Balinares
@Balinares@pawb.social
- Comment on It's been tough, y'all 5 days ago:
Too real. They’ll steal your heart alright, but goddamn.
- Comment on What are y'all buying on the steam sale? 1 month ago:
If you are considering picking up Outer Wilds, by god, go in blind. It’s all about finding out.
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 2 months ago:
It’s a trade-off that works for many. Not much you and I can do about it, even if it’s frustrating.
- Comment on You can remove or disable Windows 11 and 10's AI 'bloat' with new BloatynosyAI 2 months ago:
Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn’t help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren’t there.
If you’re intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you’re fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.
But you can’t reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.
- Comment on You can remove or disable Windows 11 and 10's AI 'bloat' with new BloatynosyAI 2 months ago:
JACK is very cool and if you’re willing to tinker there’s some really awesome stuff that can be done with LADISH session management and e.g. native Linux VSTs.
It’s still a non-option for musicians who just want to do music, not tinkering.
- Comment on What to do if you live on a farm and you're bored but also awesome. 3 months ago:
Moovie night.
- Comment on queer.af, a Mastodon instance, has been killed by the Taliban 3 months ago:
Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.
- Comment on Any recommendations for time loop games? 4 months ago:
I was pleasantly taken by surprise when I got around to playing Angels With Scaly Wings. The title and the trailer had given me a very incorrect idea of what the game was going to be like. Once past the somewhat contrived set up, it ended up being a very well paced sci fi story that keeps throwing curve balls at you loop after loop.
- Comment on Any recommendations for time loop games? 4 months ago:
The DLC has a couple of game design choices that I’ve felt detracted from the experience, and put it a notch below the main game. I’m still glad I played it, because the core Outer Wilds vibe is still there, and finishing the main game again after wrapping up the DLC had a worthwhile emotional payoff.
- Comment on Challenge accepted 5 months ago:
What really gets me is how you swapped Alabama and Mississippi just for kicks.
- Comment on A Googler who just resigned after 18 years reflects on the decline of the company he loved 5 months ago:
Big missing piece there: cloud.
In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon’s hands.
Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that’s why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.
It’s business to business, however, so the generak public doesn’t hear about it a lot. It’s also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.
In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 5 months ago:
I had the same problem on my first try! I’d been trying to do everything and talk to everyone about everything and just drowned in words.
On my second try, though, I took a different approach: what if I am this guy, just want to get the job done, and only do stuff for the purpose of trying to progress the case? That worked great for me, and the game is structured so this still takes you through much of its contents – only, now, there is a purpose to it.
So, thanks, friend! I am indeed now enjoying this game, and I hope you are enjoying whatever you are playing also.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 5 months ago:
Finally getting into Disco Elysium after a false start last year. Great game, spectacular writing, though it does require a little bit of investment.
- Comment on Orcas sink another boat in Europe after a nearly hour-long attack 6 months ago:
So you’re saying, let’s maybe not hurry to vote for the Orcas Sinking People’s Boats party? That’s probably good advice actually.
- Comment on If you could play one game for the first time all over again, what would it be? 6 months ago:
Spoilers. ❤️
But seriously, maybe it just didn’t work for you and that’s okay. Nothing is everything to everyone.
- Comment on Google Chrome pushes ahead with targeted ads based on your browser history 8 months ago:
I think it’s a new thing where the browser does the profiling locally, and supposedly without allowing sites to track you anymore. But of course the sites can still ask the browser for your personal interests in order to serve you ads, so I couldn’t tell you why they think this is any better.
- Comment on The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website 8 months ago:
Friend, you do you, and in the meanwhile the rest of us are in fact going to be right there celebrating the fuck out of the deplatforming of a bunch of horrible people whose pastime is literally to drive trans kids to suicide.
- Comment on Encryption-breaking, password-leaking bug in many AMD CPUs could take months to fix 9 months ago:
A CPU performs operations like “read a small bit of thing from the memory into the CPU” and “do a small bit of computation on things inside the CPU” and “put a small bit of thing from the CPU into the memory”.
Doing small bits of computation on things inside the CPU is very fast but moving bits of things from or to the memory is slow in comparison. In order to not be slowed down, CPUs read the code ahead of what is currently being executed, and try to guess what is going to happen and what will need to be moved from the memory into the CPU, so they can do it ahead of time, and have the small bit of thing from the memory already available right there in the CPU. No need to way on slow memory then, so the CPU runs much faster overall. That’s a good thing.
In this case, a researcher found a way to make certain CPUs guess what is going to happen with the code wrong, in such a way that the small bits of things that were read from the memory ahead of time do not get properly cleaned up, and can still be found inside the CPU by another program. Those small bits of things might be your password or banking details, so that’s bad.