TechnicallyColors

@TechnicallyColors@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need for Speed: what is the best title of the series?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think ProStreet is very underrated, and I’d say that’s my favorite. The car handling is a nice balance between realistic and arcadey, and the game is just a really entertaining take on track racing. Most of the game feels tight with its controls and challenges, and there are clear ways to express skill and achieve goals. My biggest problem with it is that dominating events (setting track records) is a little too easy, which probably works well for kids, but as someone who knows how to play racing games it’s often a matter of not crashing and having a reasonable car. There’s probably a mod to change that though? The soundtrack is also a bit mid compared to other NFS titles from this time but it does grow on you a bit.

  Most Wanted is probably my second place, but I think it’s not untouchable. The rubberbanding almost singlehandedly kills any sort of difficulty. In MW you’re there to race neat cars and look cool doing it. There’s no real challenge, and if there is, it’s not a fair one. It could be a little less menu-driven too. Sometimes it feels very linear in how you progress through the game, just picking event after event from the menu, and even starting police chases from it.

  Carbon is probably third place? It’s more interesting than MW in a lot of ways but it’s also just more mediocre in most respects. I consider MW and Carbon to be two sides of the same coin, but if it comes down to it I think you can easily put Carbon below MW. I think most people consider Carbon to be complete trash, but I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s nothing good about it.

  Underground 1 just sucks, and Underground 2 doesn’t have a lot to offer in retrospect. Both Undergrounds were amazing at the time, but now that we have newer alternatives I don’t think there’s a lot of reason to return to U2, and I think U1 has aged like milk in just about every respect. I could definitely be convinced to play U2 again, but it’s not something I feel a strong pull to return to.

  Other Need for Speeds have a lot of hits and a lot of misses, and it’s hard to want to put them in any sort of ranking system. They can all be fun in certain ways, but like most people I consider Black Box NFS to be the real NFS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Matrix 2.0 Is Here!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just finished Doki Doki Literature Club, what a fucking rollercoaster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn’t checking for Brian under my bed.

  !Although after reading some of the wiki today I’m a bit more reassured that a lot of the supernatural stuff in Echo seems to be neutral/benevolent, or at least misunderstood.!<

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just finished Doki Doki Literature Club, what a fucking rollercoaster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh, I feel like there’s no way I could do Arches if it’s way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I’m fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I’ll try the let’s play series at some point to start with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just finished Doki Doki Literature Club, what a fucking rollercoaster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It’s set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it’s more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to “date”. As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I’m too much of a chicken.

  Fair warning that it’s a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it’s humorous on the way so it’s not boring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The previous person was worried that Valve wouldn’t be able to convince “a sizable chunk of users” to move to Linux because all of the software they sell is written for Windows. If we apply a little bit of critical thinking, we realize that Valve has actually already thought of this(!) and applied a different(!) solution that solves the same problem(!) without requiring “everyone to write software for something that’s not the platform nearly all users are running”. If you want to see Valve’s attempt at getting everyone to switch to Linux without using compatibility tools you should look into how successful their Steam Machine campaign was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve more or less already done that with Proton and DXVK. Nearly all Windows games “just work” on Linux without developers needing to change anything. TBH whenever big studios develop Linux versions of games they’re usually not well-done anyway; for now it’s better if people develop with their comfy Windows tools and let compatibility tools take care of the translation. When the balance shifts to Linux dominance we can start pressing on them to learn how to use Linux SDKs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors dates and prices revealed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe Amdahl’s Law is in consideration at this point? Either way, for most consumers there’s no need for more cores, and CPUs are made to be sold. I’m guessing at this point gaming performance is one of the most important metrics to differentiate a consumer CPU, so it makes sense that adding more cores is not a priority in that regard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub - JSH32/portainer-remove-be-branding: Remove Portainer BE (Business Edition) branding and advertisements in a non-invasive way using Nginx⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  On a related note, I’ve found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don’t like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monitoring Borg backups⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I recommend a dead man’s switch like Healthchecks.io, which can be selfhosted for free. Whenever you have something that’s regularly occurring, add an extra callout to your unique Healthchecks callout UUID as part of the automation, and Healthchecks will send you a notification if something misses its callout schedule. You can also attach whatever data (e.g. a log) to the callout so you can look back through the run history. IIRC Borg will give you a non-zero return code if it detects problems, so you can send e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here/$? and a non-zero code will signal a notification as well (more examples here).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨don't use ladybird browser lol⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me personally, this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m not a fan of the languages it’s written in, its license, its immaturity, and that it’s mostly being developed by one person. Additional minor strike for communicating through discord. Now we learn that the most influential person on the project has some real bad vibes and it’s probably best to give this a pass as a whole.

