I like this approach.

Are you willing to consider a mail-forwarding service?

In my country (further East from you), it’s a somewhat popular and reliable way to buy stuff that no retailer or the vendor itself offers.

I got Oculus Rift S that way once, years ago, and it was pretty painless - some services will help you handle a lot of the paperwork greatly. Maybe even entirely for you.

The big benefit here is that they usually have the warehouses in the countries that do sell what you want, and established logistical chains to ship things safely and I would even say quickly.

The bigger benefit is having a legal entity to work with, which lets you insure the goods and press charges if the mailer steals, loses or damages them.

More expensive than kind strangers on the internet, but if you’re that careful, maybe this is an option.

That said, your Steam region and Valve’s restration for purchase makes this route difficult. Maybe you could create an account in another region, like the US or Germany, generate some activity and purchases there, wait for whatever minimum Valve sets, and order via the mail-forwarder (to their warehouse, from where they ship to you).

On an unrelated note, I did not expect to see a Swiss in the same boat of all people. Viel Glück am Kaufen!

I am not enjoying living in a cyberpunk world at all

Privileges and rights an application has has little to nothing to do with whether said application will be able to hide from an anti-cheat software or fool it or whatever. It’s more about being able to access different secure parts of the system, like memory, which is where everything lives basically, including game data that the cheats are supposed to manipulate in some advantageous way.

This is what leads many to plea for server-side anti-cheat that doesn’t invade the privacy of the end user (the client).

The games that use kernel anti-cheat are still largely infested with cheaters of many sorts. At this point, defending such deep access sounds like letting some security people live with you, totally at your expense, all the time, even in the bathroom and watching you sleep and masturbate and everything, in the name of safety, because they’ll supposedly be there when some criminal comes to do some crimes, only for them to turn the blind eye when that criminal comes with proper disguise and a gun.

ONLY 3 years for a broken middle mouse click from Razer?

Get a lottery ticket. My friend used to take his Razer mouse back to the store on warranty every few months for various reasons, because it did break that often, and they still let him swap for the identical one or get a refund - in the latter case, he often picked another Razer mouse, just a more expensive one, paying a little extra.

I’ve been rocking Logitech G102 since the beginning of 2020 (at least) and so far the only thing I had to change was the cord. Still no double clicks, no missing registers, nothing.

That said, another friend I had suggested the mouse to after years of happily using mine, kept taking them to warranty for various reasons since 2022, and I think he quit on the thing after a few attempts. Maybe they don’t make them like they used to.

I am willing enter the dumbass territory here, but - raido waves, being electromagnetic, and light travel at the same speed. Even if there is technically a difference, it is probably insignifact for the amount of distance each would have to cover before it can effectively transmit anything.

The convenience of a radio signal is that the transmitter is much easier to point in different directions, primarily because it’s a lot smaller than a star, but also because it can (at least in theory) be pointed in directions normally blocked by other celestial bodies. Given the position and orbital physics of a solar system, it would insanely difficult to position something directly “above” or “below” the Sun, let alone something as big and technologically advanced to block enough light, at an adequate frequency, to transmit any data. While a radio transmitter can be launched into space and positioned sufficiently far from other objects in the solar system to send data into various points of space. There can even be multiple such satellites, for all sorts of directions, coupled with repeaters and everything, while we only have one star in the system.

Of course, radio also depends on the receivers, even regardless of the data transmitted, but I believe in aliens, they’ll figure something out.

Amazing work, big thanks!

What’s your screen situation, by the way?

i3 is probably the only thing that I’ve experienced to be best at any resolution: if it’s small, it’s easy to hop between windows and layouts, and if it’s big, it’s so amazing to easily arrange everything to be in my view, even at 1080p @ 24’'.

Been thinking about a 4K for a while or an ultra-wide, but I can’t justify the purchase.

Not sure about other languages, but Russians are more likely to give their name as FIO, familia imya and then ochestvo (family name, given name, and then patronymic), especially in official settings. I’m given to understand the practice was even more common in Soviet and Tsarist Russia.

Very much this.

Today, the more English-like way of listing first name first, last name last in a context where the Western influence is just stronger and more prevalent, like YouTube, social media at large, git commits, etc. I think I’ve also seen it on TV, but I haven’t watched it for over a decade, really.

Generally, it seems like this order is become more and more popular thanks to globalization. which I actually like, but yeah, the more official something is, the more likely the traditional order is to appear.

That said, I think for the Russia-speaking context, last name first seems to be better in some cases, because the first names are not as varied.

