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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

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1
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248
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Linux usage hits an all-time high in Steam Hardware Survey—and AMD processors continue their march against Intel

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  • Closing in on 8% if you filter it by "English language only". Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn't consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you've spent a few years writing a game it's likely to be quite a bit more.

    https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

  • I think Inky is waiting to ask me three questions

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  • They are remarkably expensive, but 'microchip reading cat feeders' do exist, that only open for the pet with the correct chip in their back. There's a token for their collars if they're not chipped, too. Made mealtime with our three much less fraught - we'd have ended up with one spherical cat and two rake-thin ones, otherwise. Also make medical treatments easier - you know who's the only one who could have eaten it.

    https://www.surepetcare.com/en-gb/pet-feeder/microchip-pet-feeder

  • Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy

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  • 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.

  • Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy

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  • 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.

  • Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy

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  • 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.

  • Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking

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  • 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.

  • I made a KDE Plasma theme to look like Windows 98 [EDIT: v0.9]

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  • Only has the functionality that you need, everything is obviously in its place. Runs incredibly quickly without using a lot of resources, and then gets out your way when you're trying to do stuff. No settings hidden away because they might confuse novice users. No bullshit shoehorned in by managers.

    Apart from the ugly font rendering, this might be as good as the Windows UI ever got. WinNT looks the same and has almost incomparable stability improvements, but only if you've the right hardware to run it. WinXP starts the downhill slide with 'appearance over functionality' and the hot mess of the control panel.

    I could live with how OP has things set up here; my own copy of Plasma doesn't look a million miles from this.

  • It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's...

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  • I'm in this photo and I don't like it.

    More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I'd like to add some more 'robust and flexible' algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it's written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.

    I've spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it's not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.

  • Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux laptop cancelled due to performance concerns — Linux PC maker says Qualcomm CPU is ‘less suitable for Linux than expected’

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  • 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.

  • Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk

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  • 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.

  • 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

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  • especially if you have the infrastructure in place

    I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running 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?

  • I support pluto

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  • ... 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.

  • Steam On Linux Gaming Finally Cracks 3% For October 2025

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  • I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu 'Warty Warthog' was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven't got around to a web browser yet, but I've already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that's crazy.

    Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I'll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are 'twice as good' now.

    An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn't be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.

  • Pornhub says UK visitors down 77% since age checks came in

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  • Yeah, surprised it's only 77%.

    Just as an observation: Mullvad's best UK -> US connection seems to be New York. The transatlantic fibre optic cables make landfall nearby, and there's lots of big data companies there that host VPNs.

    Alternatively, a lot of more 'special interest' sites don't have age verification on them yet.

  • Have you or someone close to you converted to Linux recently (with Windows 10's end of support)?

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  • Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.

    Biggest problem was all his 'documents', which were office365 web links rather than 'actual documents'. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.

    Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He'd done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn't recommend that for beginners.

  • If it works it works

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  • 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.

  • She Was Abandoned On The Street And Found Me. Meet Kira. 😻😹😺🐾

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  • Aww, sweet looking puss. Good work on taking her in.

    Was kind of hoping that your other cats would be called Ryuk and L, but that might be asking for trouble.

  • Microsoft is making every Windows 11 PC an AI PC

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  • 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.

  • Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

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  • 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.