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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

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378
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's...

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  • I'm in this photo and I don't like it.

    More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I'd like to add some more 'robust and flexible' algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it's written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.

    I've spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it's not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.

  • Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux laptop cancelled due to performance concerns — Linux PC maker says Qualcomm CPU is ‘less suitable for Linux than expected’

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  • Reasonable for a lightly-loaded home server, however. I've got Arch Linux ARM (btw) running as my home Forgejo / Transmission / DHCP / NAS, and it just sits and sips power while providing all those services 24/7 like a champ.

    Shout out to ALARM for having basically the entire Arch ecosystem (including 99% of AUR) all working and ready-to-go.

  • Definitely how it went for me

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  • The industrial design has improved enormously since then, as well. The days of using the same connector for different voltages, or connectors which can be rotated are gone. Everything has a keyed connector or similar pokayoke that means it only fits to the correct place, and only one way around. CPUs don't suicide if you forget to attach their system cooler, they just throttle. Much better, and obvious in retrospect that it should always have been that way.

    Apart from the front panel connectors on a motherboard, of course. Those fiddly little bastards can get straight to hell.

  • Spill

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  • Interesting. I think the real question about "is it the same language?" is whether modern readers can still understand it.

    For early modern English (think Shakespeare) then most modern speakers can. You'd probably have a basic understanding from reading, although missing some nuance. A lot of the jokes in Shakespeare come out better when they're performed, so you'd probably have a better understanding of it in the theatre.

    For middle English (think Chaucer) then you'd struggle a bit. Vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot. Might have a few passages in the Canterbury Tales that make sense unaided, but in general, not really.

    For early English (think Beowulf) ha ha, fat chance. Even scholars of early languages don't understand everything in it, there's a few words the meaning of which are lost, but in general about one word in fifty even looks familiar and it's probably a false friend.

    So I'd probably put English at 'about 500 years old'.

    How far back modern French speakers can understand French would be interesting. I can understand a fair amount of Latin from my knowledge of Spanish; and unlike eg. William the Bastard invading England and introducing a whole pile of new vocabulary, the French have the advantage of never having been invaded by the French ;-)

  • Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk

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  • Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the 'classic RMS' look isn't good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.

    Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That's an expensive hobby.

  • This AI slop blanket is $40

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  • Nitrogen is reasonably soluble in water - about 18 mg/l, compared to 10 mg/l for oxygen. If it's running a bit low, you can choose the lid on the bottle and give it a shake - the bubbles have a lot of surface area to promote gas readsorption.

    It's not what we'd normally consider an essential nutrient, unless of course you're a nitrogen-fixing plant. CrossFit guy wasn't actually some green beans in disguise, were they?

  • Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI, plans to fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 as miners convert to AI en masse — Bitfarm to leverage 341 megawatt capacity for AI following $46 million Q3 loss

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  • especially if you have the infrastructure in place

    I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren't worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

    In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn't really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA's latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

  • Valve reportedly cooking native Linux version of Half-Life: Alyx, optimized for Steam Frame VR

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  • Yeah. You can sell 'pure consoles' at a loss and make it up with games sales. This is basically a mini PC that you could reinstall the OS and use for any purpose. Selling it at a loss would be crazy.

  • Valve reportedly cooking native Linux version of Half-Life: Alyx, optimized for Steam Frame VR

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  • If it's like anything else running in WSL, absolutely as slow as balls. Most Linux apps are written with the assumption that filesystem operations are incredibly fast, whereas that's not true with Windows. Most games open one big file and do big reads from it so it's not such a problem, whereas something like Git assumes that touching tens of thousands of files should be basically instant.

  • Compression!

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  • Well, yeah. The real advantage is only having a single file to transfer, makes eg. SFTP a lot less annoying at the command line.

    Lossless compression works by storing redundant information more efficiently. If you've got 50 GB in a directory, it's going to be mostly pictures and videos, because that would be an incredible amount of text or source code. Those are already stored with lossy compression, so there's just not much more you can squeeze out.

    I suppose you might have 50 GB of logs, especially if you've a logserver for your network? But most modern logging stores in a binary format, since it's quicker to search and manipulate, and doesn't use up such a crazy amount of disk space.

  • Feature parity or get out

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  • It's not a million miles away, but it's still got some problems. The 'extract archive' functionality seems to do it for me; think it must be wanting to pop up a (nested?) file chooser, but causes a session crash.

    Cinnamon legacy for getting work done, and KDE wayland for playing games, for me. Nice to go 100% cinnamon though, for sure.

  • Factorio's Linux-native adventures (FFF #408, 2024-04-26)

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  • Indeed, one of the big things holding Wayland back is that you don't really 'support It', you have to support every damn desktop environment, and they're all moving targets. Gnome should fix their shit.

  • Planet rule

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  • Am afraid it's not even the king. Eris is both substantially more massive and further away. In fact, it's the discovery of Eris that led to the realisation that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet at all.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)

  • I support pluto

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  • ... and it's been doing it for long enough that it, and all the other plutinos, have settled into a 2:3 resonant orbit with Neptune, which takes 165 years to orbit the sun by itself.

    Space is really big and the timescales are really long, in a way which doesn't really make sense on human scales, except for things which are so fast that they also don't make sense on human scales, like core-collapse supernovas.

    The good news is that we're good at doing maths and we've built some big computers to do that maths, so we've no problems 'popping a few zeros' into the sums that we do.

  • ThinkPad 701 (1995 laptop with a very unique keyboard)

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  • Yeah, considering how dusty and hard-to-clean normal laptops are, this thing looks like hell. If you need a decent keyboard for extended typing, it's not so hard to carry a USB / Bluetooth one, this just looks like the worst of all worlds.

  • Steam On Linux Gaming Finally Cracks 3% For October 2025

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  • I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu 'Warty Warthog' was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven't got around to a web browser yet, but I've already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that's crazy.

    Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I'll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are 'twice as good' now.

    An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn't be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.

  • Another European agency shifts off Big Tech, as digital sovereignty movement gains steam

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  • It's a lot compared to a year ago, no? And yeah, agencies tend to be very risk-averse, don't want to move to an unproven platform. A few success stories will help the rest follow.

  • How much have we changed really?

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  • "Dicks out for Harambe" on the right there.

  • Pornhub says UK visitors down 77% since age checks came in

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  • Yeah, surprised it's only 77%.

    Just as an observation: Mullvad's best UK -> US connection seems to be New York. The transatlantic fibre optic cables make landfall nearby, and there's lots of big data companies there that host VPNs.

    Alternatively, a lot of more 'special interest' sites don't have age verification on them yet.

  • Let's learn some words in the Finnish language

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  • 'Ty chuju jebany', nice.

    Our Polish taxi driver does a very solid line in 'kurwa' every other word, but it's always nice to expand your horizons.

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