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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Hmm I think now they meant the original “switch to linux” bit sarcastically and are stuck in a mindset thinking that it’s way more complicated than windows and thus anyone claiming to have already switched must be lying…?

    Though thinking about it more, it kinda feels like a bad faith response, posting about a vague windows solution that they want people to know exists but doesn’t want to share, while treating Linux as big and scary and requiring more effort than fighting against what your OS really wants you to do.


  • My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.

    It would tell me about updates, but wouldn’t do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).

    It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn’t want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.

    So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it’s actually been easier and I haven’t even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.

    Not saying that it’s been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven’t had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn’t even need as much settings tweaking).

    And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I’d instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.


  • I don’t get why it’s not common for people to cut out the middleman with these services that just connect a provider with a seeker. Then the seekers can stick with a reliable provider when they find one and the provider can take the full amount rather than giving away a cut (or, more accurately, accepting whatever the middleman thinks is the least they can give without driving the provider away). By the time they come in contact, the middleman has already added all of the value they can to that interaction.



  • It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

    Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

    A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

    Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

    For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

    That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.



  • I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

    With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

    With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

    But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.










  • Phone security should be such that nothing can connect or do anything on the phone unless the user allows access. Even for maintenance purposes, it should involve a physical key or something so that charging isn’t potentially giving access to anything on the phone. And have the phone pop up a notification when a connected device tries, so that this can be confirmed. Maybe even have phones give access to a sandbox to see what connected devices are specifically after.

    Though I do wonder if the average user would care if they plug their phone in their car and it tells them their car is trying to access their contacts, messages, and browser data. There’s probably a non-trivial amount that would respond by trying to give access because it must need that for a reason.




  • Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

    Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).

    But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

    And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.

    I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?