Just regarding “math community really likes AI”, that they’ve had a complicated relationship with computer-generated proofs for a long while. Not a new thing.

The first proof of the four-colour theorem was a computer-generated one in 1976, and was controversial at the time as being hundreds of pages of impenetrable slop that was exceedingly hard to check by hand. Fifty years of progress, eh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

Happy birthday, Fenrir!

That Batman collection the Batman / Returns / Forever / & Robin sequence? Dang. Treasure the first one, watch Returns once, and throw the other two away unwatched. Some people might not believe that a film with many scenes of Uma Thurman dancing around in corset and tights could be so bad that it’s not worth your time at all, but those people are fools. I am one of them; saw it at the cinema when I was a kid.

Trying to out-jank Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, eh? I didn’t see any game-breaking bugs in that 14-minute longplay, must try harder.

I don’t think that being a vampire hunting people down in a maze of streets is necessarily a bad idea. If they’d gone for a stealthier, keep-out-of-sight and strike from the shadows approach, like perhaps a vampire might do, then they could have had something. The original Castle Wolfenstein was released in '81 for inspiration, and this does have ‘better’ graphics - more stuff moving, more detail, more colour. In fact, probably looks better than most versions of Metal Gear, from '87. You’d obviously want to keep it quick so that people keep putting money in, but I don’t think ‘arcade sneaking game’ is exactly an over-done genre, even now.

It’s one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.

Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can’t commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so’s that I wouldn’t have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.

I think that “more fps” is important when there’s things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there’s a lot of “sparky” particle effects; in general, there’s a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can’t really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.

Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.

Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.

Can’t remember any particular performance problems with ET - it’s no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I’m prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.

At ~1500 per day, it will be 1.5M in about a week from now.

BTRFs, which has advanced filesystems features like snapshots, data integrity checks, and scrubbing, is a less performant filesystem for databases than filesystems that don’t have these features, like EXT4, F2FS and XFS. No shit, Sherlock. At least compare it to ZFS or something.

If you are storing files that you care about, use a filesystem with integrity checks. If you require high database performance, it’ll probably be happier using a whole partition, if not just a whole pile of disks, and be allowed to get on with it. If you are driving nails into a wall, do not compare the performance of different screwdrivers for the task. And so on.

The administration is fine with Peter Thiel, Sam Altman et al. It’s the fact that he’s not got money and influence.

Were Pabst moving beer for someone else? If it was their own stuff, surely the headline should be “40,000 pounds of piss water inside” instead.

If you’re sharing the driving, then maybe. If you’re on your own, then a ten minute break every couple of hours is sensible anyway, and so recharging isn’t inconvenient. Good maps and accurate range monitoring is more important than shaving off a couple of minutes. And having all the chargers be working, ofc - standard operating practice is to have a couple of them just be frozen up, to waste your time.

Main problem that we have (UK) is that most of the places that have fast chargers are in shopping estates on the outskirts of towns, and they largely serve pretty shitty coffee, and may or may not have toilets.

Excuse me, why is my cat in your house? Please return her immediately.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.

If you haven’t read it, Torvalds’ book is pretty interesting. He’s a fairly blunt writer of prose - alas, no Hemingway - but has a good voice and his slightly-cynical Finnish humour comes through clearly. Doesn’t have the massive ego that you might have expected, either - he knows he’s one of the planet’s biggest nerds.

Essentially, his somewhat geeky summer project was to implement the POSIX parts of Minix as a learning exercise, and basically locked himself in his room till he’d done it. Photocopied the spec sheet, and was ‘ticking off’ all the calls he’d got working. He was dual-booting with Minix for a while, which is why the filesystem layout is the same, but at one point managed to break his Minix boot, and Linux had to become self-hosting.

Fair play to him - took him a few months to produce the OS kernel that the whole GNU team couldn’t manage in a decade. Perfect is the enemy of good. Open-sourcing ‘something that works’ was all that was needed for everyone else to add in all the bits they needed as well, and the rest is history.

https://goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun

We do get a lot of German tourists coming to visit the northwest of Scotland - quite often a queue of campervans with their fancy license plates queuing up in Inverness. You can be stood on top of a mountain in the northern highlands, and not see any evidence of another human being from horizon to horizon. Which is also terrifying in a way - the traditional “Land’s End to John O’Groats” cycle does include quite a long way away from civilisation if your bike decides to have a mechanical.

German tourists always most welcome here, ofc. Even more welcome if you bring some konigsberger klopse and some robust dunkelbiers with you; will swap you for whisky, we’ve got loads.

It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…