addie
@addie@feddit.uk
- Comment on It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes 4 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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. 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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. 2 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.
- Comment on 🐀🔥🔥🔥 2 weeks ago:
Well, I didn’t realise Amouranth was Polish. Every day is a school day.
- Comment on What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you? 2 weeks ago:
Think you could take it back a step there.
- Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
- Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
- Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
- Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
- Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.
Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.
- Comment on Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold 4 weeks ago:
If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it’s exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn’t particularly heavy.
Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you’d be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.
But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don’t have (yet).
- Comment on McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ 1 month ago:
Years, sadly.
- Comment on Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor 1 month ago:
I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.
- Comment on Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor 1 month ago:
Also, MangoHud has an ability to set
fps_limitin a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144. - Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 1 month ago:
Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.
Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.
- Comment on UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25. 1 month ago:
So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 1 month ago:
Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.
It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 month ago:
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
- Comment on Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support 2 months ago:
They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.
Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.
- Comment on Marathon is delayed 2 months ago:
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 months ago:
You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)
I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.
- Comment on Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it 2 months ago:
Think there should be an ‘accessibility’ option in the settings menu? I remember it being pretty decent - god mode, slow down, item highlighting, and the ‘half damage’ option were in there.
- Comment on Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it 2 months ago:
Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.
