I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the idea of using a GUI, especially for a non-professional who mostly just wants to get into self-hosting. Not everyone has to learn all the ins and outs of every piece of software they run. My sister is one of the least technical people in the world, and she has her own Jellyfin server. It’s not a bad thing that this stuff has become more accessible, and we should encourage that accessibility.

If, however, you intend to use these tools in a professional environment, then you definitely need to understand what’s happening under the hood and at least be comfortable working in the command line when necessary. I work with Docker professionally, and Dockge is my go to interface, but I can happily maintain any of my systems with nothing but an SSH connection when required. What I love about Dockge is that it makes this parallel approach possible. The reason I moved my organization away from Portainer is precisely because a lot of more advanced command line interactions would outright break the Portainer setup if attempted, whereas Dockge had no such problems.

The thing is, those poor design decisions have nothing to do with those features, i claim that every feature could be implemented without “holding the compose files hostage”.

Yes, this is exactly my point. I think I’ve laid out very clearly how Portainer’s shortcomings are far more than just “It’s not for your use case.”

Portainer is designed, from the ground up to trap you in an ecosystem. The choices they made aren’t because it’s necessary to do those things that way in order to be a usable Docker GUI. It’s solely because they do not want you to be able to easily move away from their platform once you’re on it.

Not the point. If you want to interact with the compose files directly through the command line they’re all squirelled away in a deep nest of folders, and Portainer throws a hissy fit when you touch them. Dockge has no such issues, it’s quite happy for you to switch back and forth between command line and GUI interaction as you see fit.

It’s both intensely frustrating whenever it comes up as an issue directly, and speaks to a problem with Portainer’s underlying philosophy.

Dockge was built as a tool to help you; it understands that it’s role is to be useful, and to get the fuck out of the way when its not being useful.

Portainer was built as a product. It wants to take over your entire environment and make you completely dependent on it. It never wants you to interact with your stacks through any other means and it gets very upset if you do.

I used Portainer for years, both in my homelab and in production environments. Trust me, I’ve tried to work around its shortcomings, but there’s no good solution to a program like Portainer other than not using it.

Please don’t use Portainer.

• It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
• It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
• It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you’ve screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it’s here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we’re talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it’s still not one I can recommend.

I think you’re seriously underestimating the strength, size and funding of the Israeli military, combined with the significant presence the US has in the area. They’re likely to be quite capable of holding off a full scale assault by an Iranian lead coalition until more forces can be deployed.

Isreal is a very paranoid, highly militarized state. There is no attack that will be “faster than they can react.” They’re basically on a war footing all the time, and especially now with the recent ratcheting up of tensions.

Iran has very few strategic or tactical advantages in this situation.

Netanyahu desperately wants to drag the US into a war on Israel’s behalf. It would shore up his crumbling position at home and complete reframe the narrative in the West away from the genocide in Gaza, recasting Isreal as an embattled ally once more.

Why?

Because Isreal has the US in their corner. It’s really that simple.

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the games. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is the organization. It also operates as Roberts Space Industries (RSI) but that’s primarily a marketing arm.

So you’re saying you failed to plan adequate staffing capacity for the company’s needs?

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1. It was covered by glass, unclutch your fucking pearls already.

2. Van Gogh is my favorite painter, and I would still rather have a habitable planet for future generations than have Sunflowers. If you’re more mad about this than you are about what big oil and gas companies are doing, sit down and have a good hard think about where your priorities are. I do not give a shit if you “agree with their message but not their tactics” or if you “think it makes the cause look bad” or whatever other bullshit you want to spew to cover your ass right now. Ultimately, if this caused you to feel a greater sense of righteous anger than the wholesale destruction of our environment for profit does, you are part of the problem. I’d rather side with the people who are trying to make a difference, even if I don’t like how they do it, than side with the people plundering our world for personal gain.

Fuck yes, more Slay The Princess. One of the most brilliantly creative games I’ve played in years.

This is very well said.

I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.

In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.

The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.

Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.

An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.

Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.

The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.

If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.

To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).

See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.

$100 million is the reported budget for development. Generally speaking you double that to account for marketing and publishing costs.

(Though in the case of Concord, god only knows what marketing they actually did)

If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.

At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.

Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.

The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.

So you primary in Dems who will support ranked choice. This is .ml, surely you’ve all heard of entryism?

So noble. So majestic. SO STUBBY.

I’ll bet your boot process is a lot shorter too.