Skip Navigation

addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
3
Comments
470
Joined
3 yr. ago

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

    Jump

  • 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

    Jump

  • 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.

  • Fucking water, how does it work?

    Jump

  • 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.

  • Foreign Music

    Jump

  • Garbage's Shirley Manson

    Jump

  • 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.

  • 🐧🏴‍☠️

    Jump

  • 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

    Jump

  • 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.

  • Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.

    Jump

  • It is certainly true that TempleOS won't be identifying with one of the common browser user agents when surfing the internet.

  • Removed

    No wonder Reddit has turned to shit

    Jump

  • If you've any suggestion on how to implement that, then it's a million-dollar idea.

    The "I'm a human" test that only takes a few seconds and then lets you do what you like for an hour was always vulnerable to 'auth farms'. Pay some poor bastards in the third world a pittance to pass the test a thousand times an hour, let the bots run wild. And the bots have gained the ability to pass the tests themselves, at least by boiling the oceans in some datacentre while the VC money holds out.

    Finding the people running the bots, fitting them with some very heavy boots and then seeing if they can swim in the deep ocean is probably needlessly cruel, but I'd be up for tarring and feathering a few. Once the videos got out, the rest might think harder about their life choices...

  • The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K

    Jump

  • I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.

    Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.

  • Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?

    Jump

  • Imperial came about as a system of units by measuring "everyday" things, and it remains pretty good for that. When you step outside the everyday, then it absolutely sucks - science deals with a lot of things that are too small, and engineering deals with a lot of things that are too large.

    When I used to work in the water industry, working out how much chlorine is required to dose a hundred million litres of water per day at 0.5 mg/l, and therefore when I'd have to place an order to refill our fifty tonne storage tank, is easy enough to do in my head. If we were working in imperial, I'd have converted it to metric first and then estimated it.

    On the other hand, metric calculations for pressure suck. If I weight 160 lbs and my bike tires are at 80 psi, then I have about two square inches in contact with the ground. If my car weighs 2500 lbs and its tires are at 30 psi, then each tire has about 20 square inches in contact with the ground. If I wanted scientific accuracy, then sure, I'd do it in metric, but I'd check the end result in imperial.

    There's near enough five thousand feet in a mile - if you need more accuracy than what you can do in your head, do it in metric with a calculator.

  • Senior devs...

    Jump

  • Abstraction is not very compatible with concurrency, so as well as your your beautiful abstract API, you also need some 'cut through the layers' functions to return the underlying classes you need to synchronise on. Now you have a right mess that's incredibly hard to understand, infuriating to debug, and impossible to refactor. Best you can do is put another layer of abstraction on top. Repeat every six months.

  • Melania humiliated as UK premiere of her movie gets single-digit ticket sales

    Jump

  • If you think you might want to leave early, more polite not to disturb the other patrons. If there were any other patrons, of course.

  • Why doesn't my phone put all of my apps to "sleep" by default?

    Jump

  • 5G is for spreading the woke gay mind virus. Collecting all of your personal information is the Jewish space lasers. Fortunately, tinfoil hat stops both.

  • GOG is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C++ experience to modernize the GOG GALAXY desktop client and spearhead its Linux development

    Jump

  • Google Stadia wasn't exactly a responding success...

    From a previous job in hydraulics, the computational fluid dynamics / finite element analysis that we used to do would eat all your compute resource and ask for more. Split your design into tiny cubes, simulate all the flow / mass balance / temperature exchange / material stress calculations for each one, gain an understanding of how the part would perform in the real world. Very easily parallelizable, a great fit for GPU calculation. However, it's a 'hundreds of millions of dollars' industry, and the AI bubble is currently 'tens of trillions' deep.

    Yes, they can be used for other tasks. But we've just no use for the amount that's been purchased - there's tens of thousands of times as much as makes any sense.

  • GOG is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C++ experience to modernize the GOG GALAXY desktop client and spearhead its Linux development

    Jump

  • We've had multiple instances of AI slop being automatically released to production without any human review, and some of our customers are very angry about broken workflows and downtime, and the execs are still all-in on it. Maybe the tune is changing to, "well, maybe we should have some guardrails", but very slowly.

  • GOG is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C++ experience to modernize the GOG GALAXY desktop client and spearhead its Linux development

    Jump

  • Unfortunately, server RAM and GPUs aren't compatible with desktops. Also, NVidia have committed to releasing a new GPU every year, making the existing ones worth much less. So unless you're planning to build your own data centre with slightly out-of-date gear - which would be folly, the existing ones will be desperate to recoup any investment and selling cheap - then it's all just destined to become a mountain of e-waste.

  • Microsoft Windows 365 goes down the day after Microsoft celebrates 'reimagining the PC as a cloud service that streams a Cloud PC'

    Jump

  • 100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it's more widely used at home than on business machines.

    The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.

  • Removed

    Saving Money

    Jump

  • Oof. The second-hand market is full of stuff that businesses are throwing out since they won't run Win11, but which run Linux perfectly well. I've just recently replaced my NAS / home server with a £20 core i5 mini-PC that if anything is a bit overpowered for the job. Runs Mint desktop very nicely.

    I'd imagine that if you're spending a hundred times as much, then you don't just have "web and office" in mind, though...

  • Too late

    Jump

  • Just need a chutney that was developed in the 90s, and then we can make a delicious chutney+blue ciabatta sandwich that's all younger than you think.

  • cats @lemmy.world
    addie @feddit.uk

    Ethical Cat Food

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    addie @feddit.uk

    Issue Tracking System for Linux