game than vanilla MineCraft.

Yes. MineClone (the 2nd(?) most popular game for the MineTest/Lunatic Luanti engine recently renamed.)

Thanks for sharing this.

Here’s hoping they listen to feedback.

I left this series because it became a buggy mess. I added “stop making a buggy mess” anywhere I could. I’m not holding my breath, but I would love to get back into playing Civ again.

I guess there’s always Civ II, though. It’s quite stable, now, and runs everywhere.

This is back to the thing where a AAA game studio ignores what they know about their audience and apologizes to investors later.

I hope that’s not what’s happening here, but I won’t hold my breath.

Good catch! But - anyone who is capable of asking “am I the dipshit?” almost certainly is not one.

I once wore a tie to a meeting and I swear it made all the dipshits in ties feel that their opinions on technology were as valid as mine.

I gave away all of my ties after that meeting.

The world just isn’t safe for everyone else when us non-dipshits wear ties.

This is just speculation, but I’ve picked up on a pattern of speculating that something is technically possible, assuming there’s no way they’d actually be doing that, and later finding out that it was actually underestimating what they were doing.

As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

The answer that will put this question to bed is open source hardware. Thankfully we’re close to having viable options, finally.

Neat.

I say supposedly because I think 95% of users don’t have a threat model that justifies the extra security really.

Does street cred with my Cybersecurity peers count as a threat model?

I’m definitely one of the users of GrapheneOS that you’re talking about. My threat model is “this is fucking cool!”

Also, the grass is always greener on the other side. I want a Fair phone.

Exactly. So there’s no way to measure the exact egg that was first born to a species we would not recognize as a chicken.

(Edit: Warning: Only bullshit meant to amuse and fascinate follows. I’ve been watching too much “SmartyPants” on DropOut.tv, where they try to make each-other laugh with serious sounding silly presenations.)

Further, we might each choose a different arbitrary egg and declare that eggs parent “not a chicken”.

But for this question, that doesn’t have to matter.

If we can all agree that something in the ancestry of the modern chicken was not a chicken, and agree that it was likely still birthed from an egg, then we can conclude that that egg came first.

Even if we cannot agree about which exact egg hatched into the first chicken, or which exact animal was the first chicken, we can agree on their relationship such that we can agree that any selected “first chicken egg” came before any selected “first chicken” to be born from it.

The hardest part of this proposition is whether we can agree that the first chicken was born inside an egg. I propose that it must have been, by our own definitioms, because we widely agree that chickens are born from eggs. Not by any intrinsic property, but simply by our accepted definition of the word “chicken”.

So any hypothetical chicken-ancestor we choose as the “first chicken”, but not born from an egg, we should not be willing to call “first chicken”, after all.

So we must proceed forward in time from that failed choice of “first chicken” until something sufficiently chicken-like is born from an egg. Then we can call that animal our “first chicken”, and examine it’s relationship to “chicken eggs”. We will, by our method of searching, always then find that the “chicken egg” that our “first chicken” hatched from, came first.

Oh. This is seriously cool. Thank you.

Oh! You meant Moore’s Law is asymptotic!?

Yes! That is key to the joke I was making.