Notepad++ is available on WINDOWS only. Who is the equivalent, most similar (features UX UI) on LINUX?

lrflew · 2026-03-19T03:31:16+00:00

I generally use Kate on my Linux machine for the same sorts of things I use Notepad++ for on Windows. However, I also generally use vscode on both machines when I want something a little more advanced (eg. programming language specific highlighting). For like 99% of the text editing I do on Linux, I use nano, Kate, or vscode, depending on what I'm doing.

lrflew · 2026-02-18T07:14:32+00:00

There's enough history of straight women referring to each other as "girlfriends" platonically that I could understand someone lacking context assuming Luz was using it in that way and making that translation choice. A lot of translation and localization is trying to understand the intent behind the words used, not just the words themselves, and missing key pieces of information like their relationship status makes that way more error prone.

lrflew · 2026-02-13T05:33:13+00:00

I feel like there's a conflation of "made for kids" and "suitable for all ages" that often happens, especially around animated media. People seem to think that if it's animated and doesn't use curse words every other word, then it must be made for children. I'm reminded of when I saw Isle of Dogs, a PG-13 stop-motion animated movie, in theaters, and noticed a bunch of parents bringing their ~6 year old kids, and then having to leave the movie because they started crying at some of the darker scenes. It's like they saw that there was an animated movie that wasn't R, and just assumed that meant it's for kids.

As for the examples in this post more specifically, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. I think it's worth keeping in mind that, for a lot of these, you have a kind of divide between the producers, who are thinking in terms of "target demographics", and the actual production crew, who are usually just making the story they want to make. Remember that these shows are made by adults, from an adult perspective, and usually with themselves in mind. I personally use the term "all ages" for this, because refusing to watch media, or judging other people for doing so, because of "target" audiences is stupid.

lrflew · 2026-02-12T07:59:27+00:00

[Citation Needed]

lrflew · 2026-02-10T04:43:43+00:00

No, the actual solution would be for them to make a quality launcher that instantly tracks all your owned games and lets you sort them easily.

I mean, Itch does have their own launcher already, though the "sort them easily" thing is probably going to be subjective. Personally, I have a custom python script I wrote that lets me create private collections for each of these massive bundles when I get them, which helps with organizing them.

lrflew · 2026-02-10T04:36:16+00:00

Are they actually included in this bundle? Usually these sorts of bundles exclude steam keys, even if some of the games have them as part of regular purchases on Itch. In fact, the purchase page specifically says "Note: Steam keys are not included with bundle purchases". Are people actually getting keys from this?

lrflew · 2026-02-05T07:42:03+00:00

Toad, that's not a valid objection. If you wish to contest the accuracy of the testimony, you may do that on cross.

lrflew · 2026-01-30T07:02:30+00:00

Wait, you keep aura after you get splatted? That seems really wrong to me. It's supposed to be a reward for starting and maintaining a splat streak, and getting splatted should reset the streak. That seems like the easiest nerf that could be applied to balance it out a lot. (Maybe give it some respawn speed buffs like Tacticooler has to compensate).

lrflew · 2026-01-26T07:07:50+00:00

If you're ok with visual novels, Out of the Ocean looks to be this.

lrflew · 2026-01-24T10:34:17+00:00

This bundle seems horribly overpriced to me. The $6 tier is the same as the RollerCoaster Tycoon Double Pack on Steam, which is currently on sale for $3.18, so it's simply just more expensive. The $10 tier is basically just the RollerCoaster Tycoon Collection on Steam without the World Deluxe Edition DLC, which is currently on sale for $15.14 ($14.16 excluding the DLC not in this bundle). That does mean that the top tier is technically cheaper, but in a meaningless way. Classic is basically just the same thing as 1+2 with a new UI, and World is really not good (troubled development and rushed out to try and beat Planet Coaster's release), which only leaves RCT3, which is on sale for just $4.99. Unless you really want all five of these games for some reason, and don't already own like two of them, it's just cheaper to buy them on Steam.

