addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fascinating stuff, thanks!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it works it works⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking as someone with a chemical engineering degree and twenty years in industry:

  • 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.

  • 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is making every Windows 11 PC an AI PC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no committee that approves words being added to the English language. Anything that’s understood by the group that uses it is a real word. We make up new words and change the definition of old ones all the time; dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.

  That doesn’t stop the concept of ‘agentic AI’ being a pile of bullshit being peddled by snake-oil salesmen, of course, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be permitted to make up new words.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.

  That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.

  Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Republican? Democrat? There is a third option:⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s UK. We’ve a million streets like that, those trees in the park-looking bit opposite. I’d imagine the house with the bins is a hotel or a B&B, something like that, because otherwise it would be odd to have so many the same colour - green is compostable and black is ‘bottles and cans’ where I live, and you normally just get one of each.

  Don’t know what the green stripe on the road is. Our cycle lanes don’t look like that, aren’t that colour. I’m guessing it’s some “who’s allowed to park where in London” thing, residents-only or something like that. They’re a strange bunch, Londoners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, nice. I destroyed my first one playing Sekiro; the trigger buttons are really awkward to get to pieces to replace the internals, and my replacement Steam controller is almost too valuable to use, since I can’t replace it any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Famicom Disk Writer Kiosk Advert⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As well as being able to ‘rent’ disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.

  In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Famicom Disk Writer Kiosk Advert⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Being able to ‘rent’ games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don’t need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.

  Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.

  In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.

  Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t ask for this.

  The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.

  All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox invests big into indies, signs Game Pass deals with over 50 studios⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  48 studios will be closed before they get a game out, and then the other two will be closed after making something award-winning and genre-redefining, and the IP will never see the light of day again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel says Arc GPUs will live on after Nvidia deal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reads like Intel will be using Nvidia’s stuff for integrated systems, and doesn’t say anything at all about discrete graphics cards.

  If you’re integrating a GPU, then it’s going to be either for a laptop, in which case performance-per-watt and total die size are very important, or it’s for a generic business PC, in which case ‘as cheap as they can get away with’ takes over. A B580 might be the best mid-range graphics card, but those aren’t the areas where it shines. Using someone else’s tech makes sense.