wolf

joined 2 years ago
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Shout out to the great Hungarian people! :-)

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago

Thanks for clarification!

... and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I'd rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level... Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)... Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fair point. :-)

At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done... if it is macOS or Windows, that's okay.

In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)

Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Forced to use macOS at work, and for me it sucks (only slightly less than Windows):

  • Slow UI (have to wait several seconds after login before spotlight is able to execute custom scripts)
  • Finder is a PITA and one of the dumbest file managers I was ever forced to use
  • No easy way to provision the system
  • Annoying nagging to use all the Apple services/login with Apple ID
  • Shitty software management (instead of a descent package manager, every fucking application has a popup for its own updates after opening, which breaks my flow)
  • macOS only interacts decently with other Apple devices (iPhone etc.) and has its own 'standards', taking away my freedom to choose what I want to use.

Of course, your needs are your needs and if macOS fits your needs the best, all power to you.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn't need Linux for work reasons.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fair point, I stand corrected: I didn't know about their prior practices.

Still, I keep that Stellar Blade itself was one of the best recent game releases I experienced, and the game itself is fun!

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Well, the fan service is a factor for sure... (Seriously, I find the discussion quite hypocritical: Sex sells, most actors/singers are quite good looking and most block buster movies have a cast of sexy/good locking people displaying status symbols. That is not even mentioning product placing and other shit going on in popular movies/TV shows.)

  • A PS 5 original which is optimized well enough to run on the Steam Deck and some potatoes smoothly
  • Responsive controls
  • Great enemy design which telegraph their intentions clearly
  • No in game purchases or other dark monetization schemes
  • A complete game which seems mostly bug free (from what I heard so far)
  • Shift Up Corporation seems like a company of gamer which create the games they want to play themselves

Stellar Blade and Shift Up Corporation fully deserve a great start, and I happily payed the full price of admission w/o feeling bad about it.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I am in software and a software engineer, but the least of my concerns is being replaced by an LLM any time soon.

  • I don't hate LLMs, they are just a tool and it does not make sense at all to hate a LLM the same way it does not make sense to hate a rock

  • I hate the marketing and the hype for several reasons:

    • You use the term AI/LLM in the posts title: There is nothing intelligent about LLMs if you understand how they work
    • The craziness about LLMs in the media, press and business brainwashes non technical people to think that there is intelligence involved and that LLMs will get better and better and solve the worlds problems (possible, but when you do an informed guess, the chances are quite low within the next decade)
    • All the LLM shit happening: Automatic translations w/o even asking me if stuff should be translated on websites, job loss for translators, companies hoping to get rid of experienced technical people because LLMs (and we will have to pick up the slack after the hype)
    • The lack of education in the population (and even among tech people) about how LLMs work, their limits and their usages...

LLMs are at the same time impressive (think jump to chat-gpt 4), show the ugliest forms of capitalism (CEOs learning, that every time they say AI the stock price goes 5% up), helpful (generate short pieces of code, translate other languages), annoying (generated content) and even dangerous (companies with the money can now literally and automatically flood the internet/news/media with more bullshit and faster).

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 40 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Java is IMHO one of the most underrated platforms outside of enterprise environments.

Most people also forget, that Java is not only a language, but also a platform, an ecosystem and active research is applied to many parts of Java.

Concerning Oracle: OpenJDK is actively supported by very different but big and capable companies (IBM, Amazon, Eclipse Foundation...). The quality of the language, libraries and documentation needs people which are payed to work on this, full time.

Bring to this the free IDEs one can get for Java - Eclipse and Netbeans are a little bit old school, but offer everything to build/debug and develop complex software.

Java is not my favorite programming language, but when I want to write interesting software and ensure it will be running for the next decade w/o significant changes, Java is really hard to beat.

Of course, in hindsight we know how to do a lot of things better as they were done in Java. Still, what other open source Language/Platform/documentation with the backing of capable companies and really independent and interoperable builds are out there?

One last note to all people which were damaged by Java in university or school: Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects, and for the usual university projects which basically means getting small to midsize projects to run Java is total overkill.

Don't confuse this with real world software projects in the industry, which are mission critical and need to work a decade from now on. Java was always a bread and butter language, but one which learned from other languages and even the verbosity makes sense, once one dives into code written a few years back by another person.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago
  • Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection
  • Slay the Spire
  • Tetris Effect, Connected
  • OpenXCom
  • Olli Olli
[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks, you are spot on: Playing Street Fighter 6 casually and even bought a SteamDeck to have a computer with enough power to run it. :-) For me it is the 3rd, after 3rd Strike (ha ;-)) which hooked me, although I have to confess Fightcarde and 3rd Strike are still peak Street Fighter for me. Street Fighter IV never 'clicked' for me, and I didn't like the presentation of Street Fighter V at all.

