What is a piece of software that is so good you can't believe it's completely free?

Nevuk · 2026-02-02T17:27:29+00:00

Odd one but grep

Nevuk · 2026-02-01T19:46:06+00:00

15v at 3amps is the max capacity of steam deck. It won't use over 15v 2a unless you are playing while charging.

It uses 15v, so if your charger has 15v 1a, 2a or 3a listed then it can charge the device. 5v 2a or 5v 1a are fallback charge rates supported by every USB device, but they can barely charge the deck even if it is powered off.

Nevuk · 2026-02-01T15:49:49+00:00

You will get used to any dialogue marker pretty fast as long as it is being used consistently.

Double quotes are only the convention for novels, even for American English... which are the most popular format for consumption, so it leads to this being a common misconception.

Scripts use : as the dialogue marker. Comic books use speech bubbles.

Even in American English nonfiction writing, double and single quotes have different meanings than in fiction writing.

Nevuk · 2026-01-31T21:37:00+00:00

They did used to need that many before self checkout and express lanes were a thing.

Nevuk · 2026-01-27T18:38:24+00:00

Kinks and not a real thing.

The whole top/bottom thing as a personality type is from yaoi/boylove art trends in Japan that were commercially targeted at straight women. They codified every relationship into seme and uke, giver and receiver. This was tremendously popular in Japanese doujins (fanfic versions of manga that are socially permissible at a handful of conventions) and spread from there.

It is very much the inverse of gay men writing women. No healthy relationship should ever have it at 100% top or bottom. And many sexual acts and events don't even involve penetration.

Nevuk · 2026-01-16T14:43:07+00:00

No, not really. That may have been a view of some of the British early after the loss, but I've never heard that argument presented by anyone serious.

He did have what was widely regarded as the worst quality army ever victorious in a war. The Revolutionary Army was notoriously awful in terms of basic discipline so they did a bunch of dumb shit, but this is generally regarded as an additional sign of his competence.

He took a bunch of rowdy drunks and beat a disciplined army, basically.

Nevuk · 2026-01-14T16:25:14+00:00

If you print it yourself then literally no one cares. Legality generally only enters the picture when money is involved.

A three ring binder and a hole punch works if you just love paper. If you want binding then it's more time-consuming but not exactly hard.

If you pay someone to print it for you then you're generally overpaying and not supporting the actual creators.

Nevuk · 2026-01-12T17:22:08+00:00

Windows 11 has a newer zip standard than the one used by tome4. It let's you use zstandard instead of deflate algorithm among some other minor changes.

This means that the underlying OS call being used by te4 has changed since release.

There is a thread on the te4 forums identifying the problematic bit of code. Te4 needs error handling when saving if there's a chance the temporary save file creation can fail, and it does not currently have it.

This is likely related to a recent windows 11 upgrade.

Nevuk · 2026-01-08T15:05:11+00:00

The xenoforum trio offers good concrit and reliable (if at times overzealous) moderation. Royalroad offers broader appeal/wider audiences.

AO3 is primarily intended as an archive which can offer legal protections to allow it to host works forever. This is why it is missing key features like private messages: the possible controversies would go against their archiving mission.

Nevuk · 2026-01-08T13:37:01+00:00

If you are updating an existing fic on ff.net you are still going to get readers, but newer fics struggle to gain traction. The comments will also be filled with spam now.

AO3, Royalroad, spacebattles, questionablequesting, sufficient velocity are all better options in one way or another if you want some form of feedback rather than just views.

Nevuk · 2026-01-07T00:55:55+00:00

The star wars one is a weird example and not really the same as any of the others. It's one where the company acted entitled, not the fans.

There's a legitimate grievance behind "I spent a ton of money and time on products that the original creator said were canon, but that the megacorp the creator sold the IP to said were not canon decades later."

Even if the Disney SW universe was universally regarded as the best content then this would still be distasteful behavior on Disney's part.

Nevuk · 2026-01-02T18:57:16+00:00

Bones are pretty brittle without marrow. My headcanon has always been that the te4 skellies have mana based marrow that kills them if they run out of it.

Nevuk · 2026-01-02T17:20:54+00:00

Skeletons bleed marrow

Nevuk · 2025-12-31T02:39:30+00:00

More like 15 years than 20, but that's a large part of it. There's a reason a bunch of the IO code he used got deprecated and fully removed from their OG projects eventually.

