Seeking a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Rather than having one set of company-hosted servers that they then struggle to police, just let everyone host their own, and they can be responsible for banning anyone that doesn’t follow the community rules.

Actually makes it easier to write aimbots and triggerbots, since you’ll have the video feed and can respond with the right inputs. Skips the step where you’ve got to film the monitor on the machine that’s ‘playing’ the game, which is protected by the HDCP between the PC and the screen.

That’s why I like make basic grammatical mistakes, speling erors, and include a few fucks in my internet writing. Nobody’s not gona mistake me for no got dagned robot.

Strange, it has the ‘autoplay more like this’ option on the web player (which does basically the same) but not the explicit ‘artist radio’ option. Huh.

“Go to Radio” on the app. Hmm…

SIMD is pretty simple really, but it’s been 30 years since it’s been a standard-ish feature in CPUs, and modern compilers are “just about able to sometimes” use SIMD if you’ve got a very simple loop with fixed endpoints that might use it. It’s one thing that you might fall back to writing assembly to use - the FFmpeg developers had an article not too long ago about getting a 10% speed improvement by writing all the SIMD by hand.

Using an NPU means recognising algorithms that can be broken down into parallelizable, networkable steps with information passing between cells. Basically, you’re playing a game of TIS-100 with your code. It’s fragile and difficult, and there’s no chance that your compiler will do that automatically.

Best thing to hope for is that some standard libraries can implement it, and then we can all benefit. It’s an okay tool for ‘jobs that can be broken down into separate cells that interact’, so some kinds of image processing, maybe things like liquid flow simulations. There’s a very small overlap between ‘things that are just algorithms that the main CPU would do better’ and ‘things that can be broken down into many many simple steps that a GPU would do better’ where an NPU really makes sense, tho.

Aww. We buried our old cat’s ashes at the spot in the garden where he loved to sit and watch the world - a shady spot under the rhubarb. It’s where new cat loves to sit as well.

I’m not sure that they’re even going to be useful for gamers. Datacenter GPUs require a substantial external cooling solution to stop them from just melting. Believe NVidia’s new stuff is liquid-only, so even if you’ve got an HVAC next to your l33t gaming PC, that won’t be sufficient.

They have the human made ones, they have the “artist radio” function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you’ve been listening to. The headline ‘albums of the week’ are based on what they like, which I don’t think is unfair - I’ve really enjoyed some of them.

I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I’ve always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their ‘albums of the week’, and their album at studio quality. Not that that’s essential for punk. Admittedly I don’t listen to a lot of indy, but they’ve always had what I’ve wanted to listen to.

My main complaint about the UX is that it’s nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there’s not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?

Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I’d rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.

Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and ‘just works’ with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It’s French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you’re trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.

Yeah, we have that with our customers sometimes. To me, an app should either be running full whack - maxing out bandwidth on CPU, disk, memory or network - or completely idle. Chuntering along at 2% is a bug. For the ones that put ‘monitoring tools’ that raise errors when we reach 100% on something, we set a Linux CGroup to throttle the offending resource. Takes longer, obviously, but not worth arguing with their network deployment teams 🤷 .

Number one! Number one! Woo!

Not if you get an error from the initramfs saying that it can’t mount the root partition, no. Start from the install media, mount the drives, chroot in, mkinitcpio -P && pacman -Syu and everything was fine again. I wouldn’t like that to be the first introduction to Linux for a newstart, tho - better that they install Mint or something with a few more guard rails.

If you can’t install Arch from scratch, you probably won’t be able to fix it when it breaks. Protip: don’t run a big update in a different workspace, forget about it, and then hibernate your laptop. That would be bad.

I learned z80 assembly back when the cutting edge of technology was a ZX Spectrum, and 68k assembly when I upgraded to an Amiga. That knowledge served me quite well for my early career in industrial automation - it was hard real-time coding on eZ80’s and 65c02 processors, but the knowledge transfers.

Back in the day, when input got mapped straight into a memory location and the display output was another memory location, then assembly seems like magic. Read the byte they corresponds to the right-hand middle row of the keyboard, check if a certain bit is set in that byte, therefore a key is held down. Call your subroutine that copies a sequence of bytes into a known location. Boom, pressing a key updates the screen. Awesome.

Modern assembly (x64 and the like) has masses of rules about pointer alignment for the stacks, which you do so often you might as well write a macro for it. Since the OS doesn’t let you write system memory any more (a good thing) then you need to make system calls and call library functions to do the same thing. You do that so often that you might as well write a macro for that as well. Boom, now your assembly looks almost exactly like C. Might as well learn that instead.

In fact, that’s almost the purpose of C - a more readable, somewhat portable assembly language. Experienced C developers will know which sequence of opcodes they’d expect from any language construction. It’s quite a simple mapping in that regard.

It’s handy to know a little assembly occasionally, but unless you’re writing eg. crypto implementations, which must take the exact same time and power to execute regardless of the input, then it’s impractical for almost any purpose nowadays.

You missed ‘secure’ out of that list. Vibe coding is tantamount to communism, the way that everyone who uses it ends up publicly owned.

Well, I didn’t realise Amouranth was Polish. Every day is a school day.

https://shunbeer.com/article/where-to-buy-amouranth-beer

Got Mullvad a year ago because Sky fuck with your internet if they’re able, but damn, am I pleased to have it now.

Think you could take it back a step there.

• Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
• Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
• Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
• Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
• Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.

Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.