Hope we run into each other in an online match, though I hail from Europe so we might not be in the same region.

[–] wolf@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, for DS1, I totally respect the artistic vision and that they simply created a game against the trends (back then) ... at the same time I made it trough the swamp under the Orc-City w/o the ring which allows immunity to the swamp poison. When I looked up how to get this ring (back to the Asylum) I was just like: WTF, I have a real life, how should I have figured this out by myself? ... this turned me away, although I still have a lot of respect and love for DS1!

 

Just to be clear: My main point of sharing this article is about how detached the life of rich people is.

I do not at all agree that most of them are “Not evil, just disconnected”, I am pretty sure (and know some of the privileged), who are actively evil, know exactly what they are doing and just don't give a shit.

 

IMHO a very cool project/idea, worth being promoted!

 

Title is question, but to clarify my assumptions:

  • Vaccination is a numbers game, and the odds are in your favor that the vaccination will protect you over you get a side effect or an allergic reaction/shock
  • An infection like covid/flue can damage your body long term, not even speaking of long covid etc.
  • To the best of my knowledge it has been shown that flue shoots lower the risk of dementia later in life, wouldn't it be a good enough guess that a covid shoot decreases risks for this too
  • Even if we only assume a covid vaccination is highly to reduce your sick days for only this year, isn't it a rationale tradeoff to get vaccinated, just to avoid 1-2 weeks sick?
  • Given the security of covid vaccinations, I feel like they have been scrutinized and tested extremely well and to the best of my knowledge it was checked that nothing of the vaccination remains in the body after a few weeks (for the argument that nobody knows the long term effects of RNA vaccination)

Again my question: Why doesn't the WHO or don't most countries recommend covid vaccinations for everyone? Are there any health/medical reasons? Are there financial reasons? Are there any countries/governments which recommend the covid vaccination for everyone and not only the 'vulnerable groups'?

Edit: Just to add, I am living in Germany and right now we have a big wave of children flue, where children even die in the hospitals and the children hospitals are near their limits. It seems common sense to just put flue/covid vaccination into every child/adult, to avoid situations like this.

 

Fighting game players on lemmy might be interested in the open Beta of Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.!

 

Some games bring me in the zone/give me flow like no others.

For example the following games do that for me:

  • Olli Olli
  • Contra (NES)
  • Dark Souls
  • Street Fighter II (SNES)
  • Street Fighter 3
  • Street Fighter 6
  • Like Dreamer
  • Choplifter HD
  • XCOM
  • Infested Planet
  • Tetris Effect

What games are providing you with flow experiences?

 

Hello Linux community,

I need some help with shutting down my laptop when the battery reaches a low percentage.

I am using Debian 12 with the GNOME desktop. WARNING: Minimal installation with self selected packages.

What I want to achieve is, that the laptop just does a 'halt -p' or shuts itself down when the battery is below 20%.

What I did so far:

  • Look into GNOME settings in the power settings area and I found nothing helpful
  • I edited /etc/Upower/UPower.conf with my settings and changed the CriticalPowerAction to PowerOff, ensured the upower daemon is running via systemctl status and rebooted. The result was that I get a warning popup message in GNOME when the battery load reaches 21%, but it does not shutdown the laptop at 20% or under 20%, although I get another pop up announcing that the laptop would be shutdown
  • I ensured laptop-mode-tools and gnome-power-manager settings are installed

Any help/pointers for further help would be highly appreciated.

 

The method of loci (MOL)/memory palaces are a widely known mnemonic devices and enable memory artists impressive tasks (like memorizing several decks of cards, memorizing numbers etc.). Further MOL is featured in pop culture e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector etc...

There is, to the best of my knowledge quite some research, which shows that MOL is working/useful for improved retention, especially when combined with spaced repetition.

It seems I have never seem real world examples of long term memory palaces/method of loci applications. It always seems like a short term crutch for cards, numbers, speeches, grocery lists, phone numbers, vocabulary or for test/exam preparation. For example it seems that in language learning, the MOL is for encoding some vocabulary and visiting it regularly, until it is committed to long term memory.

All examples I find in books about the method of loci are again only about having one location, a route of 10-N stations, and never about building/using mnemonic devices to organize bigger amounts of knowledge.

Are there any examples of people using the method of loci/memory palaces to organize for example their professional knowledge? Or of polyglots having/keeping memory palaces for language learning? Is there any research about long term usage of the method of loci?

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by wolf@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
 

Can anyone recommend me books about the modern elite/modern nepotism and how it works?

