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MentalEdge

@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz

Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.

Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

MentalEdge ,
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Try to login with element X?

It requires it, and wont let you set it up if it's not provided by the homeserver.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad (www.theregister.com)

The ad itself depicted a mechanical crusher destroying artifacts of human creativity. A trumpet, guitar, sculpture, piano, drawing board, paints, a metronome, several analog cameras, a turntable, and hi-fi equipment were among the much-loved items yielding to the machine's unstoppable force.

MentalEdge ,
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"What's a computer?"

MentalEdge ,
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You're comparing apples and oranges.

The speeds you mention are defined by the memory type, not the connector.

As far as I can tell, there is no reason this connector could not, and won't be, used with more advanced memory types. Including the type in apple silicon, and beyond.

MentalEdge ,
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Yes. Because when I pause to discuss a show I'm watching with someone, or to otherwise pay attention to something else for a moment, for some other sound and video to play is exactly what I want.

This makes literally no sense. The whole point of pausing, is that it's something you do right before you turn your attention away, and that's when they want to show you ads?

Either these ads won't work, because no-one will look at them, or they will defeat the point of pausing, annoying the living shit out of your users. It's a lose-lose for everyone involved. Including the advertisers.

MentalEdge ,
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Foss project: has 100 open issues

A year passes

Foss project: 50 issues got resolved, 50 new ones have been opened in the meantime

Why hasn't this giant project fixed a single bug?

MentalEdge ,
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There are very few printers that don't work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.

That's one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I've ever used.

I just hit share on a document, choose print... And then it just works.

MentalEdge ,
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Wait. So you're saying the only appeal of the device, is the hardware?

200 bucks of what's reportedly exactly as cheap-feeling as the price suggests?

MentalEdge ,
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Followed by MPV doing the same

MentalEdge ,
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What? No way!

/s

MentalEdge ,
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I have an inkling that would result in people speedrunning all the stuff up until they can see what someone looks like...

Looks do matter, and everyone has different preferences.

The problem isn't that people are judging people based on only their looks, it's that these companies have tuned their matching algorithms to match people who enjoy each others appearance, and specifically don't like each other as people.

In reality, for a satisfying relationship you need both. It's really hard to be more than friends with someone that physically repulses you, and it's really hard to be more than friends with benefits with someone you don't like as a person.

By specifically tuning their system to only give you one, and never the other, they keep people in the grind. You might be pretty happy using these apps for hookups, but even there the algorithm will actively be working against you stumbling onto someone you might wanna meet more than once, because they want you back to swiping for the next person asap.

The fact remains that the matchmaking industry is doomed to be toxic in a capitalist system, because actually being good at it, also means getting rid of your customers.

MentalEdge ,
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Bots. Bots everywhere.

MentalEdge ,
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You absolutely can love someone because of who they are alone. And if you genuinely, truly, can "get it up for anyone", then great. Or maybe you don't have a need for that stuff in your relationships in the first place.

But as someone who is borderline haphephobic (the fear of touch), yet also absolutely have a psychological and physiological need for physical intimacy, loving someone as a person is not enough to automatically mean I'm also going to feel something physical.

It doesn't matter how strongly I feel about who they are. If I don't want to touch their body, no amount of wishing I wanted to, changes that.

And personally, I do need to want that.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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No one is being provided any avenues. These services do not work any better if you swipe based on looks.

My point is that none of it matters. The real problem is bigger.

Everyone has their preferences, and any current system that actually respects that and helps people find each other, will inevitably shift to blue-balling its users with people that are never quite what each person is looking for, because actually doing it right means you lose "customers".

Because of that, different "avenues" for different people to find what they are looking for, don't exist. For anyone.

No matter what you specifically need, matchmaking companies are incentivised to identify exactly what you are looking for, and then give you anything but that.

If things actually worked, it wouldn't matter that the service has pictures. If you don't care about that part, just swipe accordingly. As long as the people queued up for you are genuinely random (they aren't) you will find someone you like, and someone who likes you will find you.

Except that these systems explicitly do the opposite. You will be shown every person the system can find who is your type, as long as you aren't their type.

