This is why you use fish shell and just type something vaguely similar to what you remember and hit the up arrow key.

You don’t need an epoxy of any sort for this … just a grinder, some more mortar, and a joiner.

This is just something that happens with masonry after decades.

One thing I’ve learned since becoming a home owner ~5 years ago… There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet that tries to get you to a point of hysteria.

https://www.premiumwaterproofing.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/stairstep-cracks.jpg

https://www.du-west.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/bulog1-1920w.jpg

This is the kind of stair step crack you need to worry about. It’s a big gap, many blocks, etc. It’s a sign part of your foundation is sinking.

What you have is a block missing some mortar and a crack below (which can happen if water gets into the block … which happens when you’re missing mortar). You can have someone look at it, but I think an honest contractor would tell you “get it repointed or do it yourself, keep an eye on it.”

That just looks like weathering. I have some similar cracks (… that I really do need to get to sooner or later…), it just needs repointed to prevent further water intrusion (take out the old mortar and put new mortar in).

I would not bother your insurance company with this.

This headline seems way weaker than necessary BBC.

Sudan civil war: Women raped by paramilitary fighters

Actually, I guess that’s not the headline, it’s just the post title.

ClamAV is mostly for filtering things on mail servers or uploads to a shared resource like a wiki.

You can also use it as a system virus scanner, but most viruses it detects are Windows viruses.

The bigger issue is monetization. YouTube is popular in no small part because creators are trying to make money.

Yeah this is either projection because they didn’t see the mainstream media doing it or an attempt to drive a wedge and create controversy where there shouldn’t be any.

The latest expansion genuinely did shake up the enemies. They still need to … change something. It seems like maybe they will with the next expansion changing how they present the story. We shall see.

Possibly keep an eye on Diabotical Rogue… Definitely not what you want right now, but it has potential.

My concern is more so if he gets elected, he might try to justify “emergency powers” citing political violence as history has shown with other authoritarians.

Plex is moving in the app direction… So Plex is probably moving away from what you want despite being one of the easiest options.

It would probably be helpful to know what you’re trying to accomplish beyond “what”. Like, why do you want to host your music and play it via a web browser.

I’ve never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that’s about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they’re a far more “couch friendly” genre.

They also don’t tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where “it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map” and server costs of “it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match” that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.

Live Service:

• https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1172470
• https://steamcharts.com/app/359550
• https://steamcharts.com/app/440
• https://steamcharts.com/app/230410
• https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570
• https://steamcharts.com/app/594650

Never adopted a live service (but a big name):

• https://steamcharts.com/app/1517290
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238840
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238860

Live service is worse for the shooter genre on “eventual death” … but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven’t and are still trying to compete with the “buy the new game for a premium price tag” (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can’t be charted because they reorganized their game as “everything is under ‘Call of Duty’”.

The fighting games on steam don’t even come close to any of the shooter numbers.

Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or “play with a well known group of friends”), e.g., https://steamcharts.com/app/289070 and https://steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost “live service-like” levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).

Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy … but there genuinely is something to them when they’re done well. They’re often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.

Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this … They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made “extreme changes” vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA’s best chance is “try again next year” at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.

If you’re frugal you could’ve played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would’ve needed to spent $180 minimum.

We’ve had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.

Interesting question… What competitive games from the last 10 years would you consider to be not live service games?

I don’t think Fortnite can be meaningfully preserved anymore than say, Cedar Point can personally.

Live services can also certainly transition out of a live service state; or if the source code is disclosed (per my previous statement) they can be transitioned by the community after they seize operation. Building a game like Fortnite or RuneScape just doesn’t work without it being a centralized “destination.” The experience is about the large number of players as much as it’s about the game play.

Live services are more of a destination than a product … and for match made competitive shooters and things of that ilk … I think that’s fine.

You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that’s very effective at preservation.

Hmm… I’m unaware of this, but I guess it’s theoretically possible. Still it’s a lot harder to emulate x86 + some graphics hardware than it is to emulate a Gameboy.

Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies.

Agreed, but it’s not a silver bullet and A LOT of stuff is going to be shaken up now that x86 is starting to be challenged. For a long time PCs have been entirely operating on x86 (which is arguably part of why Java died … the abstraction just wasn’t necessary). That x86 dominance I think may have given a false sense of security for software longevity.

It’s not even that it’s hard to port the games, but without the source code, it’s just not going to happen.

I kind of wish there were laws where source code had to be released after X years of inactivity, especially for games for the cultural preservation aspect. Like if you have abandoned a game and not released any new content (especially if you haven’t released even any bug fixes/have totally abandoned the game), after 10 years the game code must be released.

I don’t necessarily think it needs to be a release of rights, assets, or anything like that … but being unable to operate a game you’ve bought just because it was built for an older piece of hardware is 👎.

But live service is just purposely killing games that didn’t need to die.

Bad live services are killing (in many cases bad) games that didn’t need to die (and might have been better if less time was spent trying to force something to be a live service that didn’t need to be one).

There’s a big difference between Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League and say… PUBG, Fortnite, Hunt Showdown, WOW, RuneScape, etc

That’s not really true… No closed source software that isn’t actively developed should be expected to last forever. Eventually the binaries will get to the point where nothing will run them.

You also can’t emulate Windows. Maybe you could virtualize Linux and use wine, but even that is a tall order for “forever”.

Typically live service games last a lot longer in terms of new content and updates. There are a lot of recent complete failures of live services though that didn’t make it more than a couple of months … they’re just bad games.

So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.

Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.

All that to say, you’re always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you’re doing self signed certificates… And then nobody trusts you.

The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.

Realistically… There’s not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.

So the local machine doesn’t really need the firewall; it definitely doesn’t hurt, but your router should be covering this via port forwarding (ipv4) or just straight up firewall rules (ipv6).

You can basically go two routes to reasonable harden the system IMO. You can either just set up a user without administrative privileges and use something like a systemd system level service to start the server as that user and provide control over it from other users … OR … if you’re really paranoid, use a virtual machine and forward the port from the host machine into the VM.

A lot of what you’re doing is … fine stuff to do, but it’s not really going to help much (e.g. building system packages with hardening flags is good, but it only helps if those packages are actually part of the attack surface or rather what’s exposed to the remote users in someway).

Your biggest risk is going to be plugins that aren’t vetted doing bad things (and really only the VM or using the dedicated user account provides an insulation layer there – the VM really only adds protection against privilege escalation which is pretty hard to pull off on a patched system).

My advice for most people:

• Make a new user on the system to run each game you want to run
• Run the game using systemd and that user
• Use something like kopia + the root user’s crontab (easier than systemd timers, but systemd timers also work) to backup the files on disk

For Minecraft in particular, to properly back things up on a busy server you need to disable auto save, manually force save, do the backup and then enable auto save again after your backup. Kopia can issue commands to talk to the server to do that, but you need a plugin that can react to those commands running on the server (or possibly to use the server console via stdin). Realistically though, that’s overkill and you’ll be just fine backing up the files exactly as they are periodically.

Kopia in particular will do well here because of its deduplication of baked up data + chunking algorithm that breaks up files. That has saved me a crazy amount of storage vs other solutions I’ve tried. Kopia level compression isn’t needed because the Minecraft region files themselves are already highly compressed.