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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Plenty of high-end monitors need more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4a can provide if operating uncompressed, but models with a DP 2.x port typically cost a lot more because it needs reasonably expensive hardware to make it work. That means that if you use DP, then you have to compromise between spending more money or using Display Stream Compression. Monitors needing that much bandwidth basically always have an HDMI 2.1 port that can handle it uncompressed, but without this patch, if you used HDMI under Linux with a Radeon GPU, it wouldn’t run in HDMI 2.1 mode, so would give even less bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4a, and you’d experience even more compression artefacts, despite the same configuration working perfectly under Windows.








  • For a lot of open source projects, there is a significant audience viewing the code itself rather than just what it does. There’s encouragement for the user to open the bonnet and look at it and also tinker with it themselves. Even if you don’t do that, there’re still ways that the craftsmanship can show through and leave the user thinking about how it was made and how it works, and there’s plenty of conventional art where the point isn’t to think about the final product but instead what went into creating it.

    As for the minified JavaScript in a typical website, it’s not that different to graphic design where achieving a purpose for a business can come ahead of any priorities related to being art. Even if we say for the sake of argument that graphic design for commercial purposes is never art, it doesn’t automatically mean that anything else that uses the same techniques, like drawing, can never be art.

    There are also kinds of art that people produce that are never intended to be experienced by anyone else, e.g. a doodle in a diary, so I’d say there could still be art in code that was only ever seen by its creator and which was totally obfuscated when given to users as an app or website.




  • Most people don’t see how these things directly affect them because the effects are mostly indirect and the media doesn’t explain why they should care, and many have their social lives tied to using platforms where the other people they know are, so can’t switch to a less evil alternative without becoming a recluse unless a critical mass of their friends are already using it.



  • It’s explicitly stated in A New Hope that they were shooting to miss when the main characters were escaping the Death Star because a tracker had been planted on the Millennium Falcon and they planned to follow it and destroy whichever planet was hosting the rebel base. You can’t do that if you don’t let them escape. Every other time they’re in battle, stormtroopers are shown to be devastatingly effective except when a small garrison is overwhelmed by a vasty larger number of ewoks.



  • Aluminium antiperspirant stains are actually pretty easy to remove if you soak your shirts in something acidic - I use sulphamic acid (commonly sold as the main ingredient in coffee machine descaler, so pretty safe, and not as smelly as vinegar) and just leave things for a day, then any residue that’s left just comes out in the wash. The reason it stains is that long-acting antiperspirant seals the aluminium salts in tiny wax beads which break open over the course of the day to keep releasing more, and wax needs a lot of exposure to soapy water to dissolve, but it’s protected by the aluminium salts jellifying when wet, and they in turn are protected from rinsing away by the surrounding wax. Acids can attack both.