I recall IR game controllers of that era were only particularly bad when I got excited, nervous or too focused on the game, and let them point a millimeter away from the sensor…so they only really thoroughly failed exactly when it cost me the most in the game. Haha.

For those unfamiliar with the fictional character of Charlie Burke, this McGuyver link doesn’t help.

But, since that’s clearly a uniform from “The Orville”, this Charlie Burke may be more helpful.

I like pancakes, and that this Charlie’s legacy examines racism in a thoughtful empathetic but still critical way.

“Why does the navigator of the Enterprise have to watch his step?”

“Because the Captain does his doody on the bridge!”

“If you don’t want to carry it home, that’s okay. I can bring the smell home for us with a quick roll in it.”

Yes. Or, they’ll get the thread with the awkward dog meme about a microwave. It’s beautiful to contemplate.

As someone “ordinary rich”, it is acceptable to also call me “useful idiot who turns over power and influence to the real rich in exchange for an empty promise of joining them”.

“Our AI security reviews 20,000 configurations every hour. Your money is safer than - shit. Well, nevermind. There’s no money left. Excuse me, I need to leave the country.”

If it’s all dumped into a single commit, I will whip your computer into the nearest body of water and tell you to go fish it out.

I’m going to steal this for an update to an internal guidance document for my dev team. Thank you.

People are too hard on Janeway. She didn’t have great options here. I’m sure if she could have, she would have sacrificed Ensign Kim - for not refilling the coffee replicator.

The tactics in Wolfenstein: ET were brilliant.

That’s totally fair, and I’ll keep it in mind.

I hope my habit makes your life a little easier by normalizing they/them (or just avoiding gendered terms) as an un-interesting default.

I hope for a world where they/them becomes accepted as “I’m not trusted enough by this person to be told their pronouns yet, and that’s okay.”

I think asking people to identify their gender, early in a (non-intimate) relationship, is a particularly unhealthy cultural habit. I hope I’m helping push back on that, a bit.

In the meantime, I’m trying to learn speech habits that don’t force you to gender yourself, or to be noticed in not doing so. I hope to help make these kinds of situations easier for you.

You shouldn’t have to decide at a random moment whether to share your gender identity with me. I’m committed to keep trying to learn communication patterns that make it natural for you not to have to.

I also use “they/them” until someone shares their pronouns.

Officially, I do this to avoid misgendering people.

Really, I do it because some snowflakes are too fragile to share their pronouns, and I enjoy annoying them until they do.

My preferred pronouns are actually “none of your business/fuck off”, but I settle for “they/them” for professionalism reasons. (Until I retire. Then my pronouns change officially everywhere.)

Oh, gee. A Microsoft product that worked perfectly locally is about to require a subscription. Who could have possibly guessed that would happen, yet again? (This is sarcasm.)

I really like OneNote, but I decided to learn something else when I realized which way the wind was blowing.

Usually the asshole.

It’s you can modify the settings file you sure as hell can put the malware anywhere you want

True. (But in case it amuses you or others reading along:) But a code settings file still carries it’s own special risk, as an executable file, in a predictable place, that gets run regularly.

An executable settings file is particularly nice for the attacker, as it’s a great place to ensure that any injected code gets executed without much effort.

In particular, if an attacker can force a reboot, they know the settings file will get read reasonably early during the start-up process.

So a settings file that’s written in code can be useful for an attacker who can write to the disk (like through a poorly secured upload prompt), but doesn’t have full shell access yet.

They will typically upload a reverse shell, and use a line added to settings to ensure the reverse shell gets executed and starts listening for connections.

Edit (because it may also amuse anyone reading along): The same attack can be accomplished with a JSON or YAML settings file, but it relies on the JSON or YAML interpreter having a known critical security flaw. Thankfully most of them don’t usually have one, most of the time, if they’re kept up to date.

Yeah. I’m sympathetic to the whole “technology is hard” thing, and the idea that the SteamDeck is primarily meant to be for mobile gaming.

But switching from Nintendo Switch to SteamDeck really highlighted to me how good the Nintendo engineering team is, that I never had any of these display issues with a docked Switch.

Yeah. It’s really that bad. They’ve been releasing quality of life patches, but Valve made a portable device that happens to support docking, not a device meant to be docked.

Based on your experience, I assume you have the official Steam Dock, which I find worse to use with the SteamDeck than any random USB C dongle that I have tried.

Edit: Be sure to check for updates. I recall some of the issues you mention (like the blank screen) were mentioned in SteamOS release notes this year.

Then every question afterwards is just “who couldn’t get promoted even a single time during a years long mission in the Delta quadrant?”

Yeah. The “this got dumped on us and we’re doing the minimum until we can replace it” is a genuinely solid use case for vibe coding.

And honestly, that’s all I usually did with those before AI came along anyway. So I welcome better tools for it.