addie

joined 2 years ago
[–] addie@feddit.uk 30 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

Now, what's the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We've plenty of observations that don't match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, discard it. Repeat, until we've solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I'm no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Our forever-DM is all-in on AI generation of stuff. Which I understand; it's a role that requires a lot of thankless prep, and he wants all of the in-game maps and character artwork to look fancy. But on the other hand, I play D+D for the human interaction of it, and actually prefer the 'theatre of the mind' way of playing it. Dry-wipe pens on a whiteboard, there's your adventure map. Now get roleplaying. If I wanted to play a computer game, then I'd play a computer game.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 16 points 1 day ago (4 children)

My wife used to work for a company that manufactured the glass for solar panels in the UK, but there was just no way that they could compete with Chinese prices. They would have had to have sold it below cost to match, let alone make any profit. It's not the most labour-intensive of industries, but the energy costs are massive to melt all the glass. China has made massive investments in hydro and has a lot of cheap power for industry, which ironically means that making solar panels for green power is easier too.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 10 points 4 days ago (4 children)

It's a slow burn, and it undoubtedly sags in the middle - the massive empty spaces tip over from 'epic' into 'time wasting'. But it benefits hugely from telling a very personal drama with a lot of character development, and it has one of the darkest stories of any Zelda game. The Gamecube version has much sharper controls than the Wii version, so is the much better choice to reimplement. Hope you enjoy - I'm a big fan of this game, and set this up to play last night, it's really smooth.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If your system is all-AMD, then it's amazing how well Linux just works. Turn it on, hardware accelerated everything.

If you've got NVidia anywhere near it, that's not so much the case. If Mint is being a bit dodgy, then I would have used to recommend trying it with Pop!, since that has pretty good driver support out of the box. Probably outdated advice, something like Bazzite might make more sense now, but I've not used it first hand. Partly because my system is all-AMD and just works, but also because I run Arch btw.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Well, on the one hand, that just looks like a graphics upgrade from the first game. On the other hand, you wouldn't expect the EA trailer to give too much away, there's no evidence of the snowfox or the spy pengling in it, and the original is one of the finest games ever made so why mess? So I'm thinking that's mostly positive. Will need to go and reinstall the original now I've seen this, too.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 6 points 6 days ago

An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there's much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can't be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn't changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there's not much point in redoing it.

When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don't touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can't touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That's not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.

And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn't any Linux at that point.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago

Six legs, and a tail split into two for what looks to me like flight. I think you'll find that's a beautiful Butterfly Cat.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I've found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it's unbeatable.

I've also found that "fancy Git dialogs" just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just don't see the thinking here.

  • buy a decent steak
  • leave it out at room temperature for an hour so that it will cook properly. During this time, prepare the vegetables, potatoes, sauce that will go with it.
  • cook the steak for two minutes a side in a heavy frying pan on high heat
  • let the steak rest somewhere warm for ten minutes while you finish assembling everything else.

I could spend a fucking fortune, enough to live on for months, to cook my steak upright in a toaster for 90 seconds instead, for a worse end result, and it would save me zero time, because cooking the steak is not the time-critical step here.

Would only save you time if you're buying the kind of steak that can be cooked in 90 seconds, and taking it straight from the fridge, cooking it, and then putting it in sandwich, and anyone who thinks that sounds a good idea frankly doesn't deserve to have a decent steak.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They're quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

Fortunately, there's businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won't run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it's my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.

 

Hey gang! Looking for some recommendations on issue tracking software that I can run on Linux. Partly so that I can keep track of my hobby dev projects, partly so that I've got a bit more to talk about in interviews. My current workplace uses Jira, Trello and Asana for various different projects, which, eh, mostly serve their purposes. But I'm not going to be running those at home.

The ArchWiki has Bugzilla, Flyspray, Mantis, Redmine and Trac, for instance. Any of those an improvement over pen and paper? Any of those likely to impress an employer?

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