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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

@ PorkrollPosadist @hexbear.net

Posts
36
Comments
583
Joined
5 yr. ago

Hexbear's resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • Laptop recommendations?

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  • Don't recommend going for a "gaming" laptop as those are riddled with invasive BIOSes, poor heat management, very low battery life and also weight issues. If you want to play demanding 3D games just get a steam deck separately.

    100%. Gaming laptops are a trap for all the reasons mentioned, PLUS you're paying at least 3 times as much for the performance compared to a desktop. PLUS the way GPU acceleration is implemented in laptops is by rendering certain windows on the dGPU and having them composited on the iGPU. This is done for power consumption reasons, but the architecture is a lot more complex then desktops where the CPU sends commands to the GPU which sends a signal to the display. It is a lot more prone to intermittent issues like video latency, tearing, applications not using the appropriate GPU, etc. You still WANT a dGPU, but expectations for the ideal gaming experience should be limited.

    A laptop is supposed to be a portable computer. That comes with trade-offs, but (in my humble opinion) portability is non-negotiable. That is the reason you are getting a laptop, instead of getting more than twice the performance for the price in a desktop. If you are buying a laptop it shouldn't be 20 inches long and weigh 30 pounds. Get something with a high resolution 15 inch screen without a numpad. Get a bluetooth numpad if you really need one. It should be able to fit COMFORTABLY inside a bag. You get a big laptop which barely fits in your bag and guess what? The corners of your laptop now define the profile of your bag. Every time you put your bag down you are dinging the corners of your laptop, fucking up the hinges and cracking the thin parts of the case in-between the USB ports. You don't want a CD drive/burner either. That shit just takes up space and makes the thing nearly half and inch thicker for NO REASON. Nobody uses that shit anymore.

    One thing I can say is that the build quality on a laptop is very important. A lot of people shop for laptops like they're shopping for any other computer - by specs. What CPU does it have? How much memory does it have? While this is all important, It needs to be housed inside a case that can actually endure the wear and tear of mobile use. Somebody IS going to trip over the power cable and send the thing crashing to the floor. It is going to be thrown around inside a backpack repeatedly, crushed against surfaces on busy buses, subways, elevators, or airplanes. Build quality is very difficult to discern when shopping online, so ensure you can put the thing back in the box and refund it in the event you open it up and it seems flimsy. It is only going to get worse with wear.

  • Laptop recommendations?

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  • I think the "AI processors" are just the AMD marketing department jumping on the bandwagon. MAYBE they have caches sized appropriately for certain workloads. They don't change anything about the relationship between the operating system and the hardware it's running on. They don't make software behave any differently. They are just ordinary amd64 (a.k.a x86_64) CPUs.

    All bets are off with Microsoft Windows however. They seem hellbent to cram Copilot into every nook and cranny of the operating system.

  • Your iPhone is Lying to You About Files... (Gen Z doesn't Understand Filesystems. It's not their fault.)

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  • While it is true the filesystem itself is an abstraction, it is a common abstraction used by every contemporary operating system for the past 40+ years, including the ones which hide this aspect from the end-user, excepting highly resource-constrained embedded systems. You could define an operating system as something that does filesystems and be like almost correct. If alternative architectures (like a global key-value store with namespaces, for instance) were in common use, then they would be worth mentioning in a practical "how computers work" course rather than courses for people specializing in computer science.

  • Your iPhone is Lying to You About Files... (Gen Z doesn't Understand Filesystems. It's not their fault.)

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  • if most of the files you care about are photos, do you need to care how the fs works? what about the difference between ext4, fat32, gefs? to me both are pretty important but i don't expect most to care

    Yes. This should be required knowledge in our age. Nobody should graduate from school without a fundamental understanding of how computers work. You don't need to know the technical differences between ext4 and NTFS, just that different filesystems exist. You should know what an operating system is. If we don't teach these things, people will perceive computers as magic. They will resign themselves to helplessness.

  • Please help me Zohran, my name is in the Epstein files!

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  • If your country doesn't have an entire toolbar for municipal grocery stores it is less sophisticated than Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (which is a game).

  • city specific fediverse sites / mastadon instances?

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  • because you can actually ban the creeps and stop it from looking like Facebook.

  • Please help me Zohran, my name is in the Epstein files!

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  • 13:50 SOME REPORTER, OFF-SCREEN: The cost of living is something that you and Mr. Mamdani seem to agree on. Democrats have run New York City for a long time, Mr. Mamdani, Do you see Democrat policies specifically as being a problem and [stammering, but basically "I'd like both of you to answer"]

    14:10 MAMDANI: Look I think that there are many things in our city where we have to own the responsibility of the things that have existed long before the president was the president and those are also part of the message of our campaign was to take on a broken politics of our past and I ran against a number of candidates which represented different versions of that past, and what we found time and again is that working people were left behind in the politics of our city and what we're looking to do is put those people right back at the heart of our politics so that we don't have a situation where we're in the wealthiest city in the history of the world and yet one in five can't even afford $2.90 for a metro card.

