Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it.. reminds me of early game ARPG's on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2's new tempo.

I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around... which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

Often the question marked as a duplicate isn't a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn't spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don't get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn't great these days and hasn't been for a while.

Google's first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.

It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they're saying that only "approved" browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly... Machine Learning.

Google's biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people's reason to use Google's search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they're right to be scared, it's already starting to happen and it's showing us very quickly just how bad Google's search results are.

So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It's essentially the "big boys" trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.

NPCs! Definitely not PCs! Ha.

I have seen people that don't track spell slots for NPCs and just have them all at-will, which I think is an interesting idea. But I tend to give players non-combat objectives in their encounters, which prolongs them significantly so spell slot usage can become important for balance for NPCs in those cases.

Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they've pivoted their philosophy significantly, it's a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.

It's the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.

I just have a series of "pips" that I colour-in when used and erase when claimed back. Super simple, easy to see at-a-glance, and robust so it's not going to get messed up in my bag. Added bonus is that it works when being DM too and you have several casters to track simultaneously.

Don't roll your own if you can help it, just use a distribution dedicated for use as a thin client. I was co-incidentally just looking into this last week and came across ThinStation which looks really good. There are other distro's too, search for "linux thin client".

How do Linux distro's deal with this? I feel like however that's done, I'd like node packages to work in a similar way - "package distro's". You could have rolling-release, long-term service w/security patches, an application and verification process for being included in a distro, etc.

It wouldn't eliminate all problems, of course, but could help with several methods of attack, and also help focus communities and reduce duplication of effort.

I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it's been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).

If I’m okay with the software (not just trying it out) am I missing out by not using dockers?

No, I think in your use case you're good. A lot of the key features of containers, such as immutability, reproduceability, scaling, portability, etc. don't really apply to your use case.

If you reach a point where you find you want a stand-alone linux server, or an auto-reconfiguring reverse proxy to map domains to your services, or something like that - then it starts to have some additional benefit and I'd recommend it.

In fact, using native builds of this software on Windows is probably much more performant.

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Containers utilise the host's kernel - which is why there needs to be some hoops to run Linux container on Windows (VM/WSL).

That's one of the most key differences between VMs and containers. VMs virtualise all the hardware, so you can have a totally different guest and host operating systems; whereas because a container is using the host kernel, it must use the same kind of operating system and accesses the host's hardware through the kernel.

The big advantage of that approach, over VMs, is that containers are much more lightweight and performant because they don't have a virtual kernel/hardware/etc. I find its best to think of them as a process wrapper, kind of like chroot for a specific application - you're just giving the application you're running a box to run in - but the host OS is still doing the heavy lifting.