WarrickSothr's recent activity
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Comment on How safe am I? (self hosting) in ~comp
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Comment on July 2023 Tildes Fundraiser in ~tildes
WarrickSothr Link ParentThanks for the reminder to pledge some monthly funds to keeping this site running! In my (almost) month here it has become one of the first sites I check for news and discussion. It reminds me a...Thanks for the reminder to pledge some monthly funds to keeping this site running!
In my (almost) month here it has become one of the first sites I check for news and discussion. It reminds me a lot of the early days of reddit and what was lost along the way to where that site is today. Longer form conversation is definitely where I feel most at home and Tildes and the people here are fostering that type of atmosphere.
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Comment on Thoughts on Final Fantasy 16 in ~games
WarrickSothr LinkI finished it with about 35 hours of gameplay. I'll try my best to breakdown my thoughts on the game. After about 2 hours in the game I switched to playing on story mode, which is something I have...I finished it with about 35 hours of gameplay. I'll try my best to breakdown my thoughts on the game.
After about 2 hours in the game I switched to playing on story mode, which is something I have never done before for a Final Fantasy game. I love JRPG games and they're one of the few genres I don't mind grinding in because they often have decent side content locked away behind that grind. This has definitely colored my experience and the reason I switched to it is because of some of the negatives about the game that I will call out further down.
There are some really positive aspects to the game, and on average I don't regret buying it for full retail and sinking 35 hours into it. If it wasn't for the solid core story I'd probably not feel this way.
- The story is a nice return to form from the less focused FF XV, it has depth and meaning and there are some really great moments for the main character. (I seem to be one of the few people who enjoyed FF XV and had 200+ hours and a new game plus playthrough, however it wasn't the main story that kept me playing, but my the relationships with my companions and the general exploration aspect of FF XV that kept me coming back)
- The combat feels really tight. They seemed to take everything that was fun about FF XV combat and a some quality of life improvements from FF VII remake (tightening the time between moves, making combos a bit more intuitive with less weird button combos or menu selection, and making sure not to interrupt the flow) and polish them further. (There's a but to this pro, but I'll leave it to later)
- There are moments where the game is gorgeous and some of the levels have breathtaking views.
- The side quests in the last 1/3 of the game are way better than the ones in the first 2/3. (I also stopped doing them for other reasons and will detail that later)
- The cinematic battles are epic and it shows that they spent a lot of time on them (even if I have complaints about how drawn out they were in general)
- The voice acting was generally solid (where it existed).
- The in cinematic xray mode to give you lore was amazing, I didn't have to keep notes to keep track of story, if I missed something I could often see what I needed to know at the press of a button. Also, the ingame codex was great, showing all the stages of the notes so that you could go back before big reveals and see what the codex said before things turned on their head.
- The twists in the game were not new, or unexpected but they were often executed well, Tying in your codex knowledge or main campaign dialog in with a new revelation that sent the story sideways or exposed an assumption that was wrong.
The not so positive aspects of the game.
- The companions were soulless for me. I come to JRPG games and Final Fantasy in particular for the rich relationships between the main character and their companions and even between companions in the party. At no point during this game did I feel sorry, excited for, or worried about my companions because they were flat unchanging cutouts without character development. (During the final 1/4 of the game there were moments that were better but I was already checked out of those relationships by that time so it felt a bit hollow. The writers seemed to want me to care but without the development of those relationships early in the game it just wasn't going to happen)
- If you ever talk to NPCs with dialog bubbles over their heads, they would only have the first 3-5 words voice acted and then leave the rest for you to read. It was so jarring that after the first 10 hours or so I just stopped talking with them. I would've been fine reading the dialog, that's really common in JRPG games with lots of character interaction, but voicing the first half of a sentence and then nothing else (often some quippy opening line that I'm almost certain they reused from the background dialog you hear while walking around was just unapproachable)
- The combat lost all of the strategy, it went FF XV and actively made it less enjoyable for me (though probably more approachable for people that don't like to have to plan their combat or setup party actions before entering an area). You control just the MC and there is no coordination with other party members that may or may not be tagging along at any time (With the exception of your companion animal where you get the choice of 3 moves you can command them to take).
- Enemies are just damage sponges that you have to outlast by dodging or blocking at the right time before going back to trying to land combos to do any real damage to them (unless you enjoy mashing square mindlessly against a rock wall...). Boss battles are even worse, there is a hidden timer so at certain points you'll stop doing any damage to them and you must wait out the next cinematic scene by dodging the boss exclusively. Seriously, the boss stops taking damage even if you see the damage indicators show up around them when you attack.
