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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Like for instance, when epic came out with their exclusive access titles being a part of their business plan, valve could have responded with their own exclusive access system and had a good chance of killing off epic and others in the process. Instead they just ignored it and people like me continued using them and didn’t even consider epic even when their anticompetitive actions switched to ones that would have benefitted me (free games), because I could see the shithole they wanted to bring gaming to if their platform achieved dominance.




  • This problem is far more difficult to solve than x64 windows apps running on x64 linux.

    While x64 and ARM are both turing complete and thus anything one can do, the other can also do, there can be subtle differences to the way they do them.

    Like one I’m aware of is the atomicity of loading memory using a co-processor register, which is required for accessing thread local storage, and introduces a subtle race condition if someone uses user mode multithreading (which can be way faster than kernel mode multithreading) without handling the case where they get preempted between moving that register’s value and doing the load, and end up running on a different kernel thread when they get back (because you need one kernel thread per core). That thread would end up with the pointer for another thread’s thread local storage, which tends to break things pretty badly.

    That’s just one that I’m aware of. There’s probably tons of other subtle differences that mean you can’t just have a map of “x in x64 means y in ARM” and use that to generate a compatible binary. It would probably run, but it would have bugs that the original doesn’t that are only seen in rare edge cases.

    Not that I want to discourage this effort, but this is a problem an order of magnitude or two more difficult than the one proton solved, which was essentially just a bunch of wrappers that convert one API or OS behaviour to another equivalent one.







  • There was a sith, former apprentice of Vader in the good canon version that used a weapon that was like a cat o nine tails but it used both energy and normal metal components and jedi had a very hard time dealing with it, other than Luke, which the good canon had progress into a powerful Jedi that could even force project an image of himself without dying, but also valued his friendships and connections and didn’t briefly consider killing his own nephew and would have never fucking gone into hiding as a hermit instead of dealing with the problem he created.

    Anyways, this devolved a bit into a fuck Disney rant, but the point was that someone using a weapon that combined lightsabre blades with metal blades was extremely effective against jedi just using lightsabres. Luke could only handle her because he was a beast with and without a lightsabre.



  • Was it multiple monitors or multiple systems? Can’t see if there’s another keyboard and mouse there in front of the one behind him. Though I suppose it was all supposed to be mainframe terminals (running Linux in the movie, which I’m not sure had a mainframe version, as I understand, it started as a Unix for desktops, where Unix was the mainframe OS).

    Edit: the Linux thing was my own bad memory, Lex recognizes Unix, which is weird because it was an experimental unix filesystem browser UI and most kids wouldn’t have access to machines that run any kind of unix, so it wouldn’t have been a “I played with some computers in my garage” kind of thing. Though being Hammond’s grandkids, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she did have access to a mainframe either through Hammond’s companies or from access to universities and the like.


  • Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist. If I want to search the web, I can use a web browser to do it. I feel like it was added to try to make up for how bad the search used to be (and still is? I just never really had a habit of using it because it was so unreliable and depended on other ways to figure out where things were), so that it would give something, plus MS really wanted bing to be a thing.

    I recently switched to KDE and their main search bar also includes web search. I haven’t looked at the settings for it and expect there’s probably a way to disable that, but I didn’t feel great about seeing that there.



  • Oh yeah, the bit where SSDs move sectors around for wear evening is important. Because of that, it’s possible to completely fill up an SSD after deleting files and still have those files recoverable from the flash chips themselves. Without that secure erase, as I understand it, if a sector gets marked “bad”, whatever data is there might stay there forever (or at least as long as the cells hold a charge).

    So there’s no benefit to writing multiple passes over deleted data on SSDs as far as the flash is concerned, but multiple passes might make it more likely for the controler to actually direct those extra writes to a sector actually storing the data (though the odds might be low unless you’re overwriting all free space, though even that depends on how much space is free vs how many “spare” sectors there are, and even then it might be impossible to get it to write to a sector marked “bad”).



  • Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.

    Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.

    Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).

    I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.