Oh, that’s good to hear! Always had the impression that the blob-free distros caused compatibility headaches, but glad to be wrong I suppose.

Edit: And I should say I didn’t mean to pick on Trisquel in particular, it was just the one GNU recommended distro I remembered by name.

I generally think of GNU as being foundational (or, old) and principled.

I really appreciate the contributions they’ve made to both core utilities and especially philosophy.

But I don’t see them as lighting up the world or adding anything new lately. I think of vaporware like Hurd with 1000 year dev cycles. I think of them recommending Linux distributions like Trisquel that let perfect be the enemy of pretty good.

Shining Force

It started out really slow, but now I’m mid-late game. I’ve got a band of characters I like and I’m on the cusp of promoting most of them.

It’s older and less refined than other games I’ve played in the genre (ie, Fire Emblems), but it’s been a good time.

Have a good visit! Are you staying long?

Nice consistency!

Looks to me like it’s mostly paywalled.

Anyway, the maximalist web design trend that’s popular there is really interesting. I like how low-techish it looks. But it is really hard to scan, especially when you’re only sorta-kinda able to read the language anyway.

Another fun one to mess around with is guitarix. It’s like a modeling amp in software form.

LMMS is a fairly intuitive editor that makes it easy to build midi tracks and drum loops. Can’t really record tho.

Famistudio is specific to chiptune music. I think it’s a tracker. Along the same lines, there’s MilkyTracker. I haven’t figured out how to use them, but they’re neat.

Think I used this for a little while. It was pretty much a slightly better Postman, back when Postman itself was less annoying.

Frustratingly, at some point I opened Insomnia and it randomly lost all my requests/history. That soured me on it. Then when I tried it again a couple years later, it had that bad ‘freemium’ feel, even if it is still FOSS.

Kdenlive - Worked the best for me, but has the worst name.

Shotcut - Seems feature rich and reasonably good

Openshot - Seemed more approachable, a little less performant.

Blender - I’ve heard it includes a good video editor in there somewhere, tho I’ve never used that.

Olive - I think was another Foss video editor? But it might be discontinued. Never tried it either.

Yeah, I worry about that. Seems like everything a human can do to prove they’re human, imitation machine learning will be able to look at those inputs and outputs and fake it.

If you can’t have spaces filter out bots (already hard, probably impossible in the future), trust and validity completely go away. Spam will become unmanageable, and in many cases more subtle. Abuse will scale and could become unblockable.

I’m sure there sill be some kind of good ideas to push back, but I’d certainly say I’m pessimistic atm.

I’ve come around on it somewhat at work. Recent models really are getting pretty impressive. It’s at the point where I can tell it to read a Jira ticket and implement it, and for simple ones it basically just does it. I’m not sure it’s worth the massive environmental and infrastructures detriments (or rather, I’m pretty sure it’s not), but it’s definitely a productivity boost.

It’s also creating cognitive debt tho - every change it does for me automagically is one I don’t have to think about and ‘earn’ myself. You could argue the AI compensates for that by then explaining the code for you, but I think it will lead to some bad results in the mid-long term.

For any personal programming, I don’t/wouldn’t use it, beyond just replacing Google searches maybe. It defeats the fun of it, and cost money on top of that.

Not sure how patient it is, because I ordered the physical console version ASAP. But I just got my copy of UFO 50, everyone’s favorite new-old game compilation from yesteryear.

I’ve tried about 10 of the games so far, all very interesting. Some I really enjoy, some feel like they’ve intentionally added too many rough edges to make them feel retro.

Barbuta seems such an interesting one, but I really wish the character was just a little more fun to move and control.

If you actually just download a .py file, you need to run it with python. Like in the example you linked, something like

python3 _filename_

(and if that’s the case, you might need to add a line at the top of the file, telling it where the interpreter is. But probably you actually want the following)

To install, you use the python installer program, pip. Something like

pip _package-name_

Before you do either, you need to install python and pip. I don’t know exactly (look for correct package names), but you need to run something like

sudo apt install python3 pip

I haven’t tried it. What aspects make it different from what Loops or Pixelfed are already doing?

Any creative work qualifies? Music is pretty approachable. You can learn a few basic theory things to get ideas, or just play around with random notes to see what sounds good. Don’t have to be any good, you can get LMMS or another midi editor/tracker and write it without skill at an instrument.

For writing prose in particular, maybe short stories would be easiest? Just because they aren’t so long. Still takes creativity for ideas tho.

Idk, I think an important perspective is to remember it doesn’t have to be good (assuming you’re doing this for fun or learning, not as a job right away). Just create. Then, you’ll look at what you made and see how it sucks and get ideas for what to do differently next round. You mention not having the skills, but you can just try to do all things and see how it goes.

Fair enough! While I do have problems with Oracle as a company that would prevent me from considering their services, my comment above this is just in jest about the post being in this community.

Not meaning to be seriously dismissive or judgmental of the question. I totally understand using whatever resources are available.

Wrong comm.

… or is it? Using Oracle non-ironically?

Agree with this! It’s one of those things where if you want to learn to do it, just start doing. (Which it sounds like op is, so keep at that.) You find where the gaps are then focus on learning just enough to get past your roadblock.

Pretty cool projects. I played around with the Mandarin one a little. What plans do you have for these going forward?

More languages, custom vocab lists seem like they’d be good additions, but mainly I’m interested in how you plan to improve the game aspects?