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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

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2
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423
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 - Plans move to Rust, with help from AI

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  • Indeed.

    In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It's at it best when you've a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it's coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing 'core code' that hasn't changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

    Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you've picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

    They're smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I'm doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

  • Owl-natomy: Why Bird Feet Don't Freeze in Winter

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  • Slightly dodgy thermodynamics simulator, extremely dodgy electricity simulator, and supremely dodgy gas and liquid flow simulator.

    I love it though - it's my favourite game.

  • Pirate archivist group scrapes Spotify's 300TB library, posts free torrents for downloading 86,000,000 tracks — investigation underway as music and metadata hit torrent sites

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  • Yeah yeah, I know RAID.

    If OP can't afford the storage for 'just a bunch of disks', then paying twice as much for 100% redundancy in RAID10 is doubly unaffordable.

    Also, consider what is being stored here. It's music files that we obtained from a torrent. We need sufficient raw performance to read a few megabytes per minute so we can listen to them. As a bonus, we may wish to upload the torrent again, and can use any spare capacity for that. What benefit are you going to obtain from your very expensive storage solution?

    RAID6 can lose any two drives, but at most two. RAID-10 can lose only 1 drive with guaranteed no data loss. Losing two might lose the cluster, if you lose a drive and its mirror. Yes, if you're really lucky, you can lose up to half, but 'feeling lucky' isn't how we plan data storage. Doesn't matter, we've got a backup - download the torrent again ;-)

  • Pirate archivist group scrapes Spotify's 300TB library, posts free torrents for downloading 86,000,000 tracks — investigation underway as music and metadata hit torrent sites

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  • Looks like you can get refurbished 26TB drives for about £340, so 12 of those. PCIe -> 6x SATA adaptors run you about £40 each. Molex to SATA power adaptors about £5. So £4200 will let you store all that with a bit left over for postage and some duct tape to make a storage bay out of the boxes it all came in.

    I'd probably want a few more drives for RAID6 and some hot spares, but if you go JBoD then at least you can just download the torrent again ;-)

  • United, Linux fights for freedom!

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  • The Centos "eight pointed star"?

  • AI was behind over 50,000 layoffs in 2025

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  • I write Jira tickets with what needs to be achieved and why, and usually my preferred method of doing it and if there's any constraints. I usually don't much care exactly how it's done, as long as it works, but sometimes it needs to fit into the bigger picture in a way that might not be obvious. My team have different strengths, and I'm more than happy for them to do what they do best. Most of my tickets range from two to six sentences in length - some are longer if it's complicated, but most things aren't.

    My managers don't think that's enough for a ticket, and have been using LLMs to boost them up to several pages. That obviously requires making up tonnes of shit and overspecifying shit that doesn't need specifying. We have to waste time verifying that we've not now got requirements that make no sense, and now have pages of test notes of things that don't need testing, which means tickets now take days rather than hours to complete.

    No-one can read these multi-page monstrosities, and are using LLMs to compact them down to a few sentences again.

    I can't believe that we're boiling the oceans for this shit.

  • Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

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  • Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it's easier to mouse to it, since you can't go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing 'alt' with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they're 'ugly', and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

    Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It's not like they've been 'innovating' that particular feature and annoying their users.

  • Valve put up a release candidate for Proton 10.0-4 with lots more Linux / SteamOS gaming fixes

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  • The actual fix is probably 'enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions', when some strings have different codepages to others', or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

    A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

  • Steam winter sale is now live

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  • Generally, companies are trying to maximise profit, which means that the price will be reduced only when it's stopped selling at the previous and they want to make sales the next, more price-conscious, segment of the market. They might want some quick bucks if the company is in financial trouble, or to 'make the news' with a sale if they need some publicity.

    BG3 sold shedloads, is still selling shedloads, was on multiple games-of-the-year list and generally ranks amongst the best games of all time, often at the top; and Larian seem sufficiently flush with cash from the success of it. So like you say, don't hold your breath waiting for a big sale, it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

  • Nvidia plans heavy cuts to GPU supply in early 2026

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  • Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the "several kW" range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I'm thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

    When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

  • CoreWeave Has Lost a Staggering Amount of Stock Value Over the Past Six Months

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  • The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek

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  • There's times when I want to find "exact matches and nothing but" - searching for error messages, for instance - and that's made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don't want you to switch off their "helpful" features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

  • Items under monthly rationing in Poland, early 1980s

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  • Well, look at you, still got vodka by the afternoon of the first day.

  • Raspberry Pi 4B

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  • Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I've a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

    I've retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it's back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

    They're quite capable machines. If they weren't so I/O limited, they'd be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don't need a faster disk than that, they're likely to be ideal in the role.

  • Makes perfect sense

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  • Got the most actual quoted lines from the book of any film version, plus you've got all of Dicken's direct-to-reader moralising delivered by Gonzo. And as well as being very faithful to the book, it is a superb film as well.

    Michael Caine excels as Scrooge, too. I wouldn't say that he was better than Alastair Sim was in his version - that's a performance that would take some beating - but there's not much in it.

  • Mastermind box

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  • I've always seen it as a "take turns at being the guesser, and whoever does best wins" kind of game. If you take six goes and your opponent takes seven, then taste that sweet victory.

    A digression, but the "viking chess" game Hnefatfl basically guarantees a win for white as written. So you need to mix it up - play two games, see who wins fastest; or constrain it like backgammon, roll dice and that's the moves you must make.

  • How Every Game Nominated For The Game Awards 2025 Runs On Steam Deck - Steam Deck HQ

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  • "Mostly perfectly unless they've got anti-cheat, and you'll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles."

    Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.

  • Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop Environment Lands With Major Menu Redesign

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  • systemd-networkd gets installed by default by Arch, integrates a bit better with the rest of SystemD, doesn't have so many VPN surprises, and the configuration is a bit more obvious to me - a few config files rather than NetworkManager's "loads of scripts" approach. Small niggles rather than big issues.

    Really, I just don't want duplication of services - more stuff to keep up-to-date. And if I've got SystemD anyway, might as well use it...

  • Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop Environment Lands With Major Menu Redesign

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  • NetworkManager dependencies can now be disabled at build time...

    Nice. It was a damned nuisance that Cinnamon brought its own network stack with it. All my headless servers and my Plasma gaming desktop use systemd-networkd, which meant that my Cinnamon laptop needed different configuration. Now they can all be the same.

    Hopefully the new release will bash a few of the remaining Wayland bugs; Plasma is great but I prefer Cinnamon for work, and it's just too buggy for gaming on a multi-monitor setup at the moment.

  • 700+ self-hosted Git instances battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

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  • Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you've a legit usecase. They're either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation...

  • cats @lemmy.world
    addie @feddit.uk

    Ethical Cat Food

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    addie @feddit.uk

    Issue Tracking System for Linux