The_Decryptor
@The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
- Comment on If regulated properly, ebikes could one day replace cars for millions of Australians 6 days ago:
Because some people want to ban them entirely.
That’s badly regulating them.
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 1 week ago:
Mercurial and DARCS had a rather fatal flaw though, they were so much slower than git. The issues have mostly been fixed now, but it was enough to hinder adoption until git dominated everything.
Git also has a rather big flaw, it’s “good enough”. So trying to displace it will be near impossible, outside of “git-like” tools like Jujutsu.
- Comment on Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs 2 weeks ago:
Ahh, yep it turns out ARM actually removed Thumb support with their 64-bit transition, so their instruction length is fixed now, and Thumb never made it into the M* SoCs.
- Comment on Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs 2 weeks ago:
one of problems with CISC is that it has variable length instructions
RISC systems also have variable length instructions, they’re just a bit stricter with the implementation that alleviates a lot of the issues (ARM instructions are always either 16-bits or 32-bits, while RISC-V is always a multiple of 16-bits and self-describing, similar to UTF-8)
- Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery 2 weeks ago:
a nonprofit owned by a for profit company
It’s the other way around, the foundation owns the corporation.
Still feels like the corporation is the one making decisions though.
- Comment on Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp 3 weeks ago:
It’s failing storage, top half of the display is EXT4 complaining it can’t read the SD card, bottom half is the result of that, services can’t start.
- Comment on Epstein puts my morality into perspective 3 weeks ago:
Only exception I got is global warming. We’ve never played this particular game before.
We also never had nukes before.
The conditions have been worse in the past, but the risks are so much worse these days.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 3 weeks ago:
we don’t have gestures broadly to American Evangelicalism going on here in Aus.
Hillsong says hi.
- Comment on Nvidia plans to boost presence in Israel with multibillion-dollar tech campus in north 4 weeks ago:
This is a problem that Nvidia is capable of solving but they haven’t been interested in it for over a decade so I don’t see them starting now.
They actually recently open sourced a bunch of required infrastructure, and hired a bunch of the OSS driver maintainers.
It’s all still pretty crap, but there’s more hope now.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
Yeah “universal memory” is the holy grail, seemingly as hard to find as it as well.
The articles on Wikipedia about the related tech is great, it’ll mention something like “Developers expect commercialisation to happen relatively soon” and then link to an article from 2004, or research papers from the 1980s.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
Shared memory is different to unified memory, AMD’s got an implementation of the later with their “AI MAX+” (ugh) systems, does quite well in benchmarks.
It also doesn’t hurt that Apple puts the RAM on the SoC and gives it a truckload of bandwidth. DDR5 is about 70GB/s, meanwhile the M4 Max is around 540GB/s.
- Comment on Twitter founder Jack Dorsey pumps $10 million into a nonprofit to build Nostr-based social media apps 5 weeks ago:
There was Secure Scuttblebutt, but it had issues that hindered adoption.
Nostr does actually seem like a more usable version of it, but the only people I’ve ever seen use it are cryptobros, so it’s got a kind of anti-network effect.
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 5 weeks ago:
Procedural generation is just an earlier form of AI that’s been demystified and commercialized as a positive thing.
That is such a broad generalisation that it makes the term useless.
Is Minesweeper AI then? It uses procedural generation to generate the play area. Is Minecraft chunk generation AI?
Is perlin noise AI?
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 5 weeks ago:
Would syntax highlighting?
- Comment on Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate 5 weeks ago:
It’s not really Ext4 doing that, it’s a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.
You’ll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.
- Comment on Australian government not suspending ads or posts on X amid antisemitic Grok chatbot incident 1 month ago:
On Wednesday, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after Grok began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.
The special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told ABC’s RN Breakfast on Friday she had held meetings with a number of social media platforms, including X. “They’re very keen to ensure that hate is not associated with their platform,” she said, adding: “AI is the answer.”
Ah, this must be a new definition of antisemitism that I’m not familiar with.
- Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not 1 month ago:
It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.
I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.
- Comment on BREAKING: X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down One Day After Elon Musk’s Grok AI Bot Went Full Hitler 1 month ago:
She used all the code words and dog whistles from the start.
- Comment on BREAKING: X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down One Day After Elon Musk’s Grok AI Bot Went Full Hitler 1 month ago:
The dog?
- Comment on Subnautica 2 studio begs rioting fans for benefit of the doubt after leadership axed by owner Krafton: 'The team that has been working on the game day-to-day ... remains completely unchanged' 1 month ago:
Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.
