addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 2 days ago:
Or ‘love hotels’. You want to rent a room by the hour, Mario gets his cut.
- Comment on [Silksong] Patch Version 1.0.28497 Now Live 2 days ago:
The harpoon works just fine too, one-hits the stick insects and does her some damage as well if you can line it up. She’s not very dangerous if you know her moveset, but that’s an education learned by many runbacks.
Doesn’t say they’ve fixed the comedy bug where if you look at the map while on one of the collapsing platforms, then when you fall through then the game stops accepting input, Hornet just stares at it forever. Only glitch I’ve found, quite impressive for a day one purchase.
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 2 days ago:
The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 2 days ago:
Fifty million? The “StarGate” talk was more like five hundred billion bro, just trust me, one more nuclear reactor main, that’s all we need, just one more hand and we’re going to win it big, bro.
- Comment on I got hooked on browsing openalternative.co is "Most Popular" list 2 days ago:
Agree with you completely, but the explanation is probably in order.
CoMaps is a fairly recent fork of Organic Maps. There were questions being raised about Organic’s governance - dodgy partnerships, misuse of funds, not being truly open-source due to keeping core libraries private - and so CoMaps was created to ‘do it properly’. The app functionality is basically exactly the same, so moving over is completely painless.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 1 week ago:
4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I’m working on a ticket.
Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That’s phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 1 week ago:
Speaking as a developer; I’ve a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll’s version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can ‘upscale anything’. Almost any modern game, I’m going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.
I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I’m not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I’d still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.
- Comment on TIL about Android Translation Layer (ATL), a way to port Android apps to Linux Mobile 1 week ago:
The Android dev kit includes a copy of QEMU that’s set up to emulate ARM with a selection of popular screen sizes and revisions of the OS, so that you can test your app on a variety of ‘potential phones’ before you upload it to the marketplace. Snapdragons are amazingly performant CPUs for how gently they sip at the battery, but they’re not that strong in the big scheme of things - any random x86 processor should be able to emulate them while using fifty times the power. A Steam deck ought to be able to do it; the request will then be ‘we’d like to play Android games better’, which to me is a much more reasonable ask.
- Comment on How to Build a Powerful Reverse Proxy Firewall for Blocking the Evil Web-Scraping Robot Hordes from Hell 1 week ago:
I’m still trying to make ‘sloppers’ happen. Perfectly describes the lack of thought that goes into what they produce.
- Comment on You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome 2 weeks ago:
The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.
- Comment on I'm "use NFS forfilesharing old." what's the current optimal solution for shared drives if I have like 3 linux machines in the house? 2 weeks ago:
You can turn off “delete”, but modification is a danger, it’s true.
Turning off delete makes it excellent for eg. backing up photographs on your phone. I’ve got it doing this from my Android to my raspberry pi, which puts them on my NAS for me. Saves losing all my pictures if I lose my phone.
- Comment on I love a good fractal 2 weeks ago:
Think if the GNU project had spent less time working on ‘clever’ recursive acronyms and fitting Scheme into everything, and more time hacking, we might actually be using their kernel.
Linus locked himself in his bedroom for the summer and got almost all of POSIX working on 386. That’s the level of geek to aspire to. If RMS had just decided to name his kernel after himself rather than messing, we’d all be be using Stallix instead.
- Comment on Linux Foundation says yes to NoSQL via DocumentDB 2 weeks ago:
The ‘traditional’ way of storing a database is on a mainframe or supercomputer, where all the information is stored in tables with the information all uniquely stored, frequently containing id references to other tables. For instance, an ‘orders’ table would have a customer id in it, and the ‘customer’ table would have their name and address. The programming language for databases like that is SQL - PostGres and Oracle are examples. That model gives you a lot of advantages - the data is always consistent, changes are either made completely or not at all - but every query has to go through one machine, so performance can suck, and you waste a lot of time ‘joining’ tables together for certain kinds of query.
If you’re storing eg. a blog with comments on it, that model doesn’t make sense. Each page has a varied selection of comments, comment will have a username and maybe their icon, which will rarely change, but will need to be evaluated by the database every time. It would make more sense to output the pre-rendered page as a JSON blob, and you could have a hundred machines with a few pages each to share the load. Updating people’s icons and adding new comments would need to be done by telling each machine to make a certain update if they’ve a copy of that page; you’d ‘eventually’ be consistent, but if you don’t care about that then you get a very scalable robust solution quite cheaply. Examples of such ‘NoSQL’ databases are MongoDB, Hadoop and DocumentDB.
Linux foundation have looked at DocumentDB’s license and said ‘yes, free enough for us’, so they’ll adopt it.
- Comment on Uhm 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on The people developing vegan meat alternatives must have eaten a lot of meat beforehand so they can replicate the taste and texture. 2 weeks ago:
Agreed. Got a huge amount of Indian and Asian cuisine that happens to be vegan, either incidentally or for religious reasons, and it’s all absolutely delicious; but no, ‘vegan food’ means deep-fried highly processed dinosaur shapes and cheese with a distinct aftertaste of sewage.
