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squaresinger

@ squaresinger @lemmy.world

Posts

21
Comments

3009
Joined

11 mo. ago

18h ago

Clever trick to Un tangle a spool
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4

squaresinger @lemmy.world 18h ago
The last uncleanly-wound spool I had was in 2018. I haven't paid more than €25 per kg ever, usually €15-20.

20h ago

Clever trick to Un tangle a spool

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 20h ago

Never had a pre-tangled spool. Tangles happen if someone lets go of the end.

20h ago

Are Vorons still the best DIY printers in 2026?

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 20h ago

Hot take: open-source top-tier printers are a thing of the past.

We are so far by now that companies can make out-of-the-box amazing printers for far cheaper and more high-quality than any DIY solution.

You can still DIY and get freedom, customizability and repairability for it, but you can't DIY to get the best and/or cheapest solution anymore.

1d ago

Fast-paced and exciting environment

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1d ago

Means he's unemployed. "Living at the edge of his benefits check"

4d ago

Gegen den Pflegenotstand: Studium mit Hightech

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 4d ago

Und damit hast du das Kernproblem getroffen.

4d ago

Gegen den Pflegenotstand: Studium mit Hightech

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 4d ago

Ist halt auch wieder ein Löhne-Problem. Da geht's nämlich nicht nur um die Löhne pro Person, sondern auch darum wie viele Personen im Lohnbudget drin sind.

Man stelle sich vor: deutlich höhere Pro-Kopf-Löhne, plus doppelt so viele Stellen. Durch die höheren Pro-Kopf-Löhne kriegt man mehr Leute, mit denen man die Zusatzstellen füllt. Und mehr Leute sorgt dann für bessere Arbeitsbedingungen.

4d ago

Denmark & Australia - Scandinavian and the World

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 4d ago

That's because americans have difficulty spelling/pronouncing foreign words.

4d ago

Denmark & Australia - Scandinavian and the World

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 4d ago

Sorry, I figured from your post history that you are from an english-speaking country.

The term isn't "weener", it's "wiener": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wiener

The point still stands: If you don't see discrimination against a certain group of people as something bad, using discriminatory terms isn't a statement but just a thing people do without thinking.

4d ago

Denmark & Australia - Scandinavian and the World

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 4d ago

Says someone from a country where the word for people from my home town is used to mean "penis".

That's the thing: if you don't consider racism to be a bad thing, using racist terms isn't done to show anything.

To get back to my original example: Using "wiener" to mean penis is deeply offensive to people from Vienna, because in German it just means "Person from Vienna". But people from Vienna aren't a group that's "protected" by anti-racism, and thus people commonly use it. They often don't even know that the city of Vienna exists, let alone that it's called Wien and that people from Wien are called Wiener, and that the sausage is named after that city.

So they happily use the word "wiener" to mean "penis" and sometimes they even use it as a generic derogatory term: "You are such a wiener".

In that context it's not surprising that before anti-racism became a thing people would just use racist terms for every-day items like food.

5d ago

LLM's despite all the flaws it probably made it easier to switch to Linux. Have a stupid or niche question no need to be judge just ask an LLM.

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 5d ago

I fear not so. Maybe for easy stuff. But when it comes to actual troubleshooting, Lemmy is severely limited by its tiny user base.

(There's only about 40k monthly active users on Lemmy, and that number includes bot accounts. For comparison, that's fewer active users than the Crackberry forum or the LTT forum. Reddit has over a billion of daily active users, so around 25 000x as many as Lemmy.)

Chances are there's nobody on Lemmy who uses the same hardware, the same distribution and the same DE as me, so if I need help debugging an issue that's specific to my combination, I'm out of luck.

Even on Reddit the same is true for many issues. While there might be someone with my exact combination who might even know the answer, that person first has to stumble across my post among the millions of posts that are created every hour on Reddit.

So chances are if you ask a deeper question than "How do I copy files" you will not get an answer. Instead you likely will just get snark and "RTFM noob!"

In fact, even though I have been using Linux for well over a decade now, I ran across a problem I couldn't debug: Games would run fine on my 4070 today, but they'd randomly slow to a crawl (multiple seconds per frame) the next day. I'm a Linux software developer, so I know how to go about this. Reboots and all the usual stuff didn't help. Logs didn't show anything relevant. Google didn't help either. I asked on Stackexchange, but the question was closed as duplicate to an entirely unrelated question. By the time I got it reopened, it was so far down the queue that it didn't get any answers. Asking on Reddit just got me "Lol, noob, RTFM, works on my machine"-type of answers.

So I bit the bullet after about a year of getting nowhere and asked AI, and the first answer got me to the right track.

