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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
3
Comments
483
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Will I survive the Linux CLI if I only switch because I'm a student and Arch distro speed?

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  • I've installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in /boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.

    Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn't an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn't matter.

  • I hate how pedantic people online will get all over that my grammar isn't great.

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  • Your grammar is fine, MonsterTrick. Language is a tool for communication; I understand completely what you're saying, therefore, you have wielded that tool sufficiently well. Fuck the haters.

    In fact, in a world of LLM slop, a few paragraphs of straight-up opinion with a little wildcard grammar, maybe a typo or two, is most welcome.

  • Microsoft claims "2026 is the moment" for AI PCs, but its essay-length beginner explanation only creates more confusion — Is it any wonder adoption is slow?

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  • That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it's a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

  • 'A Big F*ck You to Big Tech': New Jersey Residents Defeat AI Data Center

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  • There's some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

    Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn't take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

  • Microsoft is withdrawing support for older printers' drivers

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  • A dialogue box where it's obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn't how things are done in Windows any more.

  • LOL

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  • Looks like the records are about 60+ in ten minutes. 19 in five might get you through qualification, depending on the field, but you'd have little chance of winning.

    The very thought of trying to eat that many would make me too queasy to get started. Have one and enjoy it.

  • Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up'

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  • Which is strange, because Azure's documentation is complete dogshit.

    We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure's own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don't exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

    Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

  • rule

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  • Just as long as they keep their hands off our beans.

  • The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved

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  • Takes the 'shell model', which is exceedingly dodgy theoretically but gives good results, and reinterprets it in terms of quantum mechanics, which are pretty solid theoretically. So just need to validate it against what we already know - sounds like they did most of their work against a single isotope of tin.

    (We don't have a theory of quantum gravity, so even though quantum mechanics and general relativity are both well-studied and tested theories with enormous predictive power, they can't quite be right. If this new result gives us a better understanding of the strong nuclear force, which it might, then it might also give us a better understanding of all forces. Getting some 'island of stability' larger isotopes might help with packing a lot of power into a small space; elerium-115 style, too.)

  • Gentoo Linux begins Codeberg migration to phase out GitHub repos

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  • Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

    The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they've a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it's a cross section.)

  • This is Yoko. She is just stuck, not hurt or scared. Just being a silly ferret!

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  • The female ones don't smell too bad - 'rodenty' but not too pungent.

    The males are extremely whiffy. Very musky, akin to BO, gets into everything.

    My grandad used to keep them as working ferrets, for flushing rabbits out of their warrens, and fed them on leftover rabbit carcasses. You could smell that from quite a distance.

    The babies are incredibly cute - size of your thumb, very soft. The adults are also cute, but have sharp claws and a nasty bite when they're annoyed. They're faster than you might expect, too - can really cover the distance when they get their bounce on.

  • Gay agenda!

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  • Well, in which case, I'm super-gay. Don't need to organise a three-some when I can just have three one-somes.

  • The Hamills on Valentine's Day

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  • Not wearing his ring, just in case he meets a girl who wants to party later, the dog.

  • From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: "Why I Made the Switch"

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  • Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn't be "upgraded" from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you're unlikely to notice, and encode 'rate of change' for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

    System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

    Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they've got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that's the change from 'bad' to 'quite good' bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

  • Fuck AI @lemmy.world
    addie @feddit.uk

    The Anthropic test refusal string: kill a Claude session dead

    pivot-to-ai.com /2026/02/11/the-anthropic-test-refusal-string-kill-a-claude-session-dead/

  • Fucking water, how does it work?

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  • Considering that the Milky Way's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, is only about five million solar masses, then that would likely have a devastating effect on the entire local group of galaxies.

    Pluto's orbit is really eccentric, but it's usually about 5.5 light hours from the sun. My understanding is that the central core would form a new black hole quite quickly and most of the mass outside the event horizon would be drawn into a tight orbit, being accelerated to near-light speed and be ejected as relativistic jets from the 'poles' of the new black hole.

    It would be an exciting few days, for sure. Not that 'days' would have much meaning when what remains of the earth make an orbit every few seconds.

  • Removed

    Foreign Music

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  • Garbage's Shirley Manson

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  • She went to the same school as I did, although not at the same time. Apparently she was a bit crap at chemistry. Plainly, her talents were elsewhere.

  • 🐧🏴‍☠️

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  • I'd be happy if plasma looked a bit more like WinNT. Completely functional, all the information there at a glance. Nothing hidden away in hamburger menus, no guessing about what you can and can't click on. Does what it needs to then gets out your way. The best-designed that Windows has ever been.

  • You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

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  • Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it's a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.

  • cats @lemmy.world
    addie @feddit.uk

    Ethical Cat Food

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    addie @feddit.uk

    Issue Tracking System for Linux