- The enemy design is formulaic, worse than I've seen before in a FF game. There are a handful of base enemy types and when you are in different regions they get different colors, names, and levels and that is it. No moveset changes or special to deal with, just the same unending swarm of damage sponge clones. (The mini boss battles are better, but they often feel even more spongy and the only thing that makes the m entertaining is the expanded move sets you need to counter or dodge)
- About halfway through the game, just before the side quests started getting better they started randomly blocking off side quests for no reason. So that I would get the quest and it'd be locked for multiple missions with no real reason (It wasn't because the world was changing or because of some time sensitive quest, they truly felt like random quest locking). I stopped doing most side quests around that time because the game was not letting me complete them, even if I had complete access to the area where the quest was. It got to the point where I had to travel back and forth to the same location 3 times to complete 3 quests and I gave up. The content was not good enough to be worth being randomly blocked from completing quests and forced to run all over. At its worst there was I side quest that I opened up about 2/3rds of the way into the game and it was available until I talked to a character about another main mission and after that it stayed locked for the entire rest of the game, no warning that I wouldn't be able to complete it and even worse there was a bug that prevented me from taking it off my UI, so I was stuck staring at those damn quest lock symbols for the rest of the game.
- There was a point in the story that they really fumbled, the hero had one of his major challenges and setbacks in the game and it was stupid. It went directly against information they'd given us at the very beginning of the game and to make matters worse, the second and third time we had a similar encounter we did just fine until they kneecapped us for story reasons. I'd probably be less salty about this if it wasn't for the entire lack of relationships with my companions that could've softened the kick to that groin by Square Enix.
I may go back and play new game + at some point in the future and maybe it'll be different because I'll be going in knowing about these flaws. But there were moments while playing that I was quite angry about what they took away or chose not to do. I'm really disappointed with the lack of content around the people directly around the main character and not having a party system at all. Followed by the general lack of care in the side quests for most of the game (I'm certain there were some side quests gems that I missed because I stopped doing them. It seemed like half of all the side quests only showed up during the last 1/3 of the game).
TLDR: I think I might've enjoyed a 15 hour Final Fantasy XVI movie compared to the 35 hour husk of a Final Fantasy game that I played.
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
WarrickSothr LinkI just finished reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky and it wasn’t as good as the previous book Children of Time. However it was imaginative and I appreciate Tchaikovsky’s attention to...I just finished reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky and it wasn’t as good as the previous book Children of Time. However it was imaginative and I appreciate Tchaikovsky’s attention to imagining how aliens might think very differently than we do, right down to the biological underpinnings of the species. If you’ve read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir it is not dissimilar in concept, but the initial interspecies interaction is antagonistic and it espouses hope through the individuals that reach out and try to understand that which is different. I find the Weir novel to be quite happy in comparison and not quite as deep in the imagining of alien life.
My largest complaint about Children of Ruin is that we spend significantly less time in the “head” of characters from the new species and so we don’t get to explore the nuance of their thinking, society, and struggles in quite the same way as we did with the Portiids. Perhaps this is because unlike the first book the central conflict isn’t understanding between humans and a single alien species but rather a larger existential threat to all life. Alternatively it could also be because of a couple of plot points regarding how our new species came about in a guided fashion compared to the Portiids of the first book. Either way it didn’t resonate with me nearly as much and so it feels the lesser of the two novels in the series.
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Comment on What password management solution do you use and why? in ~tech
WarrickSothr Link ParentI also use Bitwarden self hosted with the Vaultwarden open source server implementation for privacy reasons. When LastPass started to have their security debacles over 10 years ago I started...I also use Bitwarden self hosted with the Vaultwarden open source server implementation for privacy reasons. When LastPass started to have their security debacles over 10 years ago I started shopping around for an alternative that wasn’t focused on growth and had an option for self hosting to reduce what I perceived at the time to be my biggest risk. I pay $10 a year to support the development of the official clients that I use.
For two factor authentication and accounts commonly used from a terminal I use Pass with the otp plugin and synced with git.
This setup has solved most of my needs and Pass even has a reasonable community developed iOS client so I can access my OTP codes on the phone and keep my passwords and OTP secrets in separate systems.
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Comment on What was your first programming language, what languages do you know now, and what tips do you have for those trying to learn any of those? in ~comp
WarrickSothr LinkI was introduced to programming with Visual Basic in high school and swore I'd never write software for a career and yet here I am with ~11 years of experience doing what I said I'd never do. In...I was introduced to programming with Visual Basic in high school and swore I'd never write software for a career and yet here I am with ~11 years of experience doing what I said I'd never do.
In no particular order these are the languages I have functional familiarity with.