Meanwhile your profile will be shown to everyone who'd like you, as long as they aren't the kind you like.

This way, everyone gets the illusion that there's plenty of fish in the sea. While in reality everyone gets their own algorithmic fence between them and anyone with whom the interest might be mutual.

MentalEdge ,
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Oh! That's why I've been finding tiny channels with oddly well made videos lately.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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Yes. All these people fighting for rights are trampling on the rights of corporations. What if the corporation dies, think of the tragedy!

We must protect these endangered entities from the predation of individuals looking to consume them. It's not like they need to eat. Feed the company, it must live.

/S

Seriously, what the fuck is even the point of living if we just end up serving a bunch institutions, desperately trying preserve them past their usefulness? If an institution doesn't make the world better, it doesn't need to exist.

And fuck. CEOs taking out a salary and bonus that kills the company, a-ok, but god forbid paying the baristas enough to live.

MentalEdge ,
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Lemmy doesn't support mentions in post bodies yet. Only comments.

MentalEdge ,
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https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/c43b4b02-b359-48aa-ae4d-cdccde1bcfc3.webp

MentalEdge ,
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That post will only exist on your instance. Federation out to other instances would have to happen via the instance that community is on.

MentalEdge ,
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Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before. Paying customers used to constantly miss out on events because someone else had already gotten in with their ticket. /s

MentalEdge ,
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They do. In fact they've been caught "reselling" tickets at scalper prices without them ever having been sold a first time.

The entire scalping/resale market arguably shouldn't exist, instead tickets should be refundable within reason, at which point the organiser can issue and sell new tickets.

MentalEdge ,
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I just tilt them up, wear them like normal headphones.

Bone conduction doesn't care what position or where exactly the transducer is. The sound won't be exactly as intended but it works.

MentalEdge ,
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On KDE it's not even that tricky to get working with some games.

Roku has patented a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV (arstechnica.com)

A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November...

MentalEdge ,
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Amazon/Audible walks in.

"Guess what industry I just exploited the shit out of!"

MentalEdge ,
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Why not? To get a picture on a big screen, I just use a really long cable from my desktop.

I control mouse/keyboard input via KDE connect, or grab the actual wireless mouse and keyboard from my desk.

MentalEdge ,
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Fair enough, dad uses a chromecast, mum has a miui android TV stick that started off ok but the new Android TV version is pretty ad-heavy. Siblings don't have big screens at all, and simply use laptops and phones for media consumption.

Dads savvy enough that he'll just use the HTPC he has if the chromecast gets obnoxious, but mom could use something more bespoke. Getting that for 10 bucks without having her trade in her digital soul so to speak isn't happening. "Cheapest" option I can think of is something like an RPI with OSMC/Kodi/JMP + a FLIRC receiver. For what that will cost, a Shield or OSMC Vero starts looking reasonable.

MentalEdge ,
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Wasn't it discontinued?

Edit: nope, just low supply for a while in 2022

MentalEdge ,
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It's not that hard, actually.

Got it working with Armoured Core VI on KDE, you just have to run the game in gamescope with some flags to enable HDR, and then KDE will pick that up as long as your monitor is HDR and it's enabled.

Forbidden West crashes when I enable HDR in the game settings, and Helldivers HDR is just so bad it's not worth using.

MentalEdge ,
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Roku?

MentalEdge ,
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You can get external large static directional antennae for them, tho.

The fact they don't need as strong a signal, don't move, and can be pointed directly at the nearest cell tower, means you can get far better throughout.

MentalEdge ,
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My advice for this type of situation has been a 4G/5G modem-router+directional external antennae.

They are more sensitive so they can work with a weaker signal, and they don't move once installed somewhere, pointed at a cell tower. That means the connection can be made way more stable than when using cellular data on a phone.

Combine that with a prepaid data SIM, and you wont waste any money when you're not there using it.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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It's a pretty mean angle to take, but why deconvert people by pushing them into a nihilistic crisis?

It's not like atheists think life is meaningless, kindness to be pointless, or the afterlife something to be anxious about.

