To name some games with very bad perf issues that I've played in the last couple years: Core Keeper (Unity), WORMHOLE (Unity, mostly see the lag in endless mode), Crab Champions (UE4, have to use nonsense upscaling stuff that makes the game hideous just to maintain 60fps at 1920x1200).

Meanwhile Terraria, Necesse, and Barony use their own engines and run great, they have aged like wine.

Out of fairness, I'll say Tiny Rogues (Unity) usually ran pretty well from what I recall, though the dev is actually working to move off Unity in the future, so he has clearly found issues with it himself.

I know there is the argument of making a game vs making an engine, and actually getting a game done and shipping it, but when you put out garbage you aren't gonna have a very positive legacy. I think it would be better to take the long way and ensure some level of quality. Games are often played for decades after release and if they are buggy or laggy, people will continue to run into that forever.

TFA seems to be about some AI thing. Crazy how many words are actually just AI things now. Learning, reinforcement, language, model...

LLM posts are like when a new meme template comes out and gets run into the ground everywhere you look, but someone tinkering with old computers just seems like normal human hacker interests. Perhaps you could argue that too much nostalgia is a bad thing. I have been hearing "frutiger aero" a disturbing amount the last year or so.

What are people on non-systemd distros like Guix System, Void, PCLinuxOS, and so on using for this? Is there still something better to use than cron?

Admittedly I never learned cron, I use a lot of `sleep` and `countdown` for relative delays instead. Just earlier today I set up a 12h countdown followed by opening a URL with xdg-open since I expect a release around then and don't want to forget. I also threw in a little notify-send command in case my browser isn't visible, I should see that pop up. Considered using espeak, but don't wanna scare myself and/or ruin my watching experience if I'm watching a video at that time.

Another thing that helped me learn a lot was what I call "anime playlist management", but may be too niche to recommend. Basically after I moved from VLC to mpv I had to create and add to playlists without a gui. I learned a lot about the find command, text redirection, vim, fzf, file permissions... I retrieve the full file path for the videos and dump that into a .m3u file that I then watch in mpv or rearrange later in vim. find helps to get to the exact files quicker even when everything is sorted neatly into separate directories, fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively. find can also filter by mtime, so I have some one-liners that just show e.g. all files 7 days old or newer in the media directory, easy to rerun and select the stuff I just downloaded to put in the playlist.

At some point I preferred vim over geany or whatever other text editor I used to use. It's nice to be able to use the same tools everywhere, including over ssh, so that reinforced a preference for stuff that runs in a terminal. irssi, aerc, stig+transmission-daemon, neovim, mpv (controllable over ssh). Also having a file server gets you more into rsync, sshfs, stuff like that.

I've made several vim macros to speed up the "anime workflow" as well. Like I add new episodes to the very bottom of the file, but the file has sections broken up by empty lines, and I have a macro to take everything just added at the bottom and move it to the bottom of the top section, where the high priority stuff goes. I also have macros to delete the top line of two side-by-side files in vim at once, saving both. I have both a human-readable list and the actual playlist file and then I delete the lines as I watch.

I've been incrementally refining this workflow for several years now. Just find something you enjoy doing and try to polish it, learn more applicable tools you can incorporate, etc.

Glad I'm not alone in caring about this. All I want from them is a Pico with a USB-C port. When using them for keyboards and arcade controllers you either need to wire up a separate port (and USB-C is awful to solder) or use someone else's variant with one on there. I have had issues in both cases. The Open-Frame1 leverless controller needed me to either pay for assembly or fail at soldering on the extra port myself (did the former for batch 1, got cocky when ordering batch 2 and didn't pay assembly, never got any of the new boards working). Flatbox rev 5 used an RP2040-Zero from Waveshare, which initially seemed fine but later turned out to have major bouncing issues. Typing on a virtual keyboard with it was nearly impossible, all the extra inputs being detected. The amount of debounce needed to be added in GP2040-CE settings to completely solve it resulted in it being much higher latency. I heard a theory that it was due to a lack of filtering on the MCU. Meanwhile Haute42 started pumping out incredibly cheap leverless controllers in all sorts of designs within a year of me building 10 Flatboxes. They're so cheap you can't really DIY one cheaper anymore unless you need them in bulk, and they have no bouncing/input issues. They even have extension ports to help deal with console auth. Their non-3d-printed buttoncaps also don't break as much, though I did eventually have one break after living in my backpack a while.

I'd like to take another crack at building a solid leverless someday. A new Pico with a USB-C port would probably be enough motivation.

Also I should note that part of why USB-C is such a big deal on a game controller is because they all use it now, and I've got lots of long USB-C to A cables connected to consoles and my PC, I can easily switch controllers at the user-facing end without having to re-run a cable. I can go from my Open-Frame1 playing Rivals of Aether to my Steam Controller playing Crab Champions to my Haute42 M16 playing Melty Blood all with the same cable routed under my desk, often without leaving my chair.

We have seen a bigger push to get everything using XDG config dirs in recent years, and also getting everything working on Wayland. These to me seem similar, other than that this accessibility standard would be even more niche, and if it was stated upfront to be made with AI in mind, I think there would be resistance.

Personally I do not want to let an AI tool run loose on my machine, but I do like having ways to script and automate stuff. I like Sway's IPC and that every keybind is also a command you could run. So the explanation of Apple's accessibility stuff sounds cool. I wish I had something like Unity's HUD where I could use a search to select from any depth of graphical menus in a given program instead of having to poke around by hand. If the accessibility standard were like that and allowed more stuff to be done from the CLI more easily, that would be great.