I have experienced/observed modern nepotism several times in my life, to give you some examples:

  • person founds a so called start up with money from person relatives, which boils down to paying other people to do all the work w/o anything resembling a business plan in the first place. Start up is a total failure, person gets job as a specialist for building startups via divine intervention.
  • at several companies there is a level which people who do the work can reach, and above that level people from higher class get positions seemingly out of nowhere (unless they were childhood/study buddies of someone higher up) w/o any qualification/knowledge/experience to do this kind of work
  • from a certain level on (at least in IT where we have more than enough money for it) everything is politics; when discussing technical problems/solutions at that level, the first question is always who is the sponsor behind the initiative and if this comes from the wrong party, the technical merits are of no interest at all
  • a lot of positions even lower level in IT usually are distributed via nepotism/connections, I observed especially SCRUM masters and product owners are chosen for their family names/connections. (Two negative highlights: Product owner was literally boyfriend of company owner and another product owner was son of parent to which company wanted to sell their shit)
  • lower on the list but still annoying and experienced several times: Son of friend of boss/manager/team lead gets internship in company although better candidates are there and often the nepotism sons would never have gotten an internship on their own merits, but end up with fancy internship from known company on their CV.

I understand that when you deal with a group of people politics are always relevant and inherent to groups.

My question is literately, how does this all work and why is this so extremely widespread?

Anyone can recommend some books about this social systems which give some insights?

Further, when I see what is mounted on money/time/energy because of this nepotism or the current favorite ideas of the elite, how comes no companies (that I know of) interrupt the market with a company slightly less dysfunctional.

Are there historical examples how elites/nepotism was overthrown w/o a bloody revolution?

 

I posted about ZRAM before, but because of my totally unscientific experiment, personal experience and the common question, which Linux to run on potatoes...

First, I tweaked ZRAM for my use-case(s) on my hardware, this settings might not be right for your use-cases or your hardware!

My hardware is a netbook with an Intel Celeron N4120 and 4G RAM (3.64G usable).

When I recently played around with ZRAM settings, it felt like the zstd algorithm made my netbook noticeable more sluggish. It never felt sluggish with lzo-rle or lz4.

In a totally unscientific way, I rebooted the computer several times (after a complete update of everything), executed my backup script several times, and measured the last 3 executions. (Didn't touch the netbook during the runs.) The bottleneck of the backup script should not be ZRAM, but it is some reproducible workload that I could execute and measure.

To my surprise, I could measure a performance difference for my backup scripts, lz4 was consistent fastest in real and sys time w/o tweaks to vm.page-cluster!

Changing the vm.page-cluster to 0 further enhanced the speed for lz4, but with this one toggle, all of a sudden zstd is as fast as lz4 in my benchmark and runs with a more consistent runtime.

Changing the vm.swapiness to 180 decreased the speed for lz4, to my surprise.

Obviously the benchmarks are not 100% clean, although the trend for my workload was clearly in favor of lz4/zstd.

To the best of my knowledge, I ended up with nearly the same tweaks that Google makes for ChromeOS:

  • zstd as algorithm (I think ChromeOS uses lzo-rle)

  • 2*ram as ram-size

  • vm.page-cluster = 0

  • Install/enable systemd-oomd

vm.page-cluster = 0 seems like a no-brainer when using ZRAM, on my netbook it is literally the switch for 'fast' mode.

In summary: ZRAM makes my netbook totally usable for everyday tasks, and with tweaking the above settings I run Gnome 3, VS Code and Firefox/Evolution w/o trouble. (Of course, Xfce4 on the same machine is still noticeable more performant.)

I wonder if we should recommend to people asking for a lightweight distribution for potatoes to check/tweak their ZRAM settings by default.

Anyway, I would be interested in experiences from other people:

  1. Any other tweaks on my ZRAM or sysctl for potatoes which made a measurable difference for you?
  2. Any other tips to improve quality of life on potatoe machines? (Besides switching to KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc. ;-))
  3. Any idea why vm.swapiness didn't improve my measurements? To my understanding it should basically have cached more of my files in ZRAM, making the backup run faster. It even slowed the backup down, which I don't understand.

Edit:

  • zstd beats lz4 on my machine for my benchmark when vm.page-cluster=0!
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by wolf@lemmy.zip to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 

... I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job ...

Edit:

Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:

  1. As long as Firefox is sponsored by 'we are not a monopoly' Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
  2. For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if 'we' accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
  3. This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
  4. Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
  5. This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
  6. Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
41
How I manage my KDE email (pointieststick.com)
 

Interesting workflow.

Of course the fact that Nate uses Thunderbird instead of KMail explains a lot. One day I hope KMail/Akonadi get the attention/work they need to become viable options.

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