• 3 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Oof… it actually happened to me and it’s not 1 problem but 2 namely :

    • you ran out of disk space while updating
    • AND one of the messed packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can’t recall which it actually is)

    so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that’s tricky. Basically you have to

    • actually find out what’s taking up space (often old kernels) or “just” give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
    • get the actually missing packages via another working system then install the minimum you need then finish the update

    For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.

    It’s annoying but it’s actually not that bad.



  • I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.

    Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would

    • include a very small torrent client
    • point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
    • include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.




  • It’s a VERY specific tool that needs

    • a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
    • huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
    • energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting

    So I think it is fundamental to distinguish

    • “AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all

    versus

    • commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.

    When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.







  • Funny I have the opposite experience.

    I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!

    I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.


  • Gosh… wish I could upvote twice. Feels like we just gave a low cost (for now) chainsaw to anybody who wish they had a pocket knife then say “There, you can cut anything with that!” and somehow they forgot they can just buy some OK stuff from Ikea or a nice artisan. The need to “build” anything without taking a minute to know, not even the state of the art, whatever already exist out there and “fix” it by “personalizing” it is nuts.

    Let’s not “vibe code” anything when reliable solutions already exist!







  • It’s all just speculations, both what you suggested and what others said.

    You are on the right path with your screenshots but you might not be measuring the right thing.

    So, you need a (paper) notebook to record objectively (not your biased feeling assuming a pattern that might not exist) when it happens and for how long. Only from then can you backtrack to WHAT causes it. Sure you can have some hypothesis (update related, screen attach/detach, BIOS, RAM, etc) but that should NOT lead to your data acquisition.

    So you htop is nice but AFAICT it’s just about CPU and memory, it’s not about e.g. IO so consider instead iotop, in particular if one process is some indexing (e.g. locatedb). Theoretically if it’s not CPU/memory (which you are saying it’s not the case) then it basically just leaves IO, that can be again indexing, some heavy process that is bottlenecked on disk access, but can also be a bug, e.g. BT pairing/unpairing that happens faster than you can notice.

    Think of this as a fun investigation that leads you to better understanding of your setup, good luck.