GTA online took ages to load, like 10+ minutes on some machines. One guy got really annoyed and investigated. It turned out to be loading a single 10MB JSON file in an incredibly inefficient manner. The JSON file contains about 60,000 items and they need to extract each item from it, but every time they look for the next item they start from the beginning of the file again, despite already knowing where they found the previous item! All the entries in the JSON list are unique, but the code also checks for any duplicate entries, of course it’s also done in the least efficient way possible requiring 1,984,531,500 comparisons for something that has no effect. Not only did this one person find these problems but he also implemented a fix that reduced load times by 70% as a result, shaving off more than 7 minutes of load times for some machines. The fact that Rockstar didn’t notice this is frankly shocking and speaks to the fact that they really just don’t care.

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

I was surviving with Ubuntu, I had my complaints but I figured ‘that’s just how it is’ on Linux, that it was the same everywhere. I didn’t even realise what I was missing until I switched.

I got a hardware upgrade at one point, so in order to get those new drivers ASAP I tried an Arch-based distro, with plans to switch back once drivers became available. I never moved back.

The two big reasons I stayed was ironically enough the lack of good Ubuntu documentation, and the PPA system. Ubuntu is used a lot, but there’s not really formal documentation anywhere, only random tutorials online (most likely out of date and never updated) and people on forums talking about their problems. By contrast the Arch wiki is the gold standard of Linux documentation, there’s just no comparison. Even on Ubuntu I found myself using it as a reference from time to time.

Regarding PPAs, the official Ubuntu package list is strangely small so if you’re like me and find yourself needing other software, even mainstream software like Docker, you’ll be faffing about with PPAs. So if you want to install Docker, instead of typing sudo apt install docker You instead have to type:

# Add Docker's official GPG key: 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg 
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings 
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg 
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg 
# Add the repository to Apt sources: 
echo \ "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \ $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null sudo apt-get update

These are the official install instructions, by the way. This is intended behaviour. The end user shouldn’t have to deal with all this. This feels right out of the 90’s to me.

Instead of PPAs, Arch has the Arch User Repository (AUR). Holy moly is the AUR way nicer to work with. Granted, we’re not quite comparing apples to apples here since the AUR (typically) builds packages from source, but bear with me. You install an AUR package manager like yay (which comes preinstalled on my flavour of Arch, EndeavourOS). yay can manage both your system and AUR packages. Installing a package (either official or AUR) looks like yay packageNameHere. That’s it. A full system upgrade like sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade is a single command: yay -Syu, a bit cryptic but much shorter. The AUR is fantastic not just for the ease of use, but for sheer breadth of packages. If you find some random project on github there’s probably an AUR package for it too. Because it builds from source an AUR package is essentially just a fancy build script based on the project’s own build instructions, so they’re super easy to make, which means there’s a lot of them.

You might argue ‘but building from source might fail! Packages are more reliable!’, which is somewhat true. Sometimes AUR builds can fail (very rarely in my experience), but so can PPAs. Because PPAs are often made to share one random package they can become out of date easily if their maintainer forgets or simply stops updating it. By contrast AUR packages can be marked out of date by users to notify the maintainer, and/or the maintainer role can be moved to someone else if they go silent. If a PPA goes silent there’s nothing you can do. Also, since an AUR package is just a fancy build script you can edit the build script yourself and get it working until the package gets an update, too. PPAs by comparison are just a black box - it’s broken until it gets updated.

Moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to just give something a go. Mint will always be waiting for you if you don’t like it.

This is basically rule number one in the autocrat’s handbook: Rule something as illegal but make it necessary (e.g. give your public servants a near-zero salary, making them dependent on taking bribes to live). Then at any point the leaders have the legal grounds to arrest whoever they want for ‘corruption’. It’s a very common tactic.

