It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.
Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?
Wow, what a delightful surprise! I'm a huge NetHack fan and have been waiting a long time for the official 3.7 release before switching over to it. I've been a 3.6 holdout, haha.
AFAIK, the backend has moved a lot of map generation logic (and exposure of other data) to a Lua API, which is quite exciting as something for people to play with in tooling, forks, mods, etc.
Minor spoilers below:
I heard about some great balance adjustments that help to mitigate over-reliance on a single kit, such as making certain extrinsic resistances (e.g. wearing rings) stronger than their intrinsic counterparts, which adds to the decision-making in choosing what to equip. Another change I'm really excited for is the unicorn horn no longer being usable for "restore ability", so ability-draining effects (of which there are many) are a more significant threat (they were effectively zero threat until now).
Also very cool to hear the quest is now possible to do early (despite being a Bad Idea) as that has great implications for speedrunning or "fewest turns" runs.
I wrote that L-cancel training code! Funny to see it come up out of nowhere. I too have always adored the Wii and its moddability. It'd be my go-to choice if I someday ever get the itch to write console homebrew software of my own.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
I can't believe these "smooth scrolling" scripts are still a thing. I was wondering why I was having a hard time scrolling the page on my phone, when I got to my PC and felt the reason.
It's incredible to think how many employees of this world-leading Web technology company must have visited this site before launch, yet felt nothing wrong with its basic behavior.
The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?
Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...
Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.