I purchase my audiobooks from libro.fm. It’s like Audible where you subscribe and get a credit every month, but part of the profit goes to support local book stores, and the books are DRM free.
This right here. The ability to download actual MP3s from books you’ve purchased is a miracle in 2025. Plus, sending some change to your local bookstore is better than sending it to Amazon.
100%. My workflow is purchase DRM free audiobooks from libro.fm, put it in my selfhosted audiobookshelf folder, and listen anywhere. Libby is a first choice actually as well if you have a library card.
libro.fm is great. I happily subscribe to them because it's all so effortless.
Probably worth noting as an aside that bookshop.org is sometimes mentioned as a libro.fm-like Amazon alternative for ebooks (NOT audiobooks), but my brief experiment with them was awful: they were much, much more restrictive than even Amazon, at least before Amazon's removal of file download.
Congrats! I’ve been a customer and have used it monthly since April 2021 when I first saw it here. It has been essential in planning out major life financial decisions as I’ve changed jobs, gotten married, and now as we consider children and purchasing a home.
I’ve appreciated the addition of new features over time and have recommended the tool to many friends and relatives. Hope to see another post in a couple years when you’ve hit $10M/yr!
I'm grateful to hear it's made such a difference for you, and that early support back in 2021 means more than you know. In the down months and challenging times, it's the encouragement from early adopters like you that kept me going.
I’m not sure if calling Rust “what’s in fashion this week” is accurate since it has been common for at least five years (if not longer) for posts that include “in Rust” to blow up on HN.
It has been the Most Loved/Most Admired language on Stack Overflow’s developer survey for 9 years in a row. I know that’s a relatively short amount of time for a programming language, but to me it seems like it has some serious staying power.
I read through the series my first time last year and as I was nearing the end I felt a deep sense of melancholy at not being able to continue on for another 20 books. I’m usually a science fiction and fantasy reader, so I was not expecting the Aubrey-Maturin novels to become one of my favorite series, but here we are.
I'm not sure about Alpha-gal Syndrome, but thankfully in Idaho you won't contract Lyme disease from tick bites.
I'm originally from Idaho but recently moved to Virginia. I've been far more cautious about ticks here than I ever felt the need to be in Idaho because you just don't get Lyme disease there.
When I go hiking here I treat my clothing with permethrin, wear long sleeved shirts and pants, and use 100% deet on any exposed skin. So far I haven't seen any ticks on my body.
So I have no experience in 3D graphics and very little experience in game design (I wrote a 2D game in high school but that's it), but if they are already going from DX9 to DX11 why don't they go to another library that supports all the platforms they already develop for such as Vulkan? I'd imagine that would better future-proof their game to make adapting to other platforms that are released in the future easier. So how hard would it be to go from DX to something else? As stated before, I have no experience in this area so I'm being completely sincere with my question.
Typically a DirectX revision bump would be less work than a totally different API.
To answer "How hard could it be?", the answer is, "Surprisingly hard". Games rely on weird interactions with hardware and need to smoothly render at a consistent FPS. Often a revision bump in a library might introduce subtle changes (for example, a difference in how numbers are rounded might cause z-fighting or change the way shadows are rendered). All of those need to be discovered and fixed. Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over.
It's definitely non-trivial. Doable, but non-trivial. I don't blame the devs for making a cost/benefit analysis and realizing they would never recoup the cost.
Given the economies of the games industry (where studios are basically always one step away from complete failure and being dissolved into nothing), I appreciate the need to focus on not losing money in this way.
> Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over.
Vulkan doesn't really have a shader language unless you want to write SPIR-V assembly. Thus you'd use either GLSL or HLSL.
Microsoft's own DirectX HLSL compiler[0] supports SPIR-V as a target in addition to DXIL.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess part of why I'm confused is that they have not stated any plans to stop supporting Switch and Playstation 4 versions of the game and in my mind those are probably just as difficult to maintain as the macOS and Linux version. Do Nintendo and Sony provide support here that make it easier for Psyonix to port to their platforms, or are there just so many more players on those platforms that it is worth the investment?
Good point! I mostly deal with embedded systems so I often forget the difficulty of maintaining a piece of software that needs to run on basically innumerable hardware and software configurations.
The developer has come out and said that as of the announcement of them dropping support for Mac/Linux, the two platforms combine make up 0.6% of their active player base [1]. I am guessing they just did the math and decided the cost of switching APIs to something like Vulkan is not worth it when such a small portion of their users would benefit from it.
Yeah, that is completely understandable. I was just curious why they wouldn't invest in developing for a different but more cross-platform library so that maintaining Rocket League on platforms such as the Switch and Playstation 4 (as well as the future consoles from both manufacturers) would be easier. They have stated no plans to remove support from those consoles, and I don't imagine they are much easier to maintain compatibility with than macOS or Linux.
As they stated, most of their players are on windows. If windows is your target market, then DirectX is generally the graphics API you want to support. You don't want to make architecture decisions because one or other approach would be untenable to below 1% of your target. Cross-platform is not a value as such.
At some point, somebody needs to actually tell the hardware what to do. If you're doing 3D graphic rendering in real time, that point is probably now. There are no magical abstraction layers that can let you do performant 3D graphics without paying attention to what's going on at the API level.
Rocket League is made with Unreal Engine 3 so if they wanted to port the game to using Vulkan they would also have to upgrade the game to Unreal Engine 4.
Reading the article, it appears that the issue is with the supported functionality and not with the literal library. They already had been using OpenGL instead of DX9 on Mac/Linux but they cannot use it instead of DX11 because the features they need are not available in that version of OpenGL.
Firefox on Android is a bit clunky, but Mozilla is currently working on a new version that will (hopefully) be much cleaner and faster. You can try it now as "Firefox Preview" on the Google Play Store.
I use it pretty much exclusively now, and though it doesn't block all ads and doesn't have addon support yet, it seems to prevent the intrusive ones from being a problem. I do keep Firefox for Android around with uBlock Origin just in case, but I rarely have to use it.
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