addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support. 9 hours ago:
It is certainly true that TempleOS won’t be identifying with one of the common browser user agents when surfing the internet.
- Comment on No wonder Reddit has turned to shit 14 hours ago:
If you’ve any suggestion on how to implement that, then it’s a million-dollar idea.
The “I’m a human” test that only takes a few seconds and then lets you do what you like for an hour was always vulnerable to ‘auth farms’. Pay some poor bastards in the third world a pittance to pass the test a thousand times an hour, let the bots run wild. And the bots have gained the ability to pass the tests themselves, at least by boiling the oceans in some datacentre while the VC money holds out.
Finding the people running the bots, fitting them with some very heavy boots and then seeing if they can swim in the deep ocean is probably needlessly cruel, but I’d be up for tarring and feathering a few. Once the videos got out, the rest might think harder about their life choices…
- Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K 2 days ago:
I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.
Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.
- Comment on Why doesn't my phone put all of my apps to "sleep" by default? 5 days ago:
5G is for spreading the woke gay mind virus. Collecting all of your personal information is the Jewish space lasers. Fortunately, tinfoil hat stops both.
- Comment on NASA Reveals New Details About Dark Matter’s Influence on Universe 5 days ago:
The Webb produces some beautiful pictures, as always, but identifying 800k galaxies in an area 2 1/2 times the size of the moon is hard to conceive. Both how good a telescope it is, and the scale of the universe.
Don’t think it says it in the link, but if you assume that all galaxies are randomly oriented, then in the places when the distribution isn’t quite average, you can assume that light has been pulled by gravity’s ‘hidden hand’. And with nearly a million galaxies to analyse, you get a very good picture of how sources of gravity are distributed.
- Comment on Microsoft Windows 365 goes down the day after Microsoft celebrates 'reimagining the PC as a cloud service that streams a Cloud PC' 1 week ago:
100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it’s more widely used at home than on business machines.
The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.
- Comment on Too late 1 week ago:
Just need a chutney that was developed in the 90s, and then we can make a delicious chutney+blue ciabatta sandwich that’s all younger than you think.
- Comment on Ubisoft has cancelled 6 games, including the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake | VGC 1 week ago:
Well, having not played the Xbox version… ;-) Once you’ve got it running, it remains one of the finest games of all time.
Getting it running is the real sands of time, tho. It has a particular hatred of multi-core CPUs, requires a graphics card that supports both hardware transform & lighting but also truly ancient versions of DirectX, and is obstinately not-widescreen. You’ll be wanting a fan patch; last time I tried one, it was a bit of a crash-fest (it wasn’t, back in the day) and some of the SFX looked plain wrong.
Graphics still held up perfectly - the art style is very strong - and the story remains charming. All I wanted from a remake was the damned thing to start up in a modern screen resolution, and it seems they’ve managed to spend years on it without even managing that.
- Comment on If only 1 week ago:
Saw them at a festival a couple of years back. They know they’re a bit cheesy and play into it, but they’re a tight band and can still smash out all their hits.
Now, the fact that the festival could hardly afford anyone else because Filth were headlining, that was a problem, but it did mean that a few lesser-known bands got to play a decent set, so it’s all good I suppose.
- Comment on Interesting 1 week ago:
They’ve a lot of canals, the ladders are custom, they’ll need to be coated to stop them from corroding, and that’ll be the installed price, so that’s a small team driving round, barriering off bits of the canal while the work is done
If anything, seems cheap for a council job. My town would probably spend ten times that on the desk study to decide where they’ll go and to get the paperwork together.
- Comment on What challenge from a game isn't worth completing and what challenge from a game is worth completing? 2 weeks ago:
Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You’ve got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it’s a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.
Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You’re limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you’re limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you’ll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.
Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you’re a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you’re good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.
Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can’t rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you’ll have most certainly earned it.
Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just “DPS race” them like you do normally.