Turns out, flatpak keeps its own copy of the Nvidia driver. This version needs to be identical to the system driver version. If it's not, the GPU isn't used at all and instead it falls back to software rendering. So if I do dnf update and it updates the GPU driver, it breaks the performance. Running flatpak update && reboot fixes it again. So any time I ran dnf update without flatpak update && reboot after it, it would break the performance. And I often ran flatpak update first.

AI reall can help debugging weird issues.

7d ago

Forget technical debt

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 7d ago

In this context, YAGNI is a very good principle, because incidentally, working too much ahead to avoid technical debt can actually cause technical debt.

7d ago

Forget technical debt

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 7d ago

The writer made the whole essay because saying “just ask your engineers what they need to improve” wouldn’t make him money.

I wonder if the writer ever worked as an engineer.

1w ago

Forget technical debt

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1w ago

Tech debt is a term directed at managers to convince them to not always go for the quickest and dirtiest hack.

It's not a term that's ever meant to describe anything to an engineer.

1w ago

Forget technical debt

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1w ago

Technical debt is a management term.

The reason we use it is to tell non-technical management people why implementing a simple feature might take an hour on a fresh project and a week on an old legacy project.

It's used to tell them why we shouldn't go with the quickest and dirtiest solution but instead should go with a more expensive proper solution.

It also tells management why we might have to spend some time imrpoving our code base without any tangible improvements to the customer.

And because it's a term that speaks to non-technical management it uses financial language, becausee that's what they understand. Technical debt means "I am choosing to cut corners today, but we will have to pay up in the future by fixing stuff that wouldn't be broken if we do it right today."

And because it's aimed towards non-technical management and not towards developers, it's of course not very specific. Non-technical management doesn't need to understand about dependency hell, unclean code or bad developer documentation. That's not their field and it doesn't have to be.

The real problem in OOPs example wasn't that there's no clear metric or definition of technical debt. The problem was that non-technical managemnt thought that technical debt is an engineering concept instead of a management one, and thought that they themselves were allowed to meddle with it.

The right way to handle that is to ask the people who are actually impacted by technical debt what they want to improve. Any developer can quickly give you a good list of the most pressing tech debt issues in their code base. No need to pull in someone from outside of the project to make up some useless KPIs that will end up missing critical topics.

Btw, engineers already have engineering terms for what's described as technical debt. E.g. "dependency hell", "low test coverage", "outdated dependency", "bad code style", "unoptimized code" and so on. And since these are engineering terms, they actually have specific meanings and most of them are testable and quantifiable in some specific way.

1w ago

Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam?

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1w ago

You have to differentiate between a monopoly in economics and a monopoly in law.

In economics a monopoly is the only seller of a good with no other competition. If I am the only one who owns apple trees, I got a monopoly on apples.

In law a monopoly is someone who owns so much of the market that they can charge unfair prices. If I am the only one who owns large orchards full of the best kind of apple trees, it doesn't really matter to me that someone else has a couple mediocre trees in their backyard. I am not a economics-monopoly, since someone else is also selling apples, but I hold enough of the market that I can set the price to whatever I want.

(Ok, the analogy isn't perfect, but you get it, I hope. Basically the "excess market power" thing you talked about is the legal definition of a monopoly.)

Customers don't necessarily need to be end customers. If steam is charging their business customers too much, that counts too. (It also affects the end customers too, btw.)

So the question is: If I don't release a game on steam, will that cause it to underperform significantly? If so, does steam charge a lot above market price? If both of these questions are answered with yes, a lawsuit could be successful.

1w ago

How close are we to infinite power? Being able to cheaply in our everyday lives? Or are we trying anymore?

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1w ago

We would hear about it. The oil industry was the biggest powerhouse for much of the last century, but it isn't anymore.

Tech is orders of magnitude bigger than oil, so if it feeds data centers it will be used no matter what big oil wants.

1w ago

How close are we to infinite power? Being able to cheaply in our everyday lives? Or are we trying anymore?

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squaresinger @lemmy.world 1w ago

Infinitely far.

First, actual infinite power is impossible. It violates a bunch of the laws of nature. Not going to happen ever, at all.

Second, practically infinite power (meaning more power than we could ever use) is also out of reach. Solar/wind is super cheap, but you still need to build and maintain the PV/generators and that will always have a cost. Also, there's infinitely much we could do with energy, so if energy gets cheaper we will just use more of it.

If energy was close to free, we'd just replace cargo ships with railguns or something crazy wasteful like that. We'd invest crazy amounts of energy in making things a little bit more comfortable.

Just look at the current AI craze, or the crypto craze. None of that is actually doing something really necessary, but it makes numbers go up on some billionaire's charts and thus we waste ungodly amounts of energy into it.

If it wasn't that way, and instead we'd keep our lifestyle and just use cleaner energy production to not destroy the planet, we wouldn't have global warming at all right now. With the lifestyle of the 50s and the efficient tech from today, global warming wouldn't exist.