addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics? 1 week ago:
Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris 1 week ago:
I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris 1 week ago:
Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.
Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in
openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away. - Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team 2 weeks ago:
Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.
I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.
Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.
Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.
Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.
- Comment on xkcd #3085: About 20 Pounds 2 weeks ago:
Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.
The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.
Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.
Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.
- Comment on Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts 2 weeks ago:
You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:
- load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
- manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.
- Comment on Whenever a beast is shown on screen 2 weeks ago:
You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.
Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.
- Comment on Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads 5 weeks ago:
Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.
That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed 1 month ago:
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 1 month ago:
If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.
I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 2 months ago:
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 2 months ago:
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 2 months ago:
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
- Comment on Sun God 2 months ago:
You’re understating it a bit there - the sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system by itself. To the nearest whole percent, the solar system consists of 100% “the sun”. To the nearest 0.1%, it’s 99.9% the sun and 0.1% Jupiter.
- Comment on AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds 3 months ago:
Dunno why you’re being downvoted. If you’re wanting a somewhat right-wing, pro-establishment, slightly superficial take on the news, mixed in with lots of “celebrity” frippery, then the BBC have got you covered. Their chairmen have historically been a list of old Tories, but that has never stopped the Tory party of accusing their news of being “left leaning” when it’s blatantly not.
- Comment on Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe 3 months ago:
Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn’t protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn’t protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn’t protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn’t protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.
“Infrastructure”, to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I’m thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: rockwellautomation.com/…/programmable-controllers….
Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven’t been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it’s up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.
PLCs tend to be coded up in “ladder logic” and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn’t a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there’s a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and “supported by manufacturer” is critical for these industries.
- Comment on The deed is done. 3 months ago:
Well, there’s your problem. You’ve plugged a Romantic Robot into the place where your Kempston joystick should be. Never going to win at Daley Thompson’s without perfecting your waggle. Also, the Speccy will probably crash from hammering the keyboard if you try.
Midnight Resistance is one of those weird games where the first level is the hardest; it’s not too bad to finish it if you do the first bit. Fair play on Robocop, though - that’s a hard game.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 3 months ago:
AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.
I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.
“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.
- Comment on Germany hits 62.7% renewables in 2024 energy mix, with solar contributing 14% 4 months ago:
Well, we’ve a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So “French Nuclear” should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That’s not the only import, either, so it’s not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.
- Comment on British girls outdrink boys — and most of Europe 4 months ago:
Well, we’ve a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it’s easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.
National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn’t about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.
- Comment on ReiserFS Has Been Deleted From The Linux Kernel 5 months ago:
Yeah. It’s essential that filesystems are actively supported, as they’re so core to the operation of the computer. ReiserFS isn’t supported, and in addition is built on unscaleable ideas, the behaviour of fsck is unjustifiable, and requiring a reformat to upgrade is unacceptable. Use ext3/4 for performance, BtrFS for the journaling properties and checksumming, or ZFS for cluster availability instead.
- Comment on Turkey Temptation 5 months ago:
But cooking a ham is still okay?
- Comment on AMD captures 28.7% market share in desktops 5 months ago:
Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they’ve not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.
Fantastic chips.
- Comment on Unofficial PC port of Zelda: Majora's Mask, 2 Ship 2 Harkinian has a big new release out 5 months ago:
Original release was fantastic - super-smooth, high resolution, “how I remember it on the N64”, ie. not true to the original at all, but like the impression it made on me as a youngster. Super-dark storyline and minimal hand-holding makes it very unusual for a Zelda game, absolutely stunning bit of porting work. Everything you could possibly want in 2024.
And then I got to the down-the-well bit, and that can just fuck off. New release needs a dedicated keybinding to skip that time-wasting shit, could bind it to a mouse button just so that there’s no difficulty finding it when the time comes.
- Comment on Science or some other arcane wizardry PCM 7 months ago:
Why buttplug for tachyons?
- Comment on Can't. Busy. 7 months ago:
Dang. It’s going to take a dedicated regime to fill up a one gallon jar with, eh, fluids.
- Comment on The UK officially closes its last remaining coal power plant 7 months ago:
Yeah, but from the two billion tonnes a year of steel that’s produced, about five percent is carbon added to iron, and about half of that remains in the final product, so that’s about fifty million tonnes released to atmosphere. Whereas about three and a half billion tonnes of coal was burned for power, and that all ends up in the air. A seventy-fold reduction is quite significant; means we can selectively close the higher-sulfur-content mines for an even better improvement in air quality.