swordsmanluke

joined 1 year ago

I have both. I do not think the OLED version is twice as nice, though it is noticeably improved.

If the cost is an issue, but doable, consider getting the LCD deck and putting the extra cash toward a TV dock and Bluetooth controller. The deck is awesome on the go (just took mine on vacation - 10/10) but it's also a fantastic console in its own right. I play a lot of PC games on my couch, even though my I have a decent desktop PC available.

Either one you purchase though, the Steam deck is the best gaming device I've ever owned. Access to the vast Steam library (even if not all titles are compatible yet), access to install whatever else TF I want - even competing stores, ~~emulation~~ nevermind.

It's just... ๐Ÿคฏ

My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It's taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

Balatro came out two months ago.

I have 93 hours in it.

Yup. Zorin's another great Debian-based distro. I've been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I'm a fan.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke@programming.dev 15 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Man... Anybody remember "Back Orifice"? The late nineties were weird.

[โ€“] swordsmanluke@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I'd still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it'll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you'll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a "family" (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

  • Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

  • Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven't used it in a decade, so I won't say much about it here.

  • Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. ... Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros... But not necessarily in distros from other families.

Man - that's wild. Thank you for coming though with a citation - I appreciate it!

[โ€“] swordsmanluke@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

a quick web search uses much less power/resources compared to AI inference

Do you have a source for that? Not that I'm doubting you, just curious. I read once that the internet infrastructure required to support a cellphone uses about the same amount of electricity as an average US home.

Thinking about it, I know that LeGoog has yuge data centers to support its search engine. A simple web search is going to hit their massive distributed DB to return answers in subsecond time. Whereas running an LLM (NOT training one, which is admittedly cuckoo bananas energy intensive) would be executed on a single GPU, albeit a hefty one.

So on one hand you'll have a query hitting multiple (comparatively) lightweight machines to lookup results - and all the networking gear between. One the other, a beefy single-GPU machine.

(All of this is from the perspective of handling a single request, of course. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia would run this service on only one machine.)

This looks less like the LLM is making a claim so much as using an LLM to generate a search query and then read through the results in order to find anything that might relate to the section being searched.

It leans into the things LLMs are pretty good at (summarizing natural language; constructing queries according to a given pattern; checking through text for content that matches semantically instead of literally) and links directly to a source instead of leaning on the thing that LLMs only pretend to be good at (synthesizing answers).

In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don't have to allow it. But given that there's no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe

Thank you for responding! I really liked this bit

with a (decently designed) UI, you merely have to remember the path you took to get to wherever you want to go, what buttons to press, what mouse movements to execute.

I think that's very insightful. I certainly have developed muscle-memory for many of my most-frequent commands in the CLI or editor of choice.

I agree about Visual Studio as a preference. I've used (or at least tried) dozens of IDE setups down the years from vi/emacs to JetBrains/VS to more esoteric things like Code Bubbles. I've found my personal happy place but I'd never tell someone else their way of working was wrong.

(Except for emacs devs. (Excepting again evil-mode emacs devs - who are merely confused and are approaching the light.)) ;)

I hope you take this in good humor and at least consider a TUI for your next project.

Absolutely. I see what you did there... ๐Ÿ˜‰

But seriously, thank you for your response!

I think your comment about GUIs being better at displaying the current state and context was very insightful. Most CLI work I do is generally about composing a pipeline and shoving some sort of data through it. As a class of work, that's a common task, but certainly not the only thing I do with my PC.

Multistage operations like, say, Bluetooth pairing I definitely prefer to use the GUI for. I think it is partially because of the state tracking inherent in the process.

Thanks again!

[โ€“] swordsmanluke@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

As someone who genuinely loves the command line - I'd like to know more about your perspective. (Genuinely. I solemnly swear not to try to convince you of my perspective.)

What about GUIs appeals to you over a command line?

I like the CLI because it feels like a conversation with the computer. I explain what I want, combining commands as necessary, and the machine responds.

With GUIs I feel like I'm always relearning tools. Even something as straightforward as 'find and replace' has different keyboard shortcuts in most of the text-editing apps I use - and regex support is spotty.

Not to say that I think the terminal is best for all things. I do use an IDE and windowing environments. Just that - when there are CLI tools I tend to prefer them over an equivalent GUI tool.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear your perspective- what about GUIs works better for you? What about the CLI is failing you?

Thank you!

 

I've been dual-booting since the early-oughts, but I'm only just now preparing to delete my Windows partition for good.

What with all the repartitioning in my future, I figure it's a good time to just make a clean start - reinstall from scratch. ...but I have about a decade's worth of tools and dotfile tweaks accumulated, including things like updates to xorg.conf to support my old (but awesome) mouse.

So... What's your favored toolset to get your machine back to the way you like it?

I've done this all manually many a time, backing up my home dir, writing scripts to install software, copy important config files into place, etc.

How do you like to go about reinstalling your programs, restoring .dotfiles and config?

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