    14:45 OFF SCREEN: Mr. President?

    14:45 TRUMP: You know we had some interesting conversations and some of his ideas really have - the same ideas I have. But a big thing on cost - you know the new word is affordability, another word is just groceries. It's sort of an old fashioned word but it's very accurate. And they're coming down they're coming down. They were - You know we had both of us, we had the highest inflation in the history of our country the last four years under... [dramatic pause] the Biden administration. and we've got inflation down now to our normal numbers, it's going to go even lower than that.

    That's roughly it. I transcribed it myself. Might have misplaced an article or changed a "are" to a "were" here or there. You get what you pay for :)

    Also,

    Donald Trump

    Will Stancil

    "THE ECONOMY IS DOING FINE"

  • Locked

    Occupation of Alcatraz - Novo General Megathread for the 20th-23th of November 2025

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  • The bit on TMK about Zohron rotating the Statue of Liberty so it faces Mecca was so fucking good.

  • Please help me Zohran, my name is in the Epstein files!

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  • Could simply be that Donald is having a much better time with Zohron than he did with Mohamed Bin Salmon earlier this week.

  • what the fuck is wrong with prices of memory

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  • Damn I lucked out. Two years ago when I built my current PC 128GB of DDR5 ended up costing me like $230 (4x32GB). If I bought the same DIMMs today it would be $1160. What. The. Fuck.

  • I'm a solo dev, just launched an RPG about struggle and uprising. Duskpunk lets you take part in a fictional revolution: an example of socialist propaganda!

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  • Success: You climb out of a hot shower with only two thoughts on your mind. Juice. Mallomars.

  • I'm a solo dev, just launched an RPG about struggle and uprising. Duskpunk lets you take part in a fictional revolution: an example of socialist propaganda!

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  • lmao (I got nightmares)

  • I'm a solo dev, just launched an RPG about struggle and uprising. Duskpunk lets you take part in a fictional revolution: an example of socialist propaganda!

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  • Consoles are usually more difficult because they each require contracts, license fees, and non-disclosure agreements in order to use their software development kits. Small studios usually need to outsource this to a porting house which holds the required licenses and does this work under contract (so they either need to make money first, or take out a loan hoping their game will go viral) . Publishers will make this happen somewhat transparently, but they will take an even fatter cut than the ONE THIRD Steam or Apple take, while asserting creative direction in the long run and replacing the original developers if they deem it necessary.

  • Yes

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  • The only thing I know about software engineering in aviation is that they don't even fuck with dynamic memory allocation. They are not fucking around.

  • Larry Summers in there like "yeah im in the files, now open your textbooks"

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  • Motherfuckers signed up for a class proctored by Larry Summers.

  • 'Colossally Wrong Decision' as Facebook Parent Company Wins Instagram-WhatsApp Antitrust Case

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  • You see, there is more than one website: therefore facebook.com is not a monopoly.

  • Nearly half of US kids want in-game currency this Christmas

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  • We've empowered the Job Creators.

  • Screw it, I’m installing Linux

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  • Dawg I was trying to WRITE AN EMAIL at work today and between the auto-correction bullshit (don't fucking correct me), and the fact that when I try to select some piece of text to cut and paste Outook is like no, you didn't intend to click where you fucking clicked, let me rope in a whole extra word or exclude a whole extra word for you I was literally screaming at the computer. I had to explain myself. Boomer CNC programmer agreed with me.

  • I'm a solo dev, just launched an RPG about struggle and uprising. Duskpunk lets you take part in a fictional revolution: an example of socialist propaganda!

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  • Liberal Crime Squad, a game created in 2002 by Tarn and Zach Adams (much more commonly known for Dwarf Fortress) has a sort of hybrid dynamic. You start as a single character attempting to recruit members and start a radical organization. This character's stats and backstory are generated by a series of questions asked to the player in the beginning of the game - a unique process which establishes the setting for the game and does not occur for any other characters. In most play-throughs, the organization disbands and the game ends immediately if this character dies, but if you recruit enough members and have the right stats (I don't remember the exact mechanics), one of the members can take on the leadership position and the game continues.

    Not trying to argue that you should hammer this mechanic into your game or anything, but the discussion reminded me of this relevant example of RPG design.

    Edit: Cheers on the launch, btw! I've dabbled with game development since I was a second grader and started making custom levels for Doom. I always bite off more than I can chew when it comes to personal projects. It takes a lot of commitment to see it through! I look forward to giving it a spin this weekend.

  • ‘China was playing chess while the rest of us were playing checkers’: Bombshell study finds $200 billion of secret loans to U.S. businesses over 25 years

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  • Ideology is a hell of a drug