As people have said already this is a somewhat common failure mode, especially when swapping nozzles. This happened to me twice between three nozzle swaps. The first time was a major leak like yours, the other time it was only slight (which I then made worse in my attempt to fix…). I was obviously doing something wrong, but I came fully prepared the second time with video guides for my specific machine and everything but still couldn’t get it perfect.

If you never want to think about this failure mode again (like me) then consider swapping your hotend for a Revo. A Revo nozzle is also the heatbreak, so there’s no possibility of a bad connection between them. The ‘nozzles’ are more expensive but they can be hotswapped (coldswapped, even) by hand with no special tools. Before I did everything in my power to avoid nozzle swaps, so I ended up settling for a jack-of-all-trades (but master of none) nozzle that I would never have to swap. Since moving to Revo however I find myself swapping nozzles way more now that it’s easy and with no chance of destroying my hotend. For instance I have a high-flow 1mm nozzle for quickly doing big structural prints, they print in like one third of the time and are way stronger than equivalent prints on a smaller nozzle. I also have a 0.25mm nozzle for miniature model prints with a better resolution than I could ever get before. I’m still waiting for a high-flow abrasion-resistant Revo nozzle, though.

Selective enforcement is one of those concepts that isn’t talked about much outside of legal ethics circles unfortunately, but I think it’s an important concept to be aware of and the potential issues with it. I first heard about it from The Dictators Handbook, which explores many behaviours of politicians and those in power, including how and why corrupt nations often employ selective enforcement. It’s an interesting read, would recommend. It definitely changed how I looked at the world.

I have no strong feelings on which particular weapons should be legal to carry, even if it’s just pepper spray or brass knuckles or something. The main thing is that it should be legal to carry something.

Also, selectively enforced laws are a terrible, HORRIBLE concept and should be avoided at all costs. It gives police and those in power the ability to selectively punish (or pardon) whomever they choose, often at the whims of their personal biases. Passing and exploiting selectively enforced laws is a common tactic used by corrupt nations and can be used to silence political opponents, target selected groups, promote agendas and so forth. The law should not rely on cops ‘being nice’ and choosing not to arrest you.

For a start it shouldn’t be a crime to merely carry something for self-defense. The current laws say that carrying anything for the express purpose of self-defense is illegal. There’s a bizarre cat and mouse game where the law says ‘its fine to defend yourself’ while simultaneously expressly forbidding you from carrying anything that you might be able to use for self-defense. It puts anyone actually in a life threatening situation at a supreme disadvantage: An attacker is already breaking the law so they’ll be armed to some extent, but under the law the victim is designed to be defenseless. If they do decide to arm themselves against the law and use it to defend themselves they can be prosecuted for carrying a weapon after the fact.

I never said anything about changing gun laws.

New Zealand. Gun laws are pretty strict, though we have lots of farmers who have guns for defending livestock. You can own guns with a valid reason (e.g. recreational shooting, not self defense) but essentially the only two places they can be is in a locked safe or (being transported to) a gun range.

In addition any and all tools and weapons are illegal to carry for the purpose of self defense (knives, pepper spray, tazers, clubs, screwdrivers, etc.). There’s a crime epidemic here at the moment, corner stores being robbed by people with machetes, jewelry stores ram raided with trucks, but if you dare even carry pepper spray to defend yourself you can be jailed. Don’t bother calling the cops either, they won’t be there until at least half an hour later. Cops don’t care about robberies. We literally once had the dispatcher tell us that no police would be coming. It’s ridiculous.

I wish self defense laws were less crazy here, if someone enters your home or property armed with a weapon you should be able to respond appropriately without fear of going to jail yourself.

How has nobody recommended Supreme Commander (Forged Alliance)? It’s the inspiration for other games in this thread like Planetary Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It’s so good that when the official servers shut down the community banded together and formed their own server and dev team to continue regular balancing and updates. It’s on steam and works on Linux with minimal tinkering. You can either play the campaign on the Steam version or head straight over to Forged Alliance Forever, the community-hosted server, to access the campaign (with added multiplayer support!), all the new patches and mods, and play some multiplayer games too.