- Java 7+
- Python 2.7 and 3+
- C#
- Lua
- Kotlin
- Javascript/Typescript (vastly prefer having types as I rely on them in other languages)
- Go
- Common Lisp, Scheme (because who doesn't love perenthesis inception, perenception?)
- C
- Rust
For my day to day use I mostly stick with Python and Rust because they fit my needs well enough and they both have a mature and growing library ecosystems. Python is fast enough for most things and inter-operating with Rust is fairly simple when additional performance or functionality is needed.
There's a certain tenacity that is needed to learn a new programming language and my advice would be to find the project or idea that drives you to keep practicing with it. For me it was an image comparison library I built to help perceptually compare images so that I could identify near duplicates and make informed choices on how to cleanup my photography backups. For some people it's building a LISP, and for others making a game. It needs to be something that motivates you to stretch your skills, but small enough to fit in your personal attention span.
Above all else keep it fun and embrace the failures when they happen. We all spend a lot of time failing before we become competent in a language and after that struggle to learn we get comfortable in our new status quo. So be sure to not lose your comfort with failure, so that when you want/need to learn a new language it's not a shock to go back to square one.
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Comment on Self-hosting Tildes? in ~tildes
WarrickSothr LinkDocumentation on running Tildes seems to be an area where we as a community might be able to help. Deimos has the documentation static site source code hosted here -...Documentation on running Tildes seems to be an area where we as a community might be able to help.
Deimos has the documentation static site source code hosted here - https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-static-sites - and seems to be open to contributions. However some of that documentation instead encourages use of the wiki attached to tildes directly - https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki - so I am unsure which is the best place for documentation on running tildes.
One of my concerns with writing documentation around self hosting is that once self hosting is encouraged and well documented, there will be pressure for development of features that might not benefit the first community (tildes.net) or development will be forked and the community will splinter. Having contributed to open source projects before, I am cautious to suggest lowing the barrier or entry to running personal versions of tildes with the community right now. Support requests around hosting issues and technical support will grow drastically and we'd need to be ready as a community to support answering those requests. Here are some of the things to think about when lowering the barrier of entry to self hosting software.
- Reliable database upgrades with well documented data recovery processes (Forum and forum analogs like tildes are troves are knowledge and community, strong guarantees around data integrity and provenance are a must)
- Strong operational documentation around how to backup important resources (databases, file stores, custom templates), debug errors, and required regularly scheduled maintenance.
- Clear expectations around support ticket format and where to ask for help along with volunteers to keep people honest about the process and provide consistency.
I'm not opposed to helping out with such an effort as this overlaps with a significant amount of my professional experience and I want to give back to the community. I do suggest that if this is something we as a community want to encourage, that we work with @Deimos to understand the support that will be needed to make this a net benefit to the first community (tildes.net).
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Comment on Redditors of Tildes, which subreddits are you missing the most during the blackout? in ~tech
WarrickSothr LinkI think I’ll end up echoing most of the other commenters here. I mostly miss the small niche interests, hobby focused ones, and some of the support ones I was still part of. r/steamdeck...I think I’ll end up echoing most of the other commenters here. I mostly miss the small niche interests, hobby focused ones, and some of the support ones I was still part of.
And a few of my the local subreddits for my US state and nearby cities.
What I don’t miss is the firehose of garbage that I let myself sift through regularly.
In this case I think a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is also the correct solution for a sysadmin concerned about opening even proxied traffic to the Internet. Not all VPN technologies are about egress traffic and while Tailscale can be configured with exit nodes, its default configuration is a secure network between your computers running the tailscale client anywhere you have internet access through some fairly ingenious NAT busting tooling.
To answer your question about what it gives that the other software the OP has mentioned does not. It would allow OP to not proxy traffic or open ports. Using their magic DNS you’d access computers by their name on the tailnet and all the traffic would be routed over the virtual private network encrypted instead of directly over the Wide Area Network (WAN)
However, as someone who uses tailscale in this fashion I’d like to warn OP that adding a VPN to your setup comes with configuration concerns and some additional management.
I personally use a bit of a hybrid approach with a small VM in a cloud provider acting as my web proxy for services that are better completely exposed to the internet. Routing traffic back to my computers hosting software at home or in other cloud providers over the tailscale VPN. With this setup my private networking between home and the proxy is self healing with NAT busting and my traffic between the proxy and downstream servers is encrypted. As a benefit I can SSH directly to each machine in the tailnet and use tailscale to authenticate that connection instead of having to keep my selection of private keys on each device or clutter my authorized keys with dozens of rarely used keys (https://tailscale.com/tailscale-ssh/).