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DefederateLemmyMl

@ SpaceCadet @feddit.nl

Posts
1
Comments
122
Joined
3 yr. ago
  • Gen𝕏
  • Engineer ⚙
  • Techie 💻
  • Self hoster 🖧
  • Linux user 🐧
  • Ukraine supporter 🇺🇦
  • Pro science 💉
  • Dutch speaker

  • Zoomers & Boomers are the same

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  • PC gamer no longer means tech savvy. My zoomer stepson is a hardcore gamer but can't figure out shit when something's wrong with his computer, and does not understand basic concepts regarding hardware, operating systems, networking, ... and he doesn't seem to care about any of it either.

  • Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop

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  • I think cars peaked ca. 2010. Anything added after that are annoyances or things being taken away.

    If I could get a brand new facelift E90, that would probably be my next car.

  • German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours

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  • Barracudas are SMR garbage nowadays, they're coasting on their reputation of many years ago when they were actually decent hard drives for the price.

  • The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day [Wired]

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  • Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.

  • Another orbit around the sun

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  • It is aligned for the southern hemisphere as well, just with winter and summer reversed.

  • Asus bombards Windows 11 with christmas.exe malware-like Christmas wreath banner

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  • This is why I boycott Logitech

    You should boycott Microsoft instead. As you say, they're the ones permitting it.

  • What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs

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  • I have to upgrade my Mint install every two years

    I know you're joking around here, but you don't have to upgrade every two years. You can use an LTS release instead, or, on the opposite of the spectrum, a rolling release.

    Release schedule and duration of support should always be factored into the decision of choosing a distro.

  • Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

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  • Save your sanity and do Settings -> Blocks -> Block instance -> lemmy.ml

    I approve this comment.

  • Air show

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  • I see military spending as a necessary evil, it's like paying your insurance policy against the evils in the world. There will always be someone with a stick willing to beat someone weaker than them. So you could theoretically spend that military money on something "more useful", but if all your friends do that as well, you won't be able to enjoy that nice world for very long.

    Also, people usually highly overrate how much a country spends on defense and underrate how much is spent on social security. Where I live, in Belgium, with a similar military budget as Canada (in terms of % of GDP) they did a survey once and asked people to estimate how many euros out of €100 of tax money went to the military and other things. People on average thought it was €6.1 to the military and €17.4 to social security. In reality the proportions are just €1.3 to the military and €37.5 to social security.

    So I guess what I'm saying is: it's okay to enjoy the cool noises without guilt. You paid for it, it's necessary, and at least they're providing people with some entertainment now.

  • Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions

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  • I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.

    You're better off using the Jellyfin Media Player standalone application anyway.

  • Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills

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  • It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm

    I'm limited by the rate at which I can think of bullshit.

  • Some basic info about USB

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  • yet all I needed is a "this side up" symbol ...

  • Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?

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  • Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.

    Even on Reddit new accounts are often barred from participating in discussion, or even shadowbanned in some subs, until they've grinded enough karma elsewhere (and consequently, that's why you have karmafarming bots).

  • Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?

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  • Is this a problem here?

    Not yet, but it most certainly will be once Lemmy grows big enough.

  • Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line

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  • $100 though ... a Chromecast used to be like $35.

  • average day in NPM land

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  • I’ve honestly never understood why someone at Google or Mozilla hasn’t decided to write a JavaScript Standard Library.

  • In defence of swap: common misconceptions

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  • You are misunderstanding.

    The file cache is never written out to the swapfile, because files are already on disk, like you say. The file cache is kept in memory and the kernel may decide it's more advantageous to swap out unused anonymous memory pages to disk than flushing a file from the cache. You can use the vm.swappiness parameter to finetune this behavior to your liking btw. Lower values favor keeping more anonymous memory pages in memory, higher values favor file backed pages.

    To give an extreme example of where this is useful: I have a use case where I process a number of large video files (each 2GiB-10Gib in size). The job I'm doing involves doing several passes over the same file sequentially. You can bet your ass that caching them in memory speeds things up dramatically: the first pass, where it has to read the file on disk is at 200x speed (relative to the video's duration), the second pass at 15000x speed.

    Even in less extreme circumstances it also helps by keeping frequently accessed files in your home directory in memory, for example your browser profile. Your browser and desktop environment would be much more sluggish if it had to reach out to disk every time for every file it touched.

    And you are free to disagree, but it's not my opinion but the opinion of kernel developers of just about every operating system built the past 4 decades. So I'd say: take up the argument with them and see how far you get.

  • In defence of swap: common misconceptions

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  • I have 20GB in my current setup and it was never full. If anything gets swapped in this situation it means it needlessly slows me down.

    Not necessarily. Your memory also contains file backed pages (i.e. "file system cache"). These pages are typically not counted when determining "memory usage", because they can always be discarded.

    It is often advantageous to keep frequently use files in cache in favor of unfrequently used memory pages.

  • In defence of swap: common misconceptions

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  • I’ve never understood why GNU/Linux actually needs swap

    It doesn't. It's just good to have in most circumstances.

    Also, sidenote: "GNU" doesn't apply here. Swapping is purely kernel business, no GNU involvement here.

    Okay, I created a 4G partition for it, having 32G of RAM. I never used all that RAM, but even so, stuff regularly ends up in swap. Why does the OS waste write cycles on my SSD if it doesn’t have to?

    Physical memory does not just contain program data, it also contains the filesystem cache, which is also important for performance and responsiveness. The idea is that some of the least recently used memory pages are sometimes evicted to swap in favor of more file caching.

    You can tweak this behavior by setting the vm.swappiness kernel parameter with sysctl. Basically higher values mean higher preference for keeping file backed pages in memory, lower values mean higher preference for keeping regular memory pages in memory.

    By default vm.swappiness = 60. If you have an abundance of memory, like a desktop system with 32G, it can be advantageous to lower the value of this parameter. If you set it to something low like 10 or 1, you will rarely see any of this paradoxical swap usage, but the system will still swap if absolutely necessary. I remember reading somewhere that it's not a good idea to set it to 0, but I don't remember the reason for that.

    Alternatively, there is no rule that says you can't disable swap entirely. I've run a 32G desktop system without any swap for years. The downside is that if your 32G does run out, there will be no warning signs and the OOM killer will unceremoniously kill whatever is using the most memory.

    tl;dr just do this:

     `
        
sysctl vm.swappiness=10
echo "vm.swappiness=10" > /etc/sysctl.d/99-swappiness.conf
`

  • In defence of swap: common misconceptions

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  • 0 swap: which was pretty awful with constant unexpected system freezes/crashes

    I've run Arch without swap for many years without issues. The key of course is that you need enough RAM for what you are trying to do with your computer.

    There's no reason why a 32GB RAM + 0GB swap system should have more problems than a 16GB RAM + 16GB swap system with the same workload. If anything, the former is going to run much better.

    swap file: finicky but doable

    What is finicky about a swap file?

    It's just this:

     `
        
mkswap -U clear --size 4G --file /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
`

    Done

    If anything it's way easier to create a file in your filesystem than having to (re-)partition your drive to have a swap partition. Much more flexible too if you want to change your swap configuration in the future.