addie

CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has "fetch content" since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you'd like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you'd like. I don't think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.

You've got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more "partitioned" than shared - there's a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it's usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

• load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there's no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they're just loaded and accessible.
• manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.

You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They've got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.

Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.

Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you've not got a boot manager, of course.

Looking at how chonky his wrist is, I suspect that "original OP" is quite a big lad and that this isn't his first schnitzel sandwich. Suspect it's more "plump thumb" than a double-joint.

Once you start Vim, you don't even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain't no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I've grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

As well as running as root, you can also disable kernel-level protections against Spectre and shit like that on Arch, which as far as I can tell doesn't even gain you a single FPS. But no real gamer would turn that optimisation down.

Indeed. Back in the day (by which I mean, up until about when Doom was released, around '93) then one of the "joys" of PC gaming was that you had fuck all memory and had to prepare a "boot disk" for every game, bypassing the operating system, basically to load as little as possible so that there was space for your game to run. Trying to fit the bare essential drivers - sound card, memory extender, CD ROM if you needed it for that game, mouse or joystick if you needed those - was a right fucking adventure every time, and it was always a toss-up whether you could get sound, music, or both, in any particular game.

If you're an old fart, or if you've ever used DosBox to play retro games, you might be familiar. DosBox makes it altogether too easy - loads of RAM and disk space, emulates anything, and it's very quick to swap things out.

A few things changed around that time:

• much more memory, and better processors (486s!) that could use it
• games starting to want hardware acceleration for 3D, and therefore need graphics card drivers, which were impractical to fit on a floppy disk, usually
• Windows 95 / DirectX meant that people wanted to play games by double-clicking them, and there being a "unified" way of accessing hardware, rather than directly writing to VGA- / SoundBlaster- compatible hardware.

I'm no Windows fan, but it was a hell of an improvement.

The concept of a "pure UEFI" gaming environment might sound great - direct access to hardware, what could be more efficient? - but the unfortunate reality is that direct access to hardware is a real pain in the arse. Every game would need a complete copy of everyone's graphics drivers, everyone's sound drivers, everyone's network stack, .,. . Computers are much more complicated than they used to be (although in some ways, simpler too) - very few games would work at all. You might get Terraria in 640x480 in 16 colours and no hardware-accelerated drawing, and maybe some sound effects if you'd a very common integrated sound chip on your motherboard.

The operating system is both a gateway and a gatekeeper to hardware; makes a lot of stuff appear to work the same, regardless of what it is really, and the ones that haven't been enshittified are really quite efficient, do their thing and get out of the way. Even the consoles have an OS for hardware access now, although they're lightweight. I think it would be a very backward step to be rid of them.

Maybe with an autoexec.bat and a config.sys as plain-text files in the game distribution, so that you can still set up your network configuration, CD drive and sound card?

According to this: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202407/1315864.shtml

In the first five months of 2024, Brazil, the US, Canada, Russia and Argentina remained China's top five soybean importers in terms of value. China imported $12.56 billion of soybeans from Brazil, followed by the US with $6.25 billion and Canada with $531 million, according to data from the General Administration of Customs (GAC).

Brazil and Russia (and China, of course) are part of BRICS and will be delighted to strengthen trade links. I hear that Canada have a neighbour who have become a trade liability recently and would be delighted to increase trade with other countries, too?

Hey! The images of Ryugu that were taken from Hayabusa2. What a sad lonely rock that place is - a loose collection of boulders in an endless orbit, in which it will probably continue without further interaction from now until the end of time. You could sneak a few ghosts onto that place, right enough, and no-one would notice.