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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
1
Comments
248
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Chief rodent control officer on the job

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  • Well, you've had a lucky few months off. Our three just did not stop this year.

    If your cat could explain to ours how to either eat all of the mouse or none of the mouse, that would be amazing. I don't mind them feeding on low-carbon organic meals hand-prepared by local artisans, the hipsters. But I do mind stepping in all the bits and pieces that they didn't care to finish.

  • ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI

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  • Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

    Harfbuzz though? That's going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that's unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.

  • 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?

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  • 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.

  • 'A Big F*ck You to Big Tech': New Jersey Residents Defeat AI Data Center

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  • There's some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

    Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn't take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

  • Microsoft is withdrawing support for older printers' drivers

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  • 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.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Which is strange, because Azure's documentation is complete dogshit.

    We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure's own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don't exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

    Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

  • Gentoo Linux begins Codeberg migration to phase out GitHub repos

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  • 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.)

  • From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: "Why I Made the Switch"

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  • 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.

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

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  • 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.

  • Removed

    Foreign Music

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

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  • 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.

  • Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.

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  • It is certainly true that TempleOS won't be identifying with one of the common browser user agents when surfing the internet.

  • Removed

    No wonder Reddit has turned to shit

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  • 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...

  • The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K

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  • 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.

  • Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?

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  • Imperial came about as a system of units by measuring "everyday" things, and it remains pretty good for that. When you step outside the everyday, then it absolutely sucks - science deals with a lot of things that are too small, and engineering deals with a lot of things that are too large.

    When I used to work in the water industry, working out how much chlorine is required to dose a hundred million litres of water per day at 0.5 mg/l, and therefore when I'd have to place an order to refill our fifty tonne storage tank, is easy enough to do in my head. If we were working in imperial, I'd have converted it to metric first and then estimated it.

    On the other hand, metric calculations for pressure suck. If I weight 160 lbs and my bike tires are at 80 psi, then I have about two square inches in contact with the ground. If my car weighs 2500 lbs and its tires are at 30 psi, then each tire has about 20 square inches in contact with the ground. If I wanted scientific accuracy, then sure, I'd do it in metric, but I'd check the end result in imperial.

    There's near enough five thousand feet in a mile - if you need more accuracy than what you can do in your head, do it in metric with a calculator.

  • Senior devs...

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  • Abstraction is not very compatible with concurrency, so as well as your your beautiful abstract API, you also need some 'cut through the layers' functions to return the underlying classes you need to synchronise on. Now you have a right mess that's incredibly hard to understand, infuriating to debug, and impossible to refactor. Best you can do is put another layer of abstraction on top. Repeat every six months.

  • Melania humiliated as UK premiere of her movie gets single-digit ticket sales

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  • If you think you might want to leave early, more polite not to disturb the other patrons. If there were any other patrons, of course.

  • Microsoft Windows 365 goes down the day after Microsoft celebrates 'reimagining the PC as a cloud service that streams a Cloud PC'

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  • 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.

  • Removed

    Saving Money

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  • Oof. The second-hand market is full of stuff that businesses are throwing out since they won't run Win11, but which run Linux perfectly well. I've just recently replaced my NAS / home server with a £20 core i5 mini-PC that if anything is a bit overpowered for the job. Runs Mint desktop very nicely.

    I'd imagine that if you're spending a hundred times as much, then you don't just have "web and office" in mind, though...

  • Kinect sucks ass

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  • "If you make noise in real life, then the alien will hear you in game.". As if A:I needed to be any more terrifying than it is.

    Still - it's a very expensive bit of hardware to implement the microphone feature that eg. the Famicom had, and the 'tracking' functionality only benefits a couple of games. Bizarre decision to make it mandatory as part of the console.