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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
2
Comments
378
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Ghostty terminal is out!

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  • Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you'd have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.

    Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn't scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it's instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.

    Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can't fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

  • I was idle and copilot was bored

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  • Surely i, j, k, l, m and n should be integers, and the rest should all be floats? Seems to me that this language model hasn't been trained up on enough FORTRAN77.

    Disgraceful lack of respect.

  • What do I want to see in the Linux ecosystem in 2025?

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  • Finish the transition from X to Wayland?

  • master manipulators

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  • The ho-meow-ner, at that.

  • Scottish Government bans use of WhatsApp for official business

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  • Bear in mind as well that the Scottish government rejected a lot of the privatisation that the remainder of the UK went through, so 'government' doesn't just mean civil servants in offices, it means things like Scottish Forestry and Scottish Water as well. Need to manage small teams of people over very large areas who are frequently out of mobile phone contact, as well as sharing information with subcontractors who will frequently be one-man-band operators who may just have a van and a mobile phone; no laptop, no IT team.

    So 'convenient', but also 'almost nothing else would be practicable'.

  • ELI5: What causes a Steam game not to run on an operating system like a Linux distro?

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  • I'd probably go with a "kitchen" metaphor here.

    The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they're exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.

    Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it's not very easy to generalise as to whether it'll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.

    If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you'd expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don't have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you've got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you've got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.

  • ELI5: What causes a Steam game not to run on an operating system like a Linux distro?

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  • Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they're about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you'd expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/

    Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/

    General experience is that generally there's no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.

  • Alleged Chinese spy who befriended Prince Andrew is ‘tip of iceberg’, Tory MP says

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  • Yang Tengbo; "businessman" rather than anyone particularly public.

  • ChatGPT is down

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  • Thought they were running GPT on a Playstation3 cluster, there. Sure, get the PS3 for cheap, but spare parts will be a bastard.

  • I'm afraid we've been bamboozled

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  • Ah yes. I remember preparing a recipe once that included frying up the ingredients in a cup of oil, and that turns out seriously fucking greasy if you use the UK cup size.

  • I'm afraid we've been bamboozled

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  • Bear in mind that the gallon we use is different from the US gallon, too:

    • a UK gallon is eight (imperial) pints of 20 fluid ounces, so 4.54 litres
    • a US gallon is 231 cubic inches, so 3.79 litres

    The reason that I thought American car fuel economy was so terrible as a child is partly because UK mpg is +20% on US mpg for the same car on the same fuel. But also, because American car fuel economy is so terrible.

  • Remember: the SUX 3141 Ti is 60% slower than the SUX 3141 Xt. because it's 5 years older and has no components in common.

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  • That's not correct, I'm afraid.

    Thermal expansion is proportional to temperature; it's quite significant for ye olde spinning rust hard drives but the mechanical stress affects all parts in a system. Especially for a gaming machine that's not run 24/7 - it will experience thermal cycling. Mechanical strength also decreases with increasing temperature, making it worse.

    Second law of thermodynamics is that heat only moves spontaneously from hotter to colder. A 60° bath can melt more ice than a 90° cup of coffee - it contains more heat - but it can't raise the temperature of anything above 60°, which the coffee could. A 350W graphics card at 20° couldn't raise your room above that temperature, but a 350W graphics card at 90° could do so. (The "runs colder" card would presumably have big fans to move the heat away.)

  • Remember: the SUX 3141 Ti is 60% slower than the SUX 3141 Xt. because it's 5 years older and has no components in common.

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  • Tell me about it. The numbers that I'm interested in - "decibels under full load", "temperature at full load" - might as well not exist. Will I be able to hear myself think when I'm using this component for work? Will this GPU cook all of my hard drives, or can it vent the heat out the back sufficiently?

  • Ethically sourced

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  • Well yeah, but you can get either or both from a corpse.

  • Ethically sourced

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  • Get some Dwarf Fortress-style reanimation on the go. A ghost and a zombie from the same corpse? Why not, one's the soul and one's the body, makes as much sense as anything else.

  • Old Town, New Tram

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  • Our busses were super cheap anyway; am not sure what benefits the tram brings really except making it very easy to get to Murrayfield a few times a year. Come visit our town anyway though; bit grey, but we're friendly when you get to know us.

  • Elon Musk hides X engagement figures amid user exodus

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  • At first, the air of mystery suggested hidden depths, but increasing exposure revealed that it was all just woven from thin air and would routinely come out with increasingly absurd stories that contradicted previous statements.

    Also, the X-Files.

  • Turkey Temptation

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  • But cooking a ham is still okay?

  • Batman is left out of the action

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  • Batman is left out of the action

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  • Well, Mario found Peach's ??? hidden beside the fireplace in her bedroom. If it is a dildo, then we have to assume that Mario doesn't know what a dick looks like, which is a brand new twist on the Super Mario lore.