Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  AAA games from around the 00s and 10s with heavy DRM are also often a problem, with the official version of a game not at all running in Linux no matter what you do, whilst a pirate version of the same game will work just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Because my games library is much bigger in GoG than Steam, I’ve been using Lutris alongside the Steam App from the start (for over a year now) and the rate of no-hassle success I’ve had is just as good as with Steam and the whole process of installing a game from GoG and running it is just as slick in Lutris as doing so for Steam games in the Steam App.

  Further, Lutris is much more open and flexible than Steam, so for example I’ve configured it to by default run my games inside a firejail sandbox with localhost-only networking, I can install games from many sources and formats rather than just digital distribution from a specific game store and it’s even perfectly possible to run pirated games with it (one of my Steam games won’t at all run in Linux, but a pirated version of it works just fine from Lutris), none of which is possible with Steam.

  The actual gaming is just as seamless with Steam as with Lutris, but Steam is purposefully a closed solution highly integrated with a single games store, so it’s way more restrictive about what you can do with your games than Lutris (which follows the open source ethos, up to an including having a ton of obscure configuration options)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I had lost all hope on those fuckers as soon as I saw how they went after Corbyn.

  Then again I was just an EU immigrant in the UK and left after the Leave Referendum because that was the drop and I lost all hope for the UK as a country.

  In the years since periodically some news or other comes out of the UK that just confirms my decision to leave Britain as one of the best in my life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The politicians who wrestled back control of the Labour party through a campaign of smears with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups and who, immediately after that started at purge of any with dissenting opinions from that party, had more than demonstrated their love for Machiavelism even before rising to Government purely on the back of the First Past The Post system and Reform splitting the far-right vote thus costing the Tories lots of seats.

  Also, as others pointed out, this fact of Labour has long had an autoritarian strain, both in terms of the insane civil surveillance infrastructure they built last time they were in Government (as exposed by the Snowden Revelations) and their relentless weakening of privacy and even pretty basic legal rights.

  This is really not surprising: the goose stepping into Fascism in the UK has started a while ago, it’s just that it’s a posh kind of Fascism wrapped in layers of deceit and disguised as “Rule Of Law”, unlike in places like for example Hungary were it was closer to the more traditional “strong-man with and iron-fist” Fascist image.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Judging by what has come out regarding UK personalities and the Epstein files, they’re looking for whistleblowers who would denounce the pedos they have amongst their elites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s pretty much a required upgrade to be able to protect yourself from dropped or balistic nukes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the salt used.

  If you check here on table 5 you’ll see that common table salt (NaCl) melts at 801º C.

  As for what’s used, in Chapter 2 of that paper they say “Molten salts consist of alkali metal or alkali metal halides and oxygen-containing salts”, no it’s not actually table salt for Generation 2 of those kind of power generators.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In all fairness, you need to install a magnet at the far end and keep pluging and unplugging it to generate power…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream (for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam, rather than directly generating the steam, not only does the efficieny go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt).

  Here is paper I found about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s what they called a First Generation generator.

  The ones in use now will actually use sunlight to melt salt (than then is used to generate steam) rather than directly generating the steam which has way more capacity to store heat, so they have a solar conversion efficiency of between 38% and 44%, plus the molten salt can keep on being used to generate steam during the night until it cools down enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are literally some kinds of solar panel to generate heated water for things like home use.

  They’re just boxes painted in black with a pipe with water also painted in black sneaking back and forth inside of it, rather than being photovoltaic panels.

  Were I live now - Portugal - something like that works fine even in Winter to generate hot water for things like showering.

  That said even during the Summer something like that won’t generate steam (or at least, not with enough steam pressure to drive a turbine), unlike what the meme shows, though there are solar power concentrators that use sunlight to melt salt which then boils water to generate steam for a steam turbine, but those use a ton of mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a central tower were the salt is being melted. (For example).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How solar panels generate electricity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.

  However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn’t enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all pointing to a central tower were the salt-melting happens.

  Here is an example.

  By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don’t extract all the heat of the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it’s still a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it’s also improving throught things like using different salts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not even cats are safe from cats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Finally some worthy storage for memes!

  Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what’s the big deal?

  There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn’t any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips.

  It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed.

  It’s standard distributed systems design to have a hierarchy of storage with different speeds whose contents is allocated based on the frequency with which certain data is accessed, and HDDs are really only good for bulk that which is seldom accessed (basically the speed category for long term storage with low wait times when it does get needed but not really meant to be constantly accessed, which is just above things like tapes and other backup storage methods).

  So for example for a dynamic website with thousands of users HDDs most current data should be in SSDs and HDDs would maybe contain low access info such as historical data from the last couple of years and in front of those SSDs there would be a ton of memory to serve as a cache for the most accessed of all data (say, the CSS, JS and images of the home page) as in-memory data is even faster to access than data in an SSD.

  The idea that SSDs aren’t useful for servers is hilarious ignorant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as “AI” than on the Internet-relate tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones.

  The risk is that one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classe to cover it creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses which in turn pull more money from yet other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the same time, just expanding a device with new parts is a far cheaper way to get more performance than buying a new device - after all, whatever price problem there is with some kinds of parts, it will be the same whether they’re sold as lose parts or as part of a device.

  Poor working class young me in a poorer European country after getting his first PC quickly found out that to get more a more powerful machine he had to start upgrading that machine because there wasn’t money to buy a whole new one every couple of years.

  My point is that it might very well yield the very opposite effect of what you describe - buying whole devices to replace older models becomes too expensive so people favor more expandable devices - because those can have their performance improved with just some new parts, which are cheaper than getting a whole new device - and the market just responds to that.

  I think people in countries which until recently are wealthier, such as the US, are far too used to the mindset of “throw the old one out and but a new one” which is not at all the mindset of people in places were resources are constrained or require a lot bigger fraction of people’s income to buy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It will trickle down any second now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Turns out that the golden stuff streaming down ain’t Gold …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Santa is working on those lists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This poster Romans!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Santa is working on those lists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Santa is gonna be getting a piece of coal this Christmas … and it will be worth it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to ‘once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades’ and return home with a warm ‘at least it’s not us’ feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re gonna Ratchet Effect the shit out this!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, that’s definitelly going to solve the fall in Tourism problem in the US /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out.

  And don’t get me started on things like the relative ratios of “death by police” and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe.

  The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to “create far right parties” and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit).

  In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I’ve been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act.

  Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US.

  The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller’s mobile phones and computers way back in Bush’s day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they’re open about what they’re looking for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment.

  I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a fake Nobel prize.

  As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

  I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person’s authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum.

  Without that first paragraph on your post you would’ve been right to claim Ad Hominum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Huge respect to the folks at Obsidian': Todd Howard invited Obsidian devs onto Fallout season 2's set so they could see New Vegas in the flesh⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And found out filmset scenarios are filled with tricks that make it seem one thing to viewers whilst being somethings, just like 3D worlds in games.