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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
2
Comments
378
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Jonathan Kamens: "It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about Firefox's PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is…" - federate.social

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  • Man alive, I thought that Mozilla had been doing their own Personal Package Archives so that we didn't have to deal with Ubuntu packaging it as a Snap anymore. And this is doubly disappointing.

  • WhY iS tHe SeRvEr DoWn

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  • Oh, one of our customers' users deleted the /var directory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was "taking up too much space on disk". That's where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.

  • Finnish startup says it can speed up any CPU by up to 100x using a tiny piece of hardware with no recoding

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  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs

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  • If you made memory access lines twice as wide, they'd take up more space. More space means (a) chips run slower, because it takes time for the electricity to get there (b) they'd be bigger and more expensive.

    The main problem with 32-bit, as others have noticed, is that that's not really so much RAM. CPUs do addition and subtraction the way we were taught at school - 'carry the one', they've an overflow bit that's set when your sum doesn't fit in the columns. On 8-bit CPUs, we were always checking back when adding up large numbers. On 64-bit CPUs, we can deal with truly massive numbers anyway, it's not such a hassle. And they're so fast at doing sums anyway and usually waiting for memory, it's barely a hassle.

    Moving to 128-bit would give us a truly minuscule, probably unmeasurable, benefit in exchange for significant downsides. We could make them, but it would be pointless.

  • Utah's bathroom snitch line hasn't found one legitimate complaint out of 12,000

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  • Yeah; as a native and fairly well-educated speaker, I'm fucked if I can form the past participles of some of our verbs

    If I swim across a river, is it now the swimmed river? Swum river? Swam river?

    If I sneak into a room, have I sneaked? Snuck? Both sound wrong.

    Didn't find anything ambiguous about 'costed', it works for me.

  • Flameshot: Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software

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  • Got this installed on all my work machines - if you're wanting to stick a screenshot on Jira or Slack with a couple of arrows, wavy lines, or a bit blurred out then it's dead quick and has just the functionality that you need. Yes, it's simple and lacks a lot of 'power tools'. Sometimes that's just what you need, tho.

  • its crime time

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  • Thought the text said that they were going to do Grimes. I'm up for some crimes, tho.

  • Armadillo

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  • Nah, that there's an armsadillo. You can tell, because he has two.

  • Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite prototype that runs Linux emerges from Tuxedo:12-core CPU with 32GB RAM and surprise, surprise, Debian

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  • emerges from a brand you've probably never heard of

    Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 / gen 3 as we speak. Great little laptop. I'd wanted something with a few more pixels than my previous machine, and there's a massive jump from bog-standard 1080p to extremely expensive 4K screens. Three megapixel screen at a premium-but-not-insane price, compiles code like a champion, makes an extremely competent job of 3D gaming, came with Linux and runs it all perfectly.

    "Tuxedo Linux", which is their in-house distro, is Ubuntu + KDE Plasma. Seemed absolutely fine, although I replaced it with Arch btw since that's more my style. Presumably they're using Debian for the ARM support on this new one? This one runs pretty cold most of the time, but you definitely know that you've got a 54W processor in a very thin mobile device when you try eg. playing simulation games - it gets a bit warm on the knees. "Not x64" would be a deal-breaker for my work, but for most uses the added battery life would be more valuable than the inconvenience.

  • I just switched to Pop OS, any tips on what I should do next?

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  • btw

  • I just switched to Pop OS, any tips on what I should do next?

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  • Finest advice possible for any Linux sysadmin.

  • xaitax/TotalRecall: This tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots.

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  • I thought that it was encrypted if your home directory was encrypted? The impression that I got was that it was just a SQLite database stored in the clear. The user must certainly be able to make queries of that database in order for it to work, so even if it's hosted by a non-user service, malware running locally will still be able to exfiltrate the data.

  • New World Record: 33.24% Solar Cell Efficiency From JinkoSolar! - CleanTechnica

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  • Nice insight, thank you.

    I can see that there will be a range of markets for these. Installing them in the desert (efficiency not as important as pure cost-per-watt, long-term stability very important) is not the same as installing them on your roof (limited space but fairly easy access, payback time dominated by efficiency) and so the 'customer' sweet point for these will not be the same as the 'industrial' one.

  • This is hilarious

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  • Stephen King's books tend to be both very long and contain a lot of internal monologue. That's very much not film-friendly. "Faithful" adaptions tend to drag and have a lot of tell-don't-show, which makes for a "terrible" film. Unfaithful ones tend to change and cut a lot, which makes them "terrible" adaptions. For instance, "The Shining" film has very little to do with the book, but is an absolutely phenomenal movie. King hated it.