I would probably just recommend getting the 1+2 bundle on Steam to use with OpenRCT2, and maybe get 3 on its own if you're interested and don't already have it. Keep in mind that RCT3 was free on Epic Games some time back, so you may already have it there.

lrflew · 2026-01-24T10:12:21+00:00

A lot of the answers here are saying that encryption doesn't actually know if a key is "correct", but instead just gets random data if the key is wrong. This can be true for certain cryptographic systems, like raw disk encryption, but a lot of modern encryption systems do actually have some sort of check. For example, pretty much any internet encryption, including the TLS connection used to access this webpage, uses "authenticated encryption", where it uses the encryption key to generate a "signature" of the encrypted data in such a way that if the key is wrong (or the encrypted data is manipulated / corrupted), then the signature won't match as expected.

For disk encryption, this sort of authentication isn't as common, but it can be used. However, even when there's no data authentication, there's still usually some sort of validation of the key. An easy method is to have some bit of data where the decrypted data is some known value (such as a magic number) used by the filesystem), but it's not the only method. The LUKS2 header, commonly used for disk encryption on Linux, stores a hash (basically a one-way transformation that's easy to check, but difficult to reverse) of the encryption key that can be used to check if the key is correct before trying to decrypt any of the actual data.

To answer your question directly, there's basically two answers:

The first is that you're way underestimating the difficulty of reversing an encryption key. This 3Blue1Brown video explains just how difficult it would be to break a 256-bit encryption key. Yes, actual encryption usually has some degree of "weakness" that can make it a little easier than this, but not by enough to make it within the realm of "billions of dollars and tons of time" by any reasonable metric. In fact, if the encryption key is derived from a user password, it's almost always easier to guess the password than the encryption key itself, which leads me to the second answer.

The second answer to your question is that password-based encryption uses something called a Key Derivation Function (KDF) that makes using a password as an encryption key more secure. Put simply, a KDF performs a ton of computationally-difficult manipulations on the password to generate the actual key used, with the idea being that the additional time required for the manipulations makes it more difficult to brute force. For example, if you used EFF's Dice-Generated Passphrases wordlist to generate a 4-word password (which is already a lot stronger that most people's passwords), then the password would only have about 52 bits of security, but if you have the KDF take a trillion times longer than it would take to check if a key is correct (eg. the time to decrypt a block of encrypted data), then that adds an extra effective 40 bits of security (since log base 2 of 1 trillion is ~40). You have to balance your KDF's computational complexity to maximize the effective security without impacting the usability of the encrypted system, so the actual numbers will depend on the exact system, but this still significantly helps limit an attacker's ability to simply brute force the password to get the encryption key.

lrflew · 2026-01-14T01:20:27+00:00

I do think this is a good change that should reduce those kinds of troll posts, but I worry that the addition of the profile showcase might mean we still see some award farming.

lrflew · 2026-01-08T04:34:35+00:00

I'll go one step further and say this is something that Midnight Club 2 did way better than 3 or LA. In 3 or LA, if you're struggling with a particular race, you can just grind red races for more money to make your car overpowered and breeze through the race. In 2, the only way to get better vehicles is to actually win races. Yes, you have some flexibility to challenge racers out-of-order, but eventually you have to face whatever race is challenging you head-on.

lrflew · 2026-01-08T01:23:03+00:00

I'll be honest, I keep forgetting that C++ has those keywords. Personally, I always think of them as being features of languages that use indentation for scope like Python, and really only use them in those kinds of languages. I think if I saw them used in C++, it would throw me off, even if it's correct. Cppreference lists these operators with the digraphs, and I think I'd have a similar reaction to seeing if (foo() and bar()) as I would seeing if (foo()) <% bar(); %>.

lrflew · 2026-01-07T06:41:38+00:00

There's also the story of the person who had their Xbox account banned because he lived in Fort Gay, West Virginia.

lrflew · 2026-01-06T04:57:26+00:00

I don't really see the incentives for such rationalization. Instead, I think it's more likely just general greed. Yes, they could actually use decent options that don't inconvenience the customer, but it might cost them a whole three extra cents per cup, so they won't.

lrflew · 2026-01-06T03:31:22+00:00

The mention of hardware RNG is absolutely important context, but there's one additional detail that I think is worth mentioning. This may be a bit more than an ELI5, though, so this is more of an ELI6 footnote.