I've found far less mean-spirited success by explaining how belief isn't necessary for existence to be worthwhile for us. If they can come to understand how happiness is possible for someone who doesn't believe, their own belief suddenly become a lot more optional.

MentalEdge ,
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And also on the posts about Linux. And the posts linking any tech-related news. And posts asking for any kind of tech support. And on...

MentalEdge , (edited )
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They're not really equivalent.

RCS replaces SMS, and thus for users will effectively function like a peer to peer message delivery system based on phone numbers.

Matrix is an account-based client-server system with federation capabilities, meaning it has more in common with email.

The benefit of SMS/RCS is that the ability to use them simply comes with your phone number/SIM.

While account-based chat system like Matrix have obvious benefits provided by the fact that they work through an account on a server, an open standard like SMS used to be, but with modern capabilities, is needed.

iMessage, being a closed-off obfuscated mess sitting between those two approaches, needs to go.

MentalEdge ,
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For what?

We use different things for different things.

Matrix cannot do peer-to-peer message delivery, so it literally can't be the standard.

And I for one don't want matrix to become the new email, either. Can you imagine email spam, but in your DMs?

I'll happily let it replace iMessage, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram, tho.

MentalEdge ,
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Ok, but it's still never going to become the go-to mobile client-carrier inter-carrier protocol, which is what SMS and RCS are.

I've abandoned SMS already, and won't be benefitting from apple adopting RCS, as I live in a country that has moved on from carrier-provided messaging.

But a lot of the world hasn't, and hence RCS is necessary.

I look forward to the day when everyone has a matrix address, the same as email, but I'm in no hurry to get there so long as the tools to manage what incoming communication actually gets through to you, do not exist.

MentalEdge ,
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I manage a machine that runs both media transcodes and some video game servers.

The video game servers have to run in real-time, or very close to it. Otherwise players using them suffer noticeable lag.

Achieving this at the same time that an ffmpeg process was running was completely impossible. No matter what I did to limit ffmpegs use of CPU time. Even when running it at lowest priority it impacted the game server processes running at top priority. Even if I limited it to one thread, it was affecting things.

I couldn't understand the problem. There was enough CPU time to go around to do both things, and the transcode wasn't even time sensitive, while the game server was, so why couldn't the Linux kernel just figure it out and schedule things in a way that made sense?

So, for the first time I read up on how computers actually handle processes, multi-tasking and CPU scheduling.

As FFMPEG is an application that uses ALL available CPU time until a task is done, I came to the conclusion that due to how context switching works (CPU cores can only do one thing, they just switch out what they do really fast, but this too takes time) it was causing the system to fall behind on the video game processes when the system was operating with zero processing headroom. The scheduler wasn't smart enough to maintain a real-time process in the face of FFMPEG, which would occupy ALL available cycles.

I learned the solution was core pinning. Manually setting processes to run on certain cores of the CPU. I set FFMPEG to use only one core, since it doesn't matter how fast it completes. And I set the game processes to use all but that one core, so they don't accidentally end up queueing for CPU time on a core that doesn't have the headroom to allow the task to run within a reasonable time range.

This has completely solved the problem, as the game processes and FFMPEG no longer wait for CPU cycles in the same queue.

MentalEdge ,
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I think the difference is simply that most processes only have a certain amount that needs accomplishing in a given unit of time. As long as they can get enough CPU time, and do so soon enough after getting in line for it, they can maintain real-time execution.

Very few workloads have that much to do for that long. But I would expect other similar workloads to present the same problem.

There is a useful stat which Linux tracks in addition to a simple CPU usage percentage. The "load average" represents the average number of processes that have requested CPU time, but have to queue for it.

As long as the number is lower than the available number of cores, this essentially means that whenever one process is done running a task, the next in line can get right on with theirs.

If the load average is less than the number of cores available, that means the cores have idle time where they are essentially just waiting for a process to need them for something. Good for time-sensitive processes.

If the load average is above the number of cores, that means some processes are having to wait for several cycles of other processes having their turn, before they can execute their tasks. Interestingly, the load average can go beyond this threshold way before the CPU hits 100% usage.