- Comment on F*** You! Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over This Appreciation Email 3 weeks ago:
Interesting, but misguided, I think.
If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.
If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.
What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.
Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.
- Comment on Dell brings back XPS laptops — ditches the capacitive touch bar, adds 1Hz display option, and upgrades 14 and 16-inch models 3 weeks ago:
Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.
Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 weeks ago:
A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 weeks ago:
Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.
Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.
Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
It’s the Witcher 1 but redone in the Witcher 3 engine. They’ve reimplemented the combat rhythm minigame and the ‘sex cards’ are all in HD.
- Comment on Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft 1 month ago:
Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)
Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.
- Comment on Steam winter sale is now live 1 month ago:
Generally, companies are trying to maximise profit, which means that the price will be reduced only when it’s stopped selling at the previous and they want to make sales the next, more price-conscious, segment of the market. They might want some quick bucks if the company is in financial trouble, or to ‘make the news’ with a sale if they need some publicity.
BG3 sold shedloads, is still selling shedloads, was on multiple games-of-the-year list and generally ranks amongst the best games of all time, often at the top; and Larian seem sufficiently flush with cash from the success of it. So like you say, don’t hold your breath waiting for a big sale, it doesn’t make sense for them to do that.
- Comment on Nvidia plans heavy cuts to GPU supply in early 2026 1 month ago:
Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.
When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.
- Comment on The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek 1 month ago:
There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.
- Comment on Raspberry Pi 4B 1 month ago:
Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.
I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.
They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.
- Comment on Makes perfect sense 1 month ago:
Got the most actual quoted lines from the book of any film version, plus you’ve got all of Dicken’s direct-to-reader moralising delivered by Gonzo. And as well as being very faithful to the book, it is a superb film as well.
Michael Caine excels as Scrooge, too. I wouldn’t say that he was better than Alastair Sim was in his version - that’s a performance that would take some beating - but there’s not much in it.
- Comment on 700+ self-hosted Git instances battered in 0-day attacks 1 month ago:
Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…
- Comment on Seeing so many corn posts today 1 month ago:
Criminal waste of elotes, though. I’ll have them if they don’t want them.
- Comment on This song, it's infectious 1 month ago:
On account of Dan Ek’s bullshit, have cancelled Spotify this year in favour of Qobuz, and am much happier all round.
Last year’s ‘wrapped’ was just AI generated slop all round. After a year of listening to metal and electronica, got a top five of stuff that I’m not sure I’d listened to at all. Who would have thought the great plagiarism machine, trained to produce the most average output from any given input, would not do well on input that diverges from the mean?
I’d probably have preferred a completely random K-Pop selection; might have been an interesting listen, try out something new.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 1 month ago:
He did shake things up with a lot of new ideas. I’d like to think that proving him wrong has gotten us to a better place; it’s the fin de siecle version of being wrong on the internet, everyone writes to correct you. Kind of sucks for everyone that got the bad advice in the meantime, tho.
- Comment on Linux usage hits an all-time high in Steam Hardware Survey—and AMD processors continue their march against Intel 1 month ago:
Closing in on 8% if you filter it by “English language only”. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn’t consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you’ve spent a few years writing a game it’s likely to be quite a bit more.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 1 month ago:
Sorry, putting the two things together, my mistake. My router doesn’t let you specify the DNS server directly, but it does allow you to specify a different DHCP server, which can then hand out new IPs with a different DNS server specified, as you say. Bit of a house of cards. DHCP server in order to be the DNS server too.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 2 months ago:
The router provided with our internet contract doesn’t allow you to run your own firmware, so we don’t have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.
Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we’d be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don’t normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.
Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I’d prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven’t been altered. That doesn’t fix everything - it’s a VPN job - but little steps.
The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 2 months ago:
Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.
Was thinking that my wee “Raspberry PI home server” was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn’t run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.
Have to think that if you’ve been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you’re probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.