Yeah, I’ve got a logitech mouse but didn’t want logitech’s software on my machine, so I just used the mouse by plugging it in. Which worked, but I had no way of knowing the battery level until the mouse itself started blinking low power.

When I installed fedora, I was confused a bit because it had a system tray icon saying the battery was charging. I was thinking it thought it was a laptop until I realize it had just picked up the battery information from my mouse. A feature I had written off under windows just worked without me even considering it or needing to install software that was partly about using my hardware and partially about advertising more ways to get my money.

Considering all of the comments saying that a big part of this is people not wanting to buy new computers and choosing linux because it will run on their old machine, I’d like to add insult to injury and say I built a new PC before Oct and windows was never even a consideration.

And despite it being my first Linux install I planned to play games on, everything went smoothly and I’d even say the “setting up the PC to my preference instead of the defaults” step was better because there wasn’t a “figure out how to disable the shit ms really wants you to run for them” substep, or a “figure out what new shit ms added that I’ll want to disable” discovery mode that, with win 10, lasted most of the time I was using it and included “figure out if a recent update reset settings to annoying defaults”.

I bet this is why people are so vocal about switching to linux whenever there’s another complaint about ms. It went way better than expected, like I was about to do something that would cause ongoing pain and frustration to get away from something even worse, but there’s been nothing at all that has made me miss windows.

Is that site just an ads disguised as articles site now? Like it’s not just news about the sale, it’s actively trying to sell win 11 (and not doing a great job with its list of “I thought it already did that”, “underwhelming feature”, “no, I still don’t fucking want onedrive; I no longer trust you with my own files on my computer, let alone saving everything on yours”.)

Ah too late lol, ended up grabbing a 990 pro 2tb for $200 CAD. Looking around online, there seems to be a bunch of retailers at that price, though mostly the brick and mortar ones. I kinda thought they might be slower to react to quickly moving prices than the more specialist places (I got it from Staples).

I gave him a dollar so he’d go away.

On the other hand, we’re currently in the midst of what many people already consider to be an AI bubble, so investing in new DRAM factories might be considered too risky, since the bubble might have popped before it even gets production going.

I’m glad I opted to start at 64GB ram on the PC I built about a year ago. Compared to the other parts like CPU and GPU, it felt relatively cheap to bump it up from 32GB.

Wondering if I should pull the trigger on more storage though… Don’t really need it right now but eventually I’ll probably need some.

Github copilot can do some impressive things, but it also ignores my instructions to not try to run anything and leave testing to me that I’ve stopped bothering saying it and just block the attempt when it asks permission. Just yesterday, it confidently said it had figured out an issue I was debugging with it and made a bunch of code changes that literally only affected comments. If I leave it in agent mode (which allows it to edit code) when asking a question to clarify something and not intending any code changes but wanting to think about the answer (and telling it that), sometimes it still runs ahead and tries to make changes anyways.

When it does well, it’s uncanny how effective it can be these days, but it’s not reliable enough to be trusted to be in control of the whole system. Plus I don’t trust Microsoft enough to put my data on onedrive, and believe that access to data is the real reason behind their AI push, no matter how much usefulness and reliability improves.

So going forward, social engineering will also be applicable to some computers themselves instead of just the users.

I had an A5 a while back and samsung didn’t make me hate them so the next phone I got was an s10. On that phone, they decided that they needed to dedicate a physical button to their fucking virtual assistant bixby. It was pretty obvious to me that these virtual assistants were mostly actually data vacuums, wanting to integrate into every aspect of your life so they can access better data on all those aspects.

Every single time it opened that fucking thing, it was unintentional. It wasn’t as annoying as your TV, since I bet the phone was way faster and had enough memory to not have to discard whatever else you were doing just to open its app, but it exemplifies how I see samsung today. Hardware had great specs but the software made it annoying by trying to lock everything in to their ecosystem without a hard lock like apple. Even MS had ways of disabling the windows button (which used to have a high chance of crashing a game if you accidentally hit it).

