[disputed]

SimonSays make me a sandwich

I wonder if a personalized reputation system based on your votes of other people’s comments, and influenced by votes from folks who have earned enough upvotes from you, could be developed without turning your feed into an echo chamber like Facebook.

Sort of like PageRank, but for fediverse users instead of web pages, and with each user keeping (and seeing) their own rankings of everyone else.

I just checked that 32GiB system that runs zramswap at PERCENT=50, and free -h is reporting 27GiB available. I think that confirms my suspicion.

So, I don’t think there’s any significant down side to running zramswap even if your system never needs to swap. :)

Interesting. Judging by that option’s name, it seems to refer to use of the HTML <meta> tag to refresh a page.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/meta/http-equiv

Neither this tag nor using it for refresh is new at all. I don’t think I’ve seen it used to detect bots, though. I wonder what Anubis is doing here.

Archived and readable without whitelisting apnews in your script blocker:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250707190710/https://apnews.com/article/lawsuit-vaccines-kennedy-95a1aa23c3f015f7a35a570f5ef8da36

Geany is excellent. It’s a lightweight programmer’s editor with enough features and configurable hooks to provide the important parts of a full-blown IDE. It renders text clearly, never feels laggy, and doesn’t get greedy with your RAM. I recommend it to people who can’t stand the bloat that’s often seen elsewhere these days, but would rather have a GUI than resort to vim.

A couple minor annoyances to me:

• It doesn’t yet support the Language Server Protocol, so any language that it doesn’t understand will be left without syntax and context-sensitive features. (On the other hand, it does support a lot of languages.)
• It inherits Scintilla’s use of Gtk for its GUI, so it’s an alien app on Qt-based desktops.

I use it anyway, because I find it easier / more comfortable to use than Kate.

I suspect zram’s swap device only consumes RAM when it actually contains swapped pages, but I don’t know for sure. Can anyone link an authoritative statement on this?

I use it on a 32 GiB workstation, also with PERCENT=50 and ALGO=zstd in Debian’s /etc/default/zramswap, and vm.swappiness=60. This is its only swap device. I like that it avoids needless SSD wear and painfully slow interactivity during large compile and compression jobs.

Is it worth it on your system, which has only 2 CPU cores? If your memory-intensive workloads compress well, then I would think yes, for the same reasons that I like it. If you find your CPU struggling with it, you could always change to a lighter compression algorithm.

On the other hand, if your memory-intensive tasks don’t compress well, then no, I would not expect it to be a good use of your CPU.

You’ll never know until you try it. I suggest checking the output of zramctl when running tasks that create memory pressure.

For anyone else curious about the relationship to ICE, here is what I found on Wikipedia, with each → pointing to a parent agency:

US Border Patrol → US Customs and Border Protection → US Department of Homeland Security

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) → US Department of Homeland Security

Sorry; I shouldn’t have written Cloudflare specifically. Their CAPTCHA page now contains scripts from Google, not Cloudflare. I have corrected my comment.

How do you know this?

Because a couple months ago, archive.is/archive.today started showing me CAPTCHA pages instead of the archived articles when I use Firefox with scripts disabled. The current page contains scripts hosted by Google, which I won’t enable, so I can’t read the archived articles.

What about https://ghostarchive.org/?

I haven’t used that site enough to have a consistent picture of what it’s doing. When I tried it a few minutes ago, it directed me to a CAPTCHA wall when trying to submit an article, but not when searching for an archived article. I’ll try to remember to look at it again periodically, to be able to answer this question in the future.

She told me she’s […] also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers.

As someone who is keenly aware of the privacy and security problems that come with allowing web scripts, I hope she prioritizes this soon. It’s really disappointing to find sites that were formerly readable without javascript suddenly inaccessible since adopting Anubis. The more sites that do this, the more people are pushed toward enabling scripts by default, exposing them to a great many trackers and web exploits that would otherwise be blocked.

Unfortunately, archive.is seems to have moved behind a big corporate CAPTCHA service, subjecting readers to having their reading habits (both the articles and the referring communities) tracked at a large scale.

I suggest this archive link instead:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250707135819/https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-software-saving-the-internet-from-ai-bot-scrapers/

Civilization ][ poster

This is the first time I’ve seen a Civ game title stylized as if it were a 1970s Apple computer.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075620/

It recognizes well-known device IDs, and tags matching devices in such a way that they will be treated like game controllers by downstream hardware management components. For example, giving unprivileged users permission to use the device, or labeling it as a “joystick” so it won’t be ignored by certain game support libraries.

FYI, the game-devices-udev package is Arch-specific. In the Debian family, steam-devices is the roughly equivalent package.

Some things to consider:

Do you have the game-devices-udev package installed? Its udev rules might be needed for some software to detect your controller and its features.

Have you tested for different behavior when connecting your DualShock 4 via Bluetooth vs. USB?

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_10.0/docs/CONTROLLERS.md

Friendly reminder that the US needs to replace its fundamentally broken first-past-the-post voting system.

CGP Grey - Politics in the Animal Kingdom

Duverger’s law

I won’t watch the video, but as someone who has been running Windows games on Linux since well before Steam for Linux existed, my view is that comparing performance on different distros is pointless these days.

Game performance depends very little on which Linux distro you use, because sufficiently recent versions of the performance-sensitive components are available on all of them, and because gaming runtime environments like Steam and Flatpak provide their own versions of several of these components anyway. (Also, desktop environments have generally become good about turning off expensive compositing operations while games are running.)

Pick whatever distro is comfortable for you to use and maintain. That might be bleeding edge Arch, or low maintenance Debian, or user friendly Mint, or whatever. They can all play games very well once they’re set up for it, and the setup is almost never difficult if you’re willing to learn how.

As for comparing Windows to Linux for running Windows games, I would expect performance to be close enough that the difference doesn’t matter in most cases. Game-focused Wine builds and API shims like DXVK are already very capable, and continually improving. Windows might have advantages from being a game’s native platform, but Linux has advantages from resource efficiency.

So, a review “showing almost no difference in performance between gaming distros and Windows 11 LTSC” doesn’t surprise me at all.

My opinion: the gaming performance differences these days are mostly minor, and less important than having my computer serve me (not some invasive corporation).

I look forward to the small new game studios that will surely appear as the big old ones are consolidated and/or dismantled.

It’s disappointing to see things we like fade away, but as the sun sets in one place, it rises in another.