addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft claims "2026 is the moment" for AI PCs, but its essay-length beginner explanation only creates more confusion — Is it any wonder adoption is slow?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is withdrawing support for older printers' drivers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentoo Linux begins Codeberg migration to eventually phase out GitHub repo⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

  The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: "Why I Made the Switch"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

  System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

  Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Criminal waste of elotes, though. I’ll have them if they don’t want them.