JeremysIron's comments

We were a Nintendo family when I was a kid (back when that was a meaningful distinction and cross-platform games were very rare) and I continued buying Nintendo systems and games up until the Gamecube era. But at some point I came to a realization and haven't bought anything of theirs since.

Nintendo doesn't take good care of their customers.

There's the confusing half-step hardware upgrades which can potentially leave you with hardware that doesn't technically play the latest games, or has compatibility problems. There's the bizarre hoops you have to jump through to play games with friends online.

But the biggest thing that stops me from buying any new Nintendo platform is that it's going to expire in a way that no modern system should anymore. I have Steam and Microsoft accounts that have records of my purchases from 10 or 15 years ago, and all I have to do is log in and I can download and play them on any new system I get. I don't know how it works on Sony's systems, but I imagine that it's similar. My account is credited with the game, and I can play it when I want to.

When I hear about how people have to keep continually buying classic Nintendo games on their own built-in download service, or lose access to all of their games when they buy a different console unit of the exact same console, or give up on playing with their friends because they can't just tell the service "Account X is my friend," I'm just gobsmacked.

This article makes the case that this attitude of contempt extends to their own employees as well. I think they'd do quite well to eat some humble pie, but I'm not expecting much.

I just got one myself and in my system, it seems like a fairly hot puppy. I see it idle around 50-60C and load at 70C or more. This was with an aftermarket cooler, although I may not have applied the thermal paste well. I haven't done any thorough testing but it seems hotter than the rather old i5 that it replaced.

In my own writing (such as it is), I find that putting down my thoughts too often means that when I go back and look at what I've written, the quality isn't very good. I have to sit and stew a while and write something carefully if I want it to stand up.

For very prolific authors, I wonder how much of their work is genuinely great and how much is just rephrasing something they'd written earlier or just uninteresting. I'm not sure I have enough time to read any to find out!

You're presented with a pretty unique, bite-size programming challenge every day. Everything is themed around Christmas so there's a short story about how you have to help Santa's elves fix their machinery or something like that.

Different people get slightly different problems, so you have to do your own work to solve for your puzzle input. You feed it back into the site to see if it was correct or not. Getting a problem right was a great feeling, and it progressively unlocks more of a Christmas-themed ASCII art picture.

I would have a tough time explaining it to someone who doesn't do any programming, but it's free to try if you're curious!

This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give?

As I recall, most of the time the input is delineated by spaces or linebreaks and it helps if you can carve it up easily right off the bat.