carpelbridgesyndrome @ carpelbridgesyndrome @sh.itjust.works

Posts

3

Comments

184

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've had the reverse. I started using arch because debian didn't have my wifi driver yet.

The whole idea behind Manjero's update scheme is just generally a landmine. LTS releases typically work by maintaining a older branch that gets updates. In this way you delay features not patches. If you run Firefox on such a system it will be Firefox LTS with this week's patches (this is kinda important for security reasons). Manjaro doesn't do this instead it just holds everything back artificially one or two weeks.

Bluntly doing this with a browser or other security critical software should be a crime.

Manjero just generally feels very amaturish and its history of taking down Arch's servers is not helping here.

The official multiplayer servers even work right now. Unfortunately that seems to have killed the modded server playerbase.

Oh look the gold bugs are back

Iran has been doing this a while on the theory they can keep the escalation controlled. Up until now though they've gotten lucky with not killing any US soldiers. From a domestic political situation the Biden administration will probably need to retaliate. Hopefully this won't get too much further out of hand.

It's worth pointing out here that this script was probably written by a human.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/did-an-ai-write-that-hour-long-george-carlin-special-im-not-convinced/

Edit: reporting now indicates that it was human written https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

He did build some of it though. Just part of that happened to blow over in a stiff wind and the remainder has proven remarkably vulnerable to sawzalls.

From the perspective of a computer engineer SSDs are painfully slow. Waiting for data on disk is slow enough that it is typically done by asking the OS for the data and having the OS schedule another process onto the CPU while it waits. RAM is also slow although not nearly as slow. Ideally you want your data in the L1 cache which is fast enough to minimally stall the CPU. The L2 and L3 caches are slower but larger and more likely to have the data you want. If the caches are empty and you have to read RAM your CPU will either do a lot of speculative execution or more likely stall.

Speculative execution on CPUs is a desperate attempt to deal with the fact that all memory access is slow by just continuing through the code as if you know what is in memory. If the speculative execution is wrong a lot of work gets thrown out (hopefully nothing unsound happens) and the delay is more noticable.

Bluntly an SSD only system would probably be an order of magnitude slower. I'm also not sure switching to a new process (or even thread) to load from SSD would be viable without RAM as it would likely invalidate a lot of cache triggering more loads.

Oops should have cropped earlier. It is invisible on mobile

Hey, occasionally things happen on [Death Star flavor of the month].

So what I am hearing is that Greg Abbot is preventing the border patrol from detaining migrants.

Anti virtualization is sometimes used in copy protection. Altering virtualization to avoid those checks might be circumvention under DMCA.

In new games sure. I was referring to old titles

As somone who has been on a broken escaltor that was not safe, the breaks can fail and then you have a big problem. Granted I'm not dead and didn't lose any limbs but degloving is still not something I'd like to risk.

Getting anti-cheat that technically already works enabled on Linux has been a lot of work and Epic still won't enable it. Piracy protection systems will also be an issue. Most EA games inspect your CPU to see if they like it on startup (I think this is using vmprotect and some non-OS x86 calls but don't quote me on that). These kinds on anti virtualization checks are really common (not just in games ProctorU and lock down browser do them too). I don't think valve running an open virtualization layer will be well received by companies and they will probably ban it from running games. MMOs (due to botting) and anything with anticheat will look particularly askance at this. I also suspect Valve won't want to try hiding the VM signatures as it borders on violating DMCA.

Newer games will probably get ported if a large part of the market buys into ARM. Unity stuff might get re-released as it is .net if the publishers can be bothered. Minecraft java edition will also always love you (the launcher might not though).

The main advantage of ARM right now is that there are low power cores available. The actual instruction set is unrelated to this advantage. If Intel or AMD put more serious effort into power efficiency most of the advantages go out the window.

As for instruction set changes impacting what software you can run I think that is still a big issue. Yes porting to ARM is straitforward in more modern programming environments but most software actively developed at the moment has a lot of old cruft that won't easily port if the engineers can even be convinced to touch it. Most businesses are dependent on old software not all of which is still maintained. Most gamers are even more tied to old software that is not going to get ported and often has annoying anti-virtualization checks (see games breaking on systems with enabled intel e-cores).

I am not sure how large the modern non gaming personal pc market is (tablets, phones, works computers, and chromebooks probably took a chunk out of it) but that could be in play.

Trilium is great. It has a copy of excalidraw with history which is nice. You can also automate things inside of it with scripting

What exactly is it raining at 56°C?

I'm scared what your weather is like

It's slightly colder right now in the SF Bay Area where it doesn't snow

It's always disconcerting when I go somewhere it's supposed to snow in the winter and it's warmer.

They really just can't get a break. When they take money from Google they get attacked. When they try to create other revenue streams (pocket, vpn, etc.) they get attacked. I don't think you want the browser to be a paid for subscription product and the donations aren't enough to reliably cover browser development.

Maintaining and keeping secure a large standards compliant browser is decidedly expensive. And most of the expenses are not one off they are ongoing.