addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft 2 days 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 4 days 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 5 days 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 6 days 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 week 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 700+ self-hosted Git instances battered in 0-day attacks 1 week 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 week ago:
Criminal waste of elotes, though. I’ll have them if they don’t want them.
- Comment on This song, it's infectious 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
- Comment on steam vs gog, which game store to buy from? 3 weeks ago:
Heroic keeping all your GOG games up-to-date is a revelation, and it can keep the GloriousEggroll proton fork up-to-date where Steam can use it too. Fixes the most serious irritations of GOG-on-Linux right there, no reason not to prefer it over Steam (if they have it).
- Comment on Switzerland no longer wants American cloud in the public sector 3 weeks ago:
Agree completely. Don’t think the Swiss have any problem finding someone to look after their money, tho - they’ve always been the first point of call for nazis and nazi collaborators.
- Comment on You now prossess Dracula’s heart 3 weeks ago:
The gameplay is inscrutable, but who cares when you’ve got such banging tunes? Very start to very end, best soundtrack on the NES.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 3 weeks ago:
The amount of fuel required to launch them into the sun is more than is required to eject the from the solar system completely, it’s not very efficient.
Although putrid, they remain a valuable source of protein and nutrients. As a more carbon-efficient alternative, I suggest tying some waste stone around their feet and chucking them into the sea. Something in the depths will eat them.
- Comment on Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux laptop cancelled due to performance concerns — Linux PC maker says Qualcomm CPU is ‘less suitable for Linux than expected’ 4 weeks ago:
Reasonable for a lightly-loaded home server, however. I’ve got Arch Linux ARM (btw) running as my home Forgejo / Transmission / DHCP / NAS, and it just sits and sips power while providing all those services 24/7 like a champ.
Shout out to ALARM for having basically the entire Arch ecosystem (including 99% of AUR) all working and ready-to-go.
- Comment on Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk 4 weeks ago:
Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.
Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.
- Comment on Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI, plans to fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 as miners convert to AI en masse — Bitfarm to leverage 341 megawatt capacity for AI following $46 million Q3 loss 5 weeks ago:
especially if you have the infrastructure in place
I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?
In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?
- Comment on I support pluto 1 month ago:
… and it’s been doing it for long enough that it, and all the other plutinos, have settled into a 2:3 resonant orbit with Neptune, which takes 165 years to orbit the sun by itself.
Space is really big and the timescales are really long, in a way which doesn’t really make sense on human scales, except for things which are so fast that they also don’t make sense on human scales, like core-collapse supernovas.
The good news is that we’re good at doing maths and we’ve built some big computers to do that maths, so we’ve no problems ‘popping a few zeros’ into the sums that we do.
- Comment on Let's learn some words in the Finnish language 1 month ago:
‘Ty chuju jebany’, nice.
Our Polish taxi driver does a very solid line in ‘kurwa’ every other word, but it’s always nice to expand your horizons.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 month ago:
Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.
Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.
What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever 1 month ago:
Indeed - I’ve seen more people recommend Hannah Montana Linux (
apt-based) than any of those for newcomers recently.You are entirely right that a Linux distribution is really just its package manager, the default packages installed, and some remote repositories which may (or may not) have had some customisation applied, which will have been pulled and built from a source repository somewhere. All that’s really needed to swap between eg. Arch, Manjaro or Cachy is to update the repo files and issue a package manager update command, although I’d probably like to verify my backups and get a stiff drink first.
The House of Linux is built out of bricks, and the bricks aren’t that scary - you can take them to bits and look at them if you like, they’re usually zipped-up folders of text files and the binaries you’d get from compiling them yourself. But if that’s not what you’re used to, then yeah - 🤯 .
In all seriousness, I wish that most distros had art half as good as what Void Linux has - got some really gifted people, there.
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever 1 month ago:
Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever 1 month ago:
True, but network effects are important to that.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever 1 month ago:
Listen, there’s dozens of Linux users on Void, Slackware and Gentoo. Dozens! Especially the ones wanting to run the latest games. Can’t just leave all of them out.
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever 1 month ago:
Strangely, the search page for ProtonDB shows the ‘proton rating’ for games which have a ‘native but abandoned / broken’ native Linux build, whereas the actual page for the game just shows ‘native’ and I can’t see the button to show the rest of the information. I’m sure it used to be there; they’ve started hiding a lot of stuff in favour of making the ‘steam deck’ results more prominent. But in some cases, ‘proton rating even with a native Linux build’ is quite important.
eg. Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising.
- search page shows 'gold’
- actual page says ‘native’, but ‘loads of rendering issues, really slow, broken on multi-monitor setup, use proton instead’.
Mark of the Ninja: Remastered:
- search page says 'platinum’
- actual page says ‘native’, but ‘frequent deadlocking issues makes game unplayable, use proton instead’.
- Comment on 'Emulating the Impossible' - my interview with a developer of RPCS3 1 month ago:
That’s fascinating stuff, thanks!
- Comment on If it works it works 1 month ago:
Speaking as someone with a chemical engineering degree and twenty years in industry:
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we have some really complicated computer programs and simulations for all the important stuff, then we add ten percent for safety and round it up to the next standard size. We don’t buy 292 mm pipe, we just use 300 mm, because that’s what’s on the shelves.
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you need to be able to decide quickly whether results you’re seeing are sensible, usually to order-of-magnitude, and whether eg. it will take an hour to fill a tank, or a week. We usually don’t care whether it’s 55 minutes or 56. You need to be able to do those sums in your head, though.
3 is more than accurate enough as an engineering approximation for pi. In fact, 5 is close enough, and much easier to work with.
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