  In my eyes the whole selling point of the browser is being an independent underdog with a clean slate, but what’s the point if we’re starting with a list of IOUs for things that are already bad out of the gate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨don't use ladybird browser lol⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Ladybird browser, which is highly related to this project, just did a PR event yesterday. That’s why it’s coming up years later, right after people were alerted to the project and it got more scrutiny. I appreciate knowing about this, as opposed to not knowing about it. It gives me the chance to evaluate whether I want to dedicate energy into supporting a browser primarily being developed by a sexist who thinks not being a cis male == politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s €110/year here: shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-c…

  I remember evaluating the price a long time ago and thinking it was too much for disabling a pop-up, and on writing my post I navigated to their site and saw the standard subscription and thought that’s what I had looked at a few years back: shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-s…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used Proxmox for a couple years and it’s good if you run a lot of VMs or LXCs, but I found that I’m not really the target audience. I ended up only running one Debian VM for my Docker containers. It was fine, but I eventually felt that Proxmox added no value for me, and the end result was sacrificing some memory and performance from using virtio emulations for CPU/GPU/RAM/filesystems. If your machines only have 8-16GB of RAM I don’t think it would be a good idea, as I’ve seen the rule of thumb is to dedicate 2GB for Proxmox’s usage. Meanwhile I have a Debian install on a VPS that takes about 450MB of RAM.

  For me, pros:

  • Native ZFS support - invaluable, ZFS is terrific. MergerFS+SnapRAID is a decent replacement but the dodgy tooling and laundry list of footguns makes me nervous to use it on important data. ZFS is idiot-proof, as long as you know what you’re doing during the initial setup. RAIDZ expansion is coming this year and you can still use mixed-size disks in a RAIDZ as long as you accept that all disks are equivalent to the smallest one, so I personally feel ZFS is acceptable for grab-bag disk usage now
  • Separation of bare metal and server environment, which means you can spin up another server VM from scratch without impacting the previous one, then switch with zero downtime. In the end, I replaced Proxmox with Debian on ZFS root (ZFSBootMenu) and wrote a few hundred lines of bash to automate the installation, so when I switched it only took about 30 minutes of downtime start to finish.
  • Isolation of different environments. If my VM gets hacked, it will have a harder time reaching my Proxmox host etc. I run all services in isolated Docker environments anyway so this isn’t that big of a perk for my threat profile.

  Cons:

  • Partitioning RAM for ZFS ARC, Proxmox, and VM leads to inherent inefficiencies at the margins.
  • I usually give my VM n-1 CPU cores, which is still less power than if I had just used the CPU natively.
  • GPU passthroughs to VM can be less efficient, depending on the GPU and how it handles it. My iGPU is less performant when using its ~SR-IOV feature
  • Learning requirement - not a huge learning curve but it’s a lot of knowledge that I will not use now that I’ve stopped using Proxmox
  • Hosting your data pool on the Proxmox host or a dedicated data VM means that your server VM needs to use NFS to access its data, which lacks a handful of features (e.g. inotify) and is a pain
  • Need to maintain two systems for updates, downtimes, etc
  • More points of failure
  • Extra startup time
  • Run by a company that thinks it’s okay to use winrar-style nag popups every time you load the console, and requires you to manually dig through the source to disable that. I understand it’s their business model, it doesn’t change how it affects me the end user who lacks $550/year to spend on disabling a popup