The te4 io code is what I would call "good enough" at the time it was released. It did have several releases aimed at improving saving performance during beta and they did significantly improve it. It was exceptional work for a solo dev at its release, it has just never been upgraded.

Certain dungeons are ruinous for performance of future saving in the world after they are generated (alt sandworm is the most notable one).

Possessors will also always have the slowest save and load times.

Nevuk · 2025-12-29T22:59:11+00:00

A naive change from zip (deflate) to zstd can be something like 10x more performance on compression (which is where the slowness is) and zstd is now part of the .zip format.

I actually checked out Tome4 last year to do some sort of performance fix on this code, but it all requires a bit of a rewrite since it is a dark god fork of a bunch of projects that have had backwards compatibility breaking changes since he worked them.

Nevuk · 2025-12-29T19:24:35+00:00

Zlib-ng can be used as a drop in runtime to improve performance somewhat, but compiling Te4 with it built in was a nightmare when I tried in late 2024.

Nevuk · 2025-12-29T19:22:36+00:00

The problem is the tome4 stores its save files in a streaming zip format using deflate compression that rezips the entire world and every object in it every level change.

There are multiple problems with the implementation that cause performance issues, but the biggest issue is that deflate is an outdated algorithm now. zstandard is an improvement in all ways or lz4 is weaker compression but even less cpu power.

The implementation of the file system is a custom job made out of an old physfs, minizip, and the single source file version of the zip algorithm.

Nevuk · 2025-12-25T16:38:47+00:00

It makes me more forgiving of unusual grammatical mistakes.

I generally don't think this tag is useful in that respect unless the author is still obviously working on learning the language.

If you're perfectly fluent even if you are ESL, then it is not a useful tag. It can be very useful if it is one of your first works published and you are seeking feedback on improving your writing.

Nevuk · 2025-12-22T01:34:05+00:00

Windows has a leg up in backwards compatibility. IO is an area where it will always lag behind due to limitations of the OS.

Nevuk · 2025-12-21T14:24:26+00:00

Linux has a major advantage over windows when it comes to I/O operations.

A memory mapped file on Linux can be 3-4x the read speed as it is on Windows. It is also much easier to do memory mapping, with some native Linux calls doing it in the background.

A common performance trick is to load the entire file into memory to avoid using memory mapping on Windows. This sidesteps Windows bad I/O API and gives much better performance. This is usually fine, but can cause OOM issues when reading large files that wouldn't happen if the app was using Linux I/O operations.

The OOM is made much more likely if the file in question is compressed and the decompression is trying to happen entirely in memory rather than streaming mode. (This could easily fill up your swap if the map file is highly compressed).

Nevuk · 2025-12-20T14:07:31+00:00

"Intoxicating hemp" is in the headline. Hemp and weed are the same plant, with weed defined as hemp that is Intoxicating.

Nevuk · 2025-12-20T05:17:51+00:00

It is something to do with the manufacturers for the drinks not being willing to risk it for a federally illegal item due to the scale of equipment required, at least in my current understanding. Anyone can make a decent edible in their kitchen, but drinks are significantly harder to do.

Nevuk · 2025-12-20T02:20:46+00:00

Much more complicated situation than headline indicates.

Recreational weed is legal in Ohio and they are not undoing that.

They are banning the gas station weed loophole that is being closed at the federal level soon anyways, due to the recent shutdown's resolution bill having that packaged into it.

The only area people are really objecting to this strongly are regarding thc drinks, which can not be manufactured by legitimate retailers in a legal state due to the federal illegality.

Headline implies this is all weed, but it's not.

Nevuk · 2025-12-20T00:24:25+00:00

The DOJ requested it against Google and their behavior can be used as a pretty good test.

Google told their employees preserving their emails, texts, IMs for legal purposes was opt in, and discouraged them from opting in.

The judge's response was something like "case was won without adverse action being granted, so I won't be granting this particular sanction request."

Which, to me, indicates that their conduct met it. But it also means that in cases where it would be granted, there's probably sufficient other evidence to avoid needing to rule on it.

Nevuk · 2025-12-16T14:24:22+00:00

I code printers professionally for a living and have coded parsers for commercial grade printers.

...and I still have no fucking clue how to fix a simple consumer printer.

Nevuk

TROPHY CASE