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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • So while not entirely related, I have a question.

    I’ve got a Windows 10 box hooked to my TV and you’re right, it’s great.

    Until you end up with fonts so small they’re unreadable, even with a 300% scaling on the 4k TV because it seems like every third random gaming piece of software just fucking ignore scaling.

    You ever find a working solution to that?

    My ass is old, and trying to do couch gaming from a PC means it’s a 50/50 chance I’m either squinting and giving myself a headache or having to walk over to the tv to read whatever stupid shit some game has decided to use 8pt font for.


  • One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.

    The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.

    It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.

    But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.





  • I’d also argue it makes it harder to use, period: something that takes me 10 seconds to read somehow ends up being a 5 minute video, of which 90% is fluff that’s not related to the problem.

    I’ve yet to land on a tutorial video that gets to the point and doesn’t feel the need to waste a ton of time introducing themselves, a paragraph about what we’re doing, asking me to subscribe, talking about their sponsor and so on.

    I lament the death of the text-based tutorial and strongly dislike the youtube format video.


  • Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.

    Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.

    That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.


  • It is mostly professional/office use where this make sense. I’ve implemented this (well, a similar thing that does the same thing) for clients that want versioning and compliance.

    I’ve worked with/for a lot of places that keep everything because disks are cheap enough that they’ve decided it’s better to have a copy of every git version than not have one and need it some day.

    Or places that have compliance reasons to have to keep copies of every email, document, spreadsheet, picture and so on. You’ll almost never touch “old” data, but you have to hold on to it for a decade somewhere.

    It’s basically cold storage that can immediately pull the data into a fast cache if/when someone needs the older data, but otherwise it just sits there forever on a slow drive.



  • …depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you’d enjoy it.

    The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.

    If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it’s great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?

    If you don’t have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it’s going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.

    So I guess if this is ‘I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time’ kinda usecase, it’ll probably work fine.

    For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn’t.

    Edit: a good usecase for this is more the ‘I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs’ on a NAS type thing.



  • Sure, but the way this usually works is that the government tells you to do something and if you don’t, they’ll find someone (or a couple of someones) on that list, arrest them, and charge them with a crime.

    Doesn’t matter if they did the crime, and it doesn’t matter if they’d be convicted, but the play is to keep your friends in jail until you capitulate to what they want. This is actually something that’s happened with tech companies before, like what they did with GoDaddy’s C-level in India.

    The problem is that there’s no damn way I’d want to be arrested by the upcoming US administration, because I’d bet $100 that their playbook will portray not doing what they’re demanding as a national security or terrorism offense, and if you’ve been watching ANYTHING for the last damn near 25 years, that’s a free pass for them to basically just vanish you until they feel like doing otherwise.

    It’s fantastic leverage against organizations that have US people and are, presumably, not willing to just let their friends spend who-knows amount of time in prison, and could probably result in some cooperation.

    And I’m about to both get downvoted and WELL AKSHULLY’d about how you can’t just vanish people under the US justice system, and sure, you’re technically correct. Except we’ve passed law after law after law since 9/11 that have basically given the government the ability to do any damn thing they please if they call you a national security risk or terrorist, up to and including Gitmo, in case you’ve forgotten that existed: which you shouldn’t have, because we STILL have prisoners sitting there.

    This is doomer as fuck, and horribly unlikely, but so is a demand to stuff backdoors into everything. But, if we head down that road, the only safe software will be ones that can’t be blackmailed like this which is essentially none of the major projects.


  • Well, yes, it does: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization

    But the corporation that handles all their funding and owns their trademarks is in the US, so they’re possibly subject to the same pressure. And of course a good number of those people in that org tree are in the US, so again, same issue.

    My point was more ‘this is silly, because if you REALLY think that, there’s nobody and no project that’s got any ties at all to the US that can be considered safe, and you should maybe get rid of all your computing devices now’, rather than an intent to say that Debian or anyone there is at more or less risk.


  • I mean, if you want to carry that line of reasoning out, the Linux kernel is governed under a US-based foundation, so should the kernel itself be suspect?

    How about FreeBSD? Or something like Debian? Or Ubuntu, which isn’t US-based but they’re in a typically cooperating jurisdiction?

    You’re def being paranoid and somewhat irrational, since it’s unlikely to happen and if it did, it’s not like you could trust anything at all anyways.


  • One thing you probably need to figure out first: how are the dgpu and igpu connected to each other, and then which ports are connected to which gpu.

    Everyone does funky shit with this, and you’ll sometimes have dgpus that require the igpu to do anything, or cases where the internal panel is only hooked up to the igpu (or only the dgpu), and the hdmi and display port and so on can be any damn thing.

    So uh, before you get too deep in planning what gets which gpu, you probably need to see if the outputs you need support what you want to do.



  • They really do.

    The sound great, and the ANC is great, but the “official” battery life for a brand new one (which these are not) is “up to 4.5 hours” with ANC on, and 5 without it.

    It ends up being 2-3 charge cycles basically every day, plus a full recharge of the charging case.

    They do, however, work amazingly well if you’re in the Apple ecosystem; for example they’ll swap between my iPad and Mac Mini if audio starts on one or the other.

    But for actually sitting down with something and listening to a thing, I’d rather just plug in some headphones (via the lovely USB-C dongle) and not have to think about if the stupid things are going to die before I’m ready to stop listening.

    (Disclaimer: I’m also a weirdo who doesn’t carry a smartphone, and still uses an iPod for listening to stuff outside of the house, so feel free to roll your eyes and disregard my obviously bad opinions :P )


  • My complaint has always been that the stupid things need to endlessly be recharged.

    I’ve got some AirPod Pros and they’re great… for about 4 hours.

    Then you’re stopping what you’re doing, recharging for half an hour, and then you’re good for uh, another 3 hours because that wasn’t a full charge.

    And after the 2nd or 3rd time you’ve done that, your case is dead and you get to throw everything on a charger for a couple of hours.

    Ooooooooor I can put in my wired headphones, and not give a shit about any of that, because that’s not how those work at all.

    I suppose most people don’t spend most of their day listening to podcasts and audiobooks and thus 4 hours is fine, but good lord is it annoying as crap.