You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.
It's like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.
Frieren (Sousou no Furiren, "Frieren and the Funeral). It's about what happens after the quest is finished. The elven mage Frieren was part of a band of adventurers that defeated the big bad many years ago. Before the party splits up and she goes off to travel the world studying magic, the group all agree to meet again in the future, after many years.
This is where the main story starts. Due to her elven heritage, Frieren has hardly aged at all. When she comes back, she's just in time to see the human leader of the old party one last time before he dies, and she attends his funeral. She goes searching for the other old party members, and along the way she accidentally picks up some new friends and becomes the leader of a new party, having various adventures and run-ins with new bad guys.
The Mikado Method, eh?
(All together) Three junior devs at work are we,Busy and harried as devs can be,Compiler warnings flowing freely,Three junior devs at work!
(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)
(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)
(Carlos) Don't touch our "World's Best Coder" mugs! (Laughter)
(All together) Three junior devs at work!
My apologies; I misunderstood your concept. I thought that you were talking about setting up some kind of central clearing house for funds, but now I see that you're suggesting more of an automated report which is compiled for each user, locally, for them to act on manually at periodic intervals. That does seem to sidestep most of the legal issues.
Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?
From what I've seen, efforts to develop microtransaction/microdonation systems generally seem to have trouble with regulatory compliance, either through legitimate legal requirements that force them to do things that seem nonsensical to their users (My guess is that the registered servers issue OP mentioned with Flattr came down to this), or due to greedy intermediaries stalling and witholding under false pretences while they hold out for a bigger share of the money, without appreciating the already extremely thin margins involved.
SDL is written in C, but bindings are available for multiple languages, including C++ and C#. As it happens I was actually using it with C++. And there are other libraries you could use instead, like GLFW or Allegro.
I've never thought of C as being that much lower-level than C++, but I guess everything's relative.
the cross platform is a pain.
It doesn't have to be with libraries like SDL. Years ago I got stuck fighting all-in-one game engines that didn't fit my design choices, precisely because I thought it would be worth it for platform independence. Then I found out about SDL, which was what I actually wanted.
If someone thinks that not using a pre-rolled engine with a full editing suite included is a waste of time, I can respect that. But there are options if you'd rather make your own but still don't want to have to learn the ins and outs of multiple hardware architectures and operating systems.
I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing "VIbc coam" on the spine.
People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
Cheers to the person who linked to the "font - hide" solution. I didn't know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only "valid" for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.
He sure loves to evangelise "cloning", a.k.a. "copying other people's work". One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.
To make an analogy, there's usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that's acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.
People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.
My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn't recover properly due to some edge case.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to believe that if I thought of something that I'd never heard of before, I must have been the first person ever to come up with it.
Now that I'm older and the Internet is ubiquitous, when I have those moments I go straight to a search engine. And even if I'm not the first, I still feel pretty good about discovering whatever it is for myself.
I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I'll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.
Thank goodness it's not just me! When I first saw this post yesterday, there were no comments and it was already quite downvoted. I wached the first 1/4 or so and didn't find anything objectionable; actually it seems quite good. I started checking to see if the guy had recently fiddled kids or spoken out in support of ethnic cleansing or something. The downvotes don't make sense to me either.
Seriously, the best option is whatever matches the brightness of your screen to its surroundings. I read about this decades ago and it eliminated screen fatigue for me.
If switching to dark mode works for you, great. When I worked on a PC in a well-lit office all day, I would open a program with a white background, hold up a blank white piece of paper next to the screen, and adjust the screen brightness until it looked about the same as the paper. I did this once or twice a week because I was near a set of picture windows and I was affected by weather and the seasons, but in a room with more artificial light it would be "set and forget".
It seemed very dim at first, and several of my coworkers commented on it. It took a few days of resisting the urge to turn the brightness back up, but I got used to it and never went back.
My PC at home is currently set up in a partially shaded corner of a well-lit room, so I put a dim little light bar behind the screen to make the wall match the brightness of the screen and the rest of my desk/room.
A couple of other commenters have given excellent answers already.
But on the topic in general I think that the more you learn about the history of computing hardware and programming, the more you realise that each successive layer added between the relays/tubes/transistors and the programmer was mostly just to reduce boilerplate coding overhead. The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired. Assemblers calculated addresses and relative jumps for you so you could use human-readable labels and worry less that a random edit to your code would break something because it was moved.
More complex low-level languages took care of the little dances that needed to be performed in order to do more involved operations with the limited number of CPU registers available, such as advanced conditional branching and maintaining the illusion of variables. Higher-level languages freed the programmer from having to keep such careful tabs on their own memory usage, and helped to improve maintainability by managing abstract data and code structures.
But ignoring the massive improvements in storage capacity and execution speed, today's programming environments don't really do anything that couldn't have been implemented with those ancient systems, given enough effort and patience. It's all still just moving numbers around and basic arithmetic and logic. But a whole lot of it, really, really fast.
The power of modern programming environments lies in how they allow us to properly implement and maintain a staggering amount of complex minutiae with relative ease. Such ease, in fact, that sometimes we even forget that the minutiae are there at all.
It's the first law that I'm aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.
For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.