Windows 10 had a better kernel than 7. Unfortunately, that kernel was packaged with the rest of windows 10.

Also to remember that government spending isn’t a loss of wealth but a transfer of wealth. There are people profiting from each of these missiles fired (assuming they’ll be replaced, though it still counts if they are replaced by a different missile or system, unless that new system is from a non-profit or public weapons manufacturer).

I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.

AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.

Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.

Yeah, I think the vast majority weren’t in that dumb of places, though I bet there were a ton of smaller injuries that didn’t make the news, because the whole point of the trend was to do it in shocking or obnoxious places (at least for the ones trying to go viral). But I’d guess the majority of people who did it weren’t trying to go viral but just trying to fit in and applied some common sense to it.

Something like magnets are outstanding in their field.

I think they are referring to people who did it in incredibly stupid places. There were planking fatalities, falls from cliffs and balconies. Darwin award winners.

Yeah, I can say that covers most of the “troubleshooting” I’ve had to do with games that don’t work. I usually go in thinking “uh oh, maybe it’s time for me to have to check a bunch of proton versions, this will be a pain” only to see that it’s trying to run it natively and switching to proton at all resolves any issues.

The only other thing that comes to mind is that I use dvorak and something about the way keyboard layouts are handled means it tries to “preserve” the bindings when I switch layouts in game, so it keeps the messed up QWERTY keys but dvorak layout even when I switch (and can tell it’s switched from typing things like in chat). Most games let me rebind the keys so I just need to go through the bindings, hitting the key currently bound each time as if I was using QWERTY and it rebinds. Though I suspect that due to the “preserve the layout” behaviour that keyboard input is handled specially by proton and maybe I can tweak settings to get the desired behaviour (ie, changing layouts in game means I want the bindings to change).

It is a translation layer, but the bit you added “to native code” sounds like you’re misunderstanding what translation layer means.

Games use a collection of APIs (DirectX is a set of APIs, but there’s others to handle offer operations like network access and such) to interact with OS functionality, and also receive communicarion back from the OS (the windows message loop). Proton and wine are implementations of those APIs that translate the API calls to their equivalent in linux, as well as setting up their own message loop that translates messages from the linux kernel and UI system into their windows equivalent before sending them to the registered windows messaging loop functions.

A simple example would be if a function header in windows looks like int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ), but looks like int32 SomeFuncLinux( std::string name, int64 index ), then the translation would be something like:

int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ) {
std:string TranslatedName( name );
return SomeFuncLinux( TranslatedName, index );
}

So it doesn’t change/translate any of the code of the program itself, it just provides the environment that behaves exactly like a windows environment by translating the “hey could the OS do this for me?” requests from windows to linux. Note that not all translations are that simple, there might need to be more processing on the values, missing arguments might need to be filled in, irrelevant arguments ignored, sometimes data needs to be translated to another format, etc.

The speed ups can come from improved efficiency in the underlying implementations (which Vulkan has, as I understand even using a translation layer from DX to Vulkan in windows can result in better performance) or having fewer services running in the background.

You think a quarter of people are suidical or contemplating it to the point of talking about it with an AI?

Yeah, when I got my most recent GPU, my plan had been to also get a 4k monitor and step up from 1440p to 4k. But when I was sorting through the options to find the few with decent specs all around, I realized that there was nothing about 1440p that left me dissapointed and the 4k monitor I had used at work already indicated that I’d just be zooming the UI anyways.

Plus even with the new GPU, 4k numbers weren’t as good as 1440p numbers, and stutters/frame drops are still annoying… So I ended up just getting an ultra-wide 1440p monitor that was much easier to find good specs for and won’t bother with 4k for a monitor until maybe one day if it becomes the minimum, kinda like how analog displays have become much less available than digital displays, even if some people still prefer the old ones for some purposes. I won’t dig my heels in and refuse to move on to 4k, but I don’t see any value added over 1440p. Same goes for 8k TVs.