At my last job, doing firmware for datacenter devices, almost never. JTAG debugging can be useful if you can figure out how to reproduce the problem on the bench, but (a) it’s really only useful if the relevant question is “what is the state of the system” and (b) it often isn’t possible outside of the lab. My experience with firmware is that most bugs end up being solved by poring over the code or datasheets/errata and having a good long think (which is exactly as effective as it sounds – one of the reasons I left that job). The cases I’ve encountered where a debugger would be genuinely useful are almost always more practically served by printf debugging.

Profilers aren’t really a thing when you have kilobytes of RAM. It can be done but you’re building all the infrastructure by hand (the same is true of debugger support for things like threads). Just like printf debugging, it’s generally more practical to instrument the interesting bits manually.

Friendship ended with font gatekeeping and dogpiling, accessibility is my new best friend

RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV’s single player mode: it’s a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.

RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn’t want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between “interact with item/character X” and “start mission with character Y” can be and the game’s tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.

The soundtracks from NieR:Automata and NieR Replicant are definitely my favorite of all time.

Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST are also very good.

which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network

Makes sense, after all matrix multiplication is O(n²).

If you’re not playing hand-held, make sure your TV is set up to minimize input delay (usually called “game” mode or something like that). An extra few tens of milliseconds of lag can make a game like Hollow Knight unplayable :(

I hadn’t really actively engaged with Reddit in years, and I stopped lurking almost cold turkey when they killed off the personal homepage on the mobile web interface earlier this year. I deleted my account when the Apollo news broke (I’ve never even used a third-party app, but it’s crystal-clear what direction the wind is blowing). I only found out about lemmy after I pulled the plug.

Now to figure out how mastodon and all the other “fediverse” apps work :-)

It’s weird, a little confusing, and a little janky. Love it so far. It’s not a novel observation on my part but it definitely feels new and exciting the way Reddit and Tumblr did back in the day.

My two favorite Emacs jokes:

• What does EMACS stand for? Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
• Emacs is a great operating system; it only lacks a decent text editor.

Can you imagine a world where a program originally designed to manipulate documents was extended through a highly dynamic, kind of half-baked interpreted language to the point of underpinning almost every application you interact with on a daily basis and using an order of magnitude or so more resources than are actually necessary?

Loot is great when it’s unique, or at least rare. Unique weapons and lore items in Dark Souls come to mind.

But yeah, loot that just fills up your inventory (or worse, your equip load) until you go sell it is just Worse Money.