    "IT" the Tim Curry version has Tim Curry in it, who was absolutely fantastic. A lot of material from the book was cut out - I'm thinking it could be 80% or more. That includes the scene where the children have a gang bang in the sewer. Out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing, and it's never mentioned again if I remember correctly. That might make it a "terrible" unfaithful adaption, but you know something? I'm alright without seeing that.

  • Deleted

    deleted by creator

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  • Sorry if I was ambiguous - it was me that received a spectacular number of downvotes for a comment that I'd not think controversial in any way, and then realised that I might as well ignore all that because it doesn't matter here.

    There's a few arseholes running bots that seem to downvote every post on a topic sometimes. Don't let that get you down - no point putting more thought into it than they did. Your opinion matters, dude (-ette), don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

  • Deleted

    deleted by creator

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  • Once you've posted a comment that implies that China is imperfect in some way and received a truly spectacular number of downvotes, and then realised that it makes no difference whatsoever because Lemmy votes only affect your ego and nothing else, then you can move on. We aren't "the other website".

  • Linux has reached 2.32% in Steam Hardware Survey for May 2024

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  • One of the things that got me to change my gaming desktop from Mint to Arch was the fact that you get the cutting-edge version of everything; kernel and amdgpu being the most important, but also getting the latest version of Lutris and things is nice too. Brought me from "usually about 50 fps outdoors in Elden Ring" to "usually about 60 fps" on the same machine.

    Makes sense for a gaming machine to only include the services you actually want, which Arch enables. Supports my hardware better too - my audio gear works perfectly in Pipewire but is ropey in ALSA, so rather than "install Mint -> install Pipewire -> remove ALSA -> hope ALSA is gone", the sequence is "install Arch -> install Pipewire", which make more sense.

    Other cutting-edge rolling release distros are available, of course, but once you learn Arch, it makes a lot of sense for gaming.

  • Transition from litter box to doing business outdoors

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  • We've a few rescue cats - we got them all when they were about three / four years old. We kept them inside initially for six weeks or so, made sure that they'd got used to living in a new house before we let them outside.

    The one which had been abandoned and had been living outside for a few weeks (a boy) stopped using his litter tray completely, as soon as he was allowed outside again.

    The other two, both girls but a 'smooth' changeover, took a bit more time to get used to being outside. One transitioned off of her litter tray after a couple of months by herself; the other took more like four months, and she was a bit of a fair-weather pooper for a while as well.

    My take-home message would be that cats generally prefer to do their business as far away from where they live as possible. Only possible bit of advice would be to wait until the weather's getting better in case your cats dislike the wind and the rain. I believe forest cats love the frosty weather anyway, though?

  • Canonical Announces Availability of Real-Time Kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

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  • Yeah.

    There's a couple of ways of looking at it; general purpose computers generally implement 'soft' real time functionality. It's usually a requirement for music and video production; if you want to keep to a steady 60fps, then you need to update the screen and the audio buffer absolutely every 16 ms. To achieve that, the AV thread runs at a higher priority than any other thread. The real-time scheduler doesn't let a lower-priority thread run until every higher-priority thread is finished. Normally that means worse performance overall, and in some cases can softlock the system - if the AV thread gets stuck in a loop, your computer won't even respond to keyboard input.

    Soft real-time is appropriate for when no-one will die if a timeslot is missed. A video stutter won't kill you. Hard real-time is for things like industrial control. If the anti-lock breaks in your car are meant to evaluate your wheels one hundred times a second, then taking 11 ms to evaluate that is a complete system failure, even if the answer is correct. Note that it doesn't matter if it gets the right answer in 1 ms or 9 ms, as long as it never ever takes more than 10. Hard real-time performance does not mean good performance, it means predictable performance.

    When we program up PLCs in industrial settings, for our 'critical sections', we'll processor interrupts, so that we know our code will absolutely run in time. We use specialised languages as well - no loops, no recursion - that don't let you do things that can't be checked for an upper time bound. Lots of finite state machines! But when we're done, we know that we've got code that won't miss a time slot in the next twenty years of operation.

    That does mean, ironically, that my old Amiga was a better music computer than my current desktop, despite being millions of times less powerful. OctaMED could take over the whole CPU whenever it liked. Whereas a modern desktop might always have to respond to a USB device or a hard drive, leading to a potential stutter at any time. Tiny probability, but not an acceptable one.