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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The industrial design has improved enormously since then, as well. The days of using the same connector for different voltages, or connectors which can be rotated are gone. Everything has a keyed connector or similar pokayoke that means it only fits to the correct place, and only one way around. CPUs don’t suicide if you forget to attach their system cooler, they just throttle. Much better, and obvious in retrospect that it should always have been that way.

    Apart from the front panel connectors on a motherboard, of course. Those fiddly little bastards can get straight to hell.





  • Well, an increase from (60 to 70) fps to (85 to 87) fps is nothing to complain about. It was obviously completely playable when it was managing “a bit over 30” since it was designed that way, but I’ve no problem with more.

    Apparently they have fixed the “vertex explosion” bug as well, where your face would occasionally turn into a mass of spikes that obscured what you were doing so much it was unplayable - needed a quit out and restart, and was the major interruption to the game.





  • It’s not a million miles away, but it’s still got some problems. The ‘extract archive’ functionality seems to do it for me; think it must be wanting to pop up a (nested?) file chooser, but causes a session crash.

    Cinnamon legacy for getting work done, and KDE wayland for playing games, for me. Nice to go 100% cinnamon though, for sure.




  • Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.

    Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.

    What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.


  • Indeed - I’ve seen more people recommend Hannah Montana Linux (apt-based) than any of those for newcomers recently.

    You are entirely right that a Linux distribution is really just its package manager, the default packages installed, and some remote repositories which may (or may not) have had some customisation applied, which will have been pulled and built from a source repository somewhere. All that’s really needed to swap between eg. Arch, Manjaro or Cachy is to update the repo files and issue a package manager update command, although I’d probably like to verify my backups and get a stiff drink first.

    The House of Linux is built out of bricks, and the bricks aren’t that scary - you can take them to bits and look at them if you like, they’re usually zipped-up folders of text files and the binaries you’d get from compiling them yourself. But if that’s not what you’re used to, then yeah - 🤯 .

    In all seriousness, I wish that most distros had art half as good as what Void Linux has - got some really gifted people, there.



  • True, but network effects are important to that.

    There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.

    There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.

    Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.




  • Really, it’s a misuse of language to describe elementary particles as having ‘wave/particle duality’. If you ask them a wave-like question, they give a wave-like answer. If you ask them a particle-like question, they give a particle-like answer. But that doesn’t mean they’re a combination of the two; just means that our everyday understanding of big things isn’t suitable for describing small things.

    We know that general relativity and quantum dynamics can’t be quite right. They have enormous predictive power, but they don’t overlap, which means we can’t model things where they’re equally important; the big bang and black holes for instance. “Higher dimensions” is the string theory way of trying to reconcile them - it might be right. But a theory isn’t scientific if it doesn’t make predictions you can test, and string theory hasn’t been very productive in that so far. Amazing maths though, has been great for expanding our knowledge there.