If anything Subnautica lets you see too much.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 month ago:
PNG gets you the best compatibility and features, at the expense of file size. But I probably wouldn’t use it for uploading photographs to the web of course.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 month ago:
WebP is the same, it’s got a lossy mode (VP8) and a lossless mode (Which is more limited than PNG, but beats it where it overlaps). But to make it more complicated the lossless mode also has lossy processing modes, where it alters the image first to achieve smaller output sizes.
People have a long habit of turning JPEG files into PNG files, the file extension won’t help you there. They also could have reduced the colour depth or resized it, all lossy operations. All it really tells you is that it can have an alpha channel.
As for AVIF, personally I don’t like the format, it feels like an “open media” (But still patented) version of HEIF to oppose Apple. Like WebP it makes the (baseless IMO) assumption that a format designed to encode motion data is better at encoding still data than a format designed to encode still data. It’s got all the limitations of a video format (It’s got a max resolution, only supports 12bit images, and no progressive decoding), and they left out all the enhancements from WebP (The dedicated lossless mode, “lossless AVIF” files are huge and the last I checked badly supported, so nobody actually used them, and they just called very high quality settings “lossless”)
A team inside of Google was working on WebP2 around the same time, that used AV1 but actually added the useful stuff like efficient lossless encoding, it got killed too in favour of AVIF.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 month ago:
AVIF is generally smaller in size than both WebP and PNG. AVIF supports animation while PNG does not.
The lossless mode in AVIF is so bad that a BMP in a ZIP file produces smaller results.
Which makes sense, as it doesn’t actually have a dedicated lossless mode (like WebP does), the encoder is just to not quantise the video data it produces.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 month ago:
JXL can do lossy images (like JPEG) and lossless ones (like PNG), and on average it’ll produce smaller file sizes than both (While beating JPEG quality wise). The killer feature is that it can do lossless recompression of existing JPEG files and shave off about 20% of the file size, and it’s reversible so you can turn those JXL files back into JPEG images for existing software.
The downside is that it was created by Google Research (among others), but the Chrome team made AVIF instead and decided that’s what they’d support and nothing else.
At least Safari supports it.
- Comment on Why there are a lot of people migrating from Windows to Linux these days? 1 month ago:
I switched a year ago, after trying and failing multiple times over the years whenever I gave it a try.
- Linux has massively improved, systemd is a lot cleaner than the mess of disparate shell scripts it displaced. Network Manager is also a lot nicer now than I remember it being when it was first introduced into Red Hat.
- Windows hasn’t, in a lot of ways it was actually regressing. I used to get multiple shell crashes a week with no insight as to why, friends would claim it was just me but then receive an update and start having similar crashes. Also noticeable UI issues that went unfixed for multiple revisions, made it felt cheap.
- MS went all in on AI garbage and was jamming it into everything, kept getting popup notifications and the like to try Copilot, notifications went from being useful to just being an ad delivery mechanism.
- Gaming on Linux massively improved, last time I tried it OpenGL support was a mess. Now OpenGL is very mature, and all the D3D translation stuff uses Vulkan which has been rock solid for me. I’ve found games run better than they did on Windows on the same hardware, and the only game I’ve had an issue with was Destiny 2, which is intentional on the devs behalf (Luckily the game’s boring now)
I find I’m a lot more willing to let issues slide though, like I’ve had some Thunar crashes which I’m cool with since there’s like 4 devs maintaining it, vs. the multi-billion dollar company working on Explorer which I expect better from. Also unsurprisingly the only actual shop-stopper issue I’ve had was with a memory leak in the Nvidia drivers, the actual FLOSS stuff has been great.
- Comment on Tumblr’s move to WordPress and fediverse integration is ‘on hold’ 1 month ago:
Or Automattic doesn’t have enough employees left to implement it
- Comment on No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites 1 month ago:
Use Zola or Hugo then
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 2 months ago:
Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.
- Comment on I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days 2 months ago:
Tizen (resting place of Meego)
I’d say SailfishOS is the final resting place of Meego, especially since it’s maintained by ex-Nokia devs.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 2 months ago:
I’m not convinced LLMs as they exist today don’t prioritize sources – if trained naively, sure, but these days they can, for instance, integrate search results, and can update on new information.
Well, it includes the text from the search results in the prompt, it’s not actually updating any internal state (the network weights), a new “conversation” starts from scratch.