I feel bad for vegetarians. If pubs and restaurants have one meat-free item on the menu then it’s going to be vegan, and if it’s going to be vegan then it’s going to be some awful faux food where the main plant source is chemical plant. Vegetarian meals that celebrate the quality and freshness of the vegetables are the equal of any meat meal, but you’re not having those.
- Comment on It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They’ve also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.
- Comment on Electricity Consumption 3 weeks ago:
Visited a traditional water-powered flour mill recently. Very cool, beautiful building, and the end product makes really delicious bread and pasta. Wholemeal, not too fine, nothing in it but grain. Perfection.
From the water flow, drop and wheel turning rate, I made the maximum possible power as about 5 kW. Probably optimistic to think you’d get a quarter of that in practice. Still, that’s a huge amount compared to what a person can produce, and it’s ‘on tap’ 24 hours a day. That kind of thing does explain why, in the days before electrification, that having ‘the right landscape’ made some areas really wealthy and some others not. Exploitable renewable energy, what a concept.
So yeah, your proposed map would be really interesting. The Romans burned down whole forests to make steel - you simply couldn’t refine it in a place without. It would be fascinating to see the map of “power resources” and the resulting industries, even if it would be very hypothetical.
- Comment on Microsoft breaks Windows reset and recovery 3 weeks ago:
A CD with RedHat on it? Pretty fancy. My first RH installation came on about three boxes of floppy disks, took hours to unpack it all. And damn right, been all uphill since.
- Comment on Begun the kernel wars have 4 weeks ago:
Seeking a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Rather than having one set of company-hosted servers that they then struggle to police, just let everyone host their own, and they can be responsible for banning anyone that doesn’t follow the community rules.
- Comment on Begun the kernel wars have 4 weeks ago:
Actually makes it easier to write aimbots and triggerbots, since you’ll have the video feed and can respond with the right inputs. Skips the step where you’ve got to film the monitor on the machine that’s ‘playing’ the game, which is protected by the HDCP between the PC and the screen.
- Comment on Here’s how to spot AI writing, according to Wikipedia 4 weeks ago:
That’s why I like make basic grammatical mistakes, speling erors, and include a few fucks in my internet writing. Nobody’s not gona mistake me for no got dagned robot.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 4 weeks ago:
Strange, it has the ‘autoplay more like this’ option on the web player (which does basically the same) but not the explicit ‘artist radio’ option. Huh.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 4 weeks ago:
“Go to Radio” on the app. Hmm…
- Comment on My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space 4 weeks ago:
SIMD is pretty simple really, but it’s been 30 years since it’s been a standard-ish feature in CPUs, and modern compilers are “just about able to sometimes” use SIMD if you’ve got a very simple loop with fixed endpoints that might use it. It’s one thing that you might fall back to writing assembly to use - the FFmpeg developers had an article not too long ago about getting a 10% speed improvement by writing all the SIMD by hand.
Using an NPU means recognising algorithms that can be broken down into parallelizable, networkable steps with information passing between cells. Basically, you’re playing a game of TIS-100 with your code. It’s fragile and difficult, and there’s no chance that your compiler will do that automatically.
Best thing to hope for is that some standard libraries can implement it, and then we can all benefit. It’s an okay tool for ‘jobs that can be broken down into separate cells that interact’, so some kinds of image processing, maybe things like liquid flow simulations. There’s a very small overlap between ‘things that are just algorithms that the main CPU would do better’ and ‘things that can be broken down into many many simple steps that a GPU would do better’ where an NPU really makes sense, tho.
- Comment on Techcrunch reports that AI coding tools have "very negative" gross margins. They're losing money on every user. 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure that they’re even going to be useful for gamers. Datacenter GPUs require a substantial external cooling solution to stop them from just melting. Believe NVidia’s new stuff is liquid-only, so even if you’ve got an HVAC next to your l33t gaming PC, that won’t be sufficient.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 5 weeks ago:
They have the human made ones, they have the “artist radio” function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you’ve been listening to. The headline ‘albums of the week’ are based on what they like, which I don’t think is unfair - I’ve really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I’ve always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their ‘albums of the week’, and their album at studio quality. Not that that’s essential for punk. Admittedly I don’t listen to a lot of indy, but they’ve always had what I’ve wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it’s nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there’s not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I’d rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 5 weeks ago:
Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and ‘just works’ with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It’s French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you’re trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
- Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, we have that with our customers sometimes. To me, an app should either be running full whack - maxing out bandwidth on CPU, disk, memory or network - or completely idle. Chuntering along at 2% is a bug. For the ones that put ‘monitoring tools’ that raise errors when we reach 100% on something, we set a Linux CGroup to throttle the offending resource. Takes longer, obviously, but not worth arguing with their network deployment teams 🤷 .
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 5 weeks ago:
You missed ‘secure’ out of that list. Vibe coding is tantamount to communism, the way that everyone who uses it ends up publicly owned.