Multi-monitor i3 really ruins virtually any non-i3 multi-monitor, with a few exception of other tiling window managers, I think.

I heard KDE introducing something similar, but I can’t imagine it being as convenient.

I’m thinking of migrating to sway on a full-AMD machine I have, but I think it had shown me some attitude a couple of times and I didn’t bother further.

Aside from the best practices and safety, what can Wayland provide to me on a mostly-work machine? I know I’ll miss .Xresources for the colors across multiple applications, though.

What’s a config compositor? Compositor makes me think of display/server compositor, like KWin, picom, etc.

Anyway, share everything you got if you can, that sounds cool!

I loved niri as a long-time i3 user, but once the novelty of it faded, I realized it was mostly its GNOME-like features that charmed me, like pressing Meta for “explode” view and dynamic workspace management, while the actual tiling and window management wasn’t as streamlined for me (especially stacking thinga vertically).

Sometimes I also miss the quality-of-life of a full DE, like dynamically switching from light to dark mode, but that can arguably be achieved in some other way - or even running i3 under a DE.

Sometime when I upgrade from my trusty old Nvidia GPU, I might switch to sway, but as of now, nothing has managed to topple i3 for me.

At least some of the online games, especially the competitive FPS, could benefit from a system similar to Quake III, where the map creator basically had to define enemy visibility per-sector. That’s more manual labor, yes, but modern software is too afraid of it for its detriment, often missing out on O(1) time complexity and simple, reliable solutions.

Maintenance be damned, because they keep abandoning projects despite all the overhead, abstractions and tech that should supposedly allow them to ship more - the management will de-optimize anything good through their short-sighted attempts to maximize throughput and profits regardless.

One of the few books (if not the only) that I managed to read in a few days, being a slow reader myself.

Very fun and moving sci-if piece. Goes even better in these uncertain and unhappy times.

If you buy ARC Raiders, you’ll have your money’s worth by the time you decide whether you’re enjoying it.

You can easily avoid PVP most of the time by not engaging in combat with other players - the game will put you into like-minded lobbies in a few raids.

ARC is often fairly big and has multiple ways to destroy, as well as multiple points to damage them, with some weapons definitely being easier to use, let alone the grenades. On top of non-combat ways of dealing with them.

And most importantly, the people. You can just join raids solo and run up to people and team up to go do whatever together. You can get helped on most, if not all, things that you might wanna do, but struggle with due to your vision.

And even if you don’t, you’ll love the game for what your vision won’t affect: the chatting and the community and the cool shit you all do.

I’d say go watch some specifically friendly videos, but they just do such lobbies justice.

Fire will still damage them, so Fireball Burners and Blaze Grenades are still there as an option. I think you can also stun your teammates.

There’s been reports of griefing randoms doing this for profit.

That’s a lot of very misdirected effort, with a lot of bad and not-at-all-necessary consequences.

I could not imagine myself in this timeline.

Every time I’m done with it. Same for work. Even for laptops.

The only gaming device I can put to sleep for a longer period of time without feeling weird about it is my Steam Deck, and even in such cases it either means I’ll be back in minutes (essentially putting a game on standby) or a few hours tops.

Your reasoning is solid, but you’re not a KGB agent with a financially challenged background and extreme paranoia with likely assortment of other psychological -pathies that shape your entire worldview.

Also, Putin sure seems like someone who isn’t planning escape routes or anything - he’s burn everything and everyone around him, maybe even himself, if he had to give up power (which we’ve been witnessing for a while).

Even if he had to flee Russia and rely on stashed wealth and secret locations and whatever, he would have probably used another framework, not some already well-known American citizen that does finances.

We’re not in the timeline to doubt anything, but Putin strikes me, a Russian living in Russia and closely following the politics at least of my own country, especially from the not-so-safe side, as someone who would not choose someone he can’t control and have in his grasp to run anything like this.

Not to mention his paranoia, ego mania and the alleged financial skills that, again, allegedly let him win a lot of trust among the people de-facto making big decisions in Russia before he wriggled into presidency.

I don’t doubt that Putin had dedicated financial managers at some point, it’s just hard to belive it could’ve been anyone like Epstein, i.e. someone outside Russia or even Moscow where Putin could blackmail and hurt them or at least first treaten them into obedience, even with the eventual murder somewhere outside Russia (Litvinenko poisioning).

Not that nothing unexpected and hard-to-believe hasn’t been surfacing for a while already, though.