I found that I can allow my system to get up to a load average of about 1.5 times the number of cores available, before you start noticing it when playing on one of the servers I run.

And whenever ffmpeg was running, the load average would spike to 10-20 times the number of cores. Not good.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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Theoretically a load average could be as high as it likes, it's essentially just the length of the task queue, after all.

Processes having to queue to get executed is no problem at all for lots of workloads. If you're not running anything latency-sensitive, a huge load average isn't a problem.

Also it's not really a matter of parallelization. Like I mentioned, ffmpeg impacted other processes even when restricted to running in a single thread.

That's because most other processes will do work in small chunks that complete within nanoseconds. Send a network request, parse some data, decode an image, poll HID device, etc.

A transcode meanwhile can easily have a CPU running full tilt for well over a second, working on just that one thing. Most processes will show up and go "I need X amount of CPU time" while ffmpeg will show up and go "give me all available CPU time" which is something the scheduler can't actually quantify.

It's like if someone showed up at a buffet and asked for all the food that no-one else is going to eat. How do you determine exactly how much that is, and thereby how much it is safe to give this person without giving away food someone else might've needed?

You don't. Without CPU headroom it becomes very difficult for the task scheduler to maintain low system latency. It'll do a pretty good job, but inevitably some CPU time that should have gone to other stuff, will go the process asking for as much as it can get.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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It serves a purpose tho, in that as text can't have a tone of voice or display body language, you do need to distinguish yourself from the people who actually say and believe the insane stuff.

Without it, there will be a fraction of people who misinterpret what you meant. It's not about "fearing downvotes".

MentalEdge , (edited )
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It was very obvious.

But text can't have a tone of voice or display body language, it's use is to distinguish ourselves from the people who actually say and believe the insane stuff.

Even worse, is when some nutcase says something like this, and then gets upvotes and validation. Not realising that a bunch of people assumed it was sarcasm.

MentalEdge ,
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Agreed, but let's not pretend r/fuckthes has a point in it being dumb and unnecessary.

Using it removes even the slightest room for misinterpretation. That is always a good thing.

MentalEdge ,
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Right, but isn't that something we effectively do anyway, with tone of voice and body language?

And if someone doesn't pick up on our sarcasm in person, do we just let them go on thinking we believe something we actually don't?

No. We do go "I was being sarcastic" and then they burst out laughing and go "oh damn, you got me for a second there haha".

We announce our sarcasm in a variety of ways regardless of the setting. The point of making it unmissable online, is that if you don't, there will be fraction of people who walk away having misinterpreted what you were saying. In person we can make sure that doesn't happen, online in a public forum, not so much.

And since when is explaining a joke to someone who doesn't get it, a bad thing? Are you seriously arguing that ruining the joke (whether it is even ruined in the first place is debatable, imo) is too much to trade in for helping people understand?

MentalEdge ,
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Agreed, but again, let's not pretend r/fuckthes has a point in it being dumb and unnecessary.

Using it removes even the slightest room for misinterpretation. That is always a good thing.

MentalEdge , (edited )
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And this still doesn't account for the nutcases that say this stuff, actually believing it, and then get showered with validation because the rest of us assume it is sarcasm.

Edit: whether someone is being "too unreasonable to be serious" is unfortunately no longer a reliable way to tell what someone is actually trying to say.

MentalEdge ,
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Hard disagree.

Clarity has never ruined a joke.

MentalEdge ,
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Hardly.

I'm saying satire that doesn't in some way tell you it's satire, can't be distinguished from the genuinely delusional.

And thereby the way satire tells you it is satire, needs to change. No part of the art requires that there be no way to truly tell, I would argue the opposite.

MentalEdge ,
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Opt-in only?

Also only really discusses outbound federation, how is inbound content going to work?

MentalEdge ,
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Fair enough. And I'm absolutely far more interested in convincing people to just not jump to "patent troll" with this little to go on.

And preferably not spreading misinfo like "nokia is just a microsoft puppet" when this is about the part of the company that MS never even acquired.

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