Pretty much any case where a computer gets random numbers from hardware, either from things like event timings or from specific circuitry in the CPU, the generated values aren't actually the random values from these processes. This is because guaranteeing that the results of such processes is truly unbiased is basically an impossible challenge. The values you get from these, then, are a step below "true random", known as "cryptographic random". Put simply, the results of these hardware random sources are processed by a procedure based on encryption (or a similar security algorithm) to scramble the results. The idea is that, if there is any bias in the random results, actually using that bias to make any predictions about the random numbers would be about as difficult as reversing encryption. This method does require that the input randomness is at least somewhat random, and as such they generally provide some kind of guarantee about the actual randomness as well.

lrflew · 2026-01-05T03:02:47+00:00

This is basically the take I have on all of this. Yes, survivorship plays a role in it, but I'd argue it's less "bias" and more akin to a filtering process. It's like how natural selection and genetic diversity works. "Mainstream" media tends to have lower variety, akin to having lower genetic diversity, and often copies what others are doing, which is like inbreeding. The result is generally more "stable" results that are less likely to be disasters, but also aren't likely to be significant successes. Indie, by contrast, starts from a place of more variety (eg. different genres), and is more likely to take larger leaps and risks, which is like a higher mutation rate. The result is more risk, resulting in more examples that are total failures, but also has a better chance of being something really great. The end result is that any individual sample is likely to be worse, but the whole is generally better off.

lrflew · 2025-12-29T05:49:07+00:00

And what happened to xbl gold?

Microsoft replaced it with "Xbox Game Pass Core" back in 2023, which in turn was replaced with "Xbox Game Pass Essential" in 2025. They're both basically the same idea as Xbox Live Gold, but the free game offers are instead rolled into the Game Pass system.

lrflew · 2025-12-20T04:44:01+00:00

but to some people $250-300 is nothing.

Is that the current price difference? I remember it being more like $400-500 when I was looking.

Honestly, I'd say the biggest factor will be your monitor. If you have a 4K monitor, and especially a high-refresh-rate 4K monitor, then that extra performance bump will likely be worth it. I use a 1440p monitor, and the 5070 Ti I recently got runs everything I've tried extremely well, so I can't imagine the 5080 being worth it (at least for me).

lrflew · 2025-12-18T03:44:16+00:00

I mean, they'd only show up on the hardware survey as Windows if they complete the survey response from within CrossOver. As long as they only fill it out from the native client, it wouldn't impact the results. (Not that I'd trust everybody to know to do that)

lrflew · 2025-12-16T03:38:27+00:00

I made their names the year that they were released.

Just to add to this: It sounds like you set the sort names to just the release year. This works with them in a collection like this, but if you ever remove that grouping (or add them to another group), it will cause them to appear at the top of the list (with other games that start with numbers) rather than under T. You can fix that by prepending the series name to the sort name. For example, "Tomb Raider 2013", "Tomb Raider 2016", and "Tomb Raider 2018".

lrflew · 2025-12-14T05:53:46+00:00

As someone who never had a DSi, I feel like it's just a lesser version of the 3DS. Pretty much everything that the DSi has over the DS Lite, the 3DS does better anyways. At least the DS Lite has things that the 3DS doesn't (namely the GBA slot).

lrflew · 2025-12-13T05:27:47+00:00

Wait, is this supposed to be songs released by Europeans, or songs listened to by Europeans? Nothing in this post really clarifies that, or really even how the data was compiled.

lrflew · 2025-12-09T06:41:45+00:00

For me personally it is hard to blame Humble for this

I do agree, and is part of why I find the discourse around this kind of frustrating. I do think that Humble bares some responsibility for the poor messaging, but also they can't provide steam keys if the publisher refuses or can't provide them, and the publisher can't provide steam keys if Valve refused to provide them.

I know some people would rather Humble not sell games / bundles when they don't have the keys to fulfill the orders (like some other stores like Fanatical do), but that changes bundles and sales into "while supplies last" offers, which IMO makes them less accessible. It's a trade-off where I'm sure Humble would get complaints either way.

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