• 1 Post
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

    Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

    The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

    Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

    Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

    It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.



  • Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

    With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

    Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

    Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

    Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

    AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

    The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.


  • Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

    As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

    Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

    I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

    Its all a bit…


  • If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

    A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

    A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

    I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

    Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

    Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

    WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

    WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

    People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

    There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/



  • SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

    The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.

    Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.

    The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

    First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

    The whole lot is privately funded



  • I have always had 1 question.

    In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.

    Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn’t the borg commit a larger fleet?

    You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.

    Considering how difficult the federation finds holding them back, attacking with 3-6 cubes would seemto assure victory


  • Tesla actually market it as a positive.

    Car manufacturers have to setup different manufacturing lines to provide different feature levels. Tesla argue this makes them more expensive. Tesla cars have all features installed, just disabled and the optional extra packages are cheaper compared to their rivals as a result.

    To be honest there is a certain logic, if you’ve ever been in a Ford Focus LX (bottom range) its pretty clear they had to spend quite a bit of money on more basic systems. I honestly thought each LX was sold at a loss


  • @ergoplato I didn’t suggest that.

    Personally I don’t think its ego. I think you have two issues.

    The first is people go through stages learning DevOps. Stage 1 has people deploy a CI because its cool, they build a few basic pipelines and then 90% of people get bored. The 2nd stage is people start extending those pipelines, it results in really complex pipelines requiring lots of unique changes based on the opinion of the writer. You move to the 3rd stage when your asked to recreate/extend for a new project and realise how specific your solutions are.

    Learning how to make minor tweaks and hook in a few key points to get what you want takes years. Without that most packagers will want to make big changes upstream which won’t go down well.

    The second issue, I have met quite a few developers who become highly stressed when the build system is doing something they haven’t needed to do or understand.

    A really simple example I have a Jenkins function which I tend to slip into release pipelines, it captures the release version and creates a version in Jira.

    I normally deploy it first as a test before a few other functions to automate various service management requirements.

    Its surprising how many devs will suddenly decide every problem (test failed, code failed review, sharepoint breaks, bad os update, etc…) is due to that function.

    For me this little function is a test, if the team don’t care I will work to integrate various bits. If they freak out, I’ll revert decide if it is worth walking them through the process or walk away.


  • One of the reasons for the #DevOps movement is developers see building and packaging as #notmyjob.

    The task would historically fall on the most junior member of the team, who would make a pigs ear out of it due to complete lack of experience.

    This is compounded by the issue that most C/C++ build systems don’t really include dependency management.

    Linux distributions have all tried to work out those dependency trees but they came up with slightly different solutions. This is why there are a few “root” distributions everything branches from.

    That means developers have to learn about a few root distributions to design a deb/rpm/aur package systems to base their release around.

    That is a considerable amount of learning in a subject most aren’t interested in.

    The real question is why don’t package maintainers upstream a packaging solution?


  • It never quite finds its grove.

    Season 1, 2 & 3 all had fantastic premises I would have loved 7 seasons of but were all unrelated and concluded within a season.

    Season 4 actually demonstrates the missed opportunity, they deal with the fall out of season 3

    For example if you think of the scene set in “A Vulkan Hello”, you would have ended up with an Action focussed version of DS9.

    You didn’t need a spore drive, Jason Isaacs could have stayed the same and we could still have watched scientists struggle to become soliders with the war causing the type of fall out we see in Season 4.


  • Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

    Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

    KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

    The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.


  • Github stars is not a good metric, firstly because KBin is hosted on codeberg but mainly because a healthy project has lots of unique contributors and regular updates/enhancements.

    KBin has 79 open Pull Requests, while Lemmy has 29. From a visual check PR’s seem to be older than 2 weeks. Its hard to say one is “healthier” than the other, without scraping information into a spreadsheet.

    Secondly Rust is new and has a lot of hype surrounding it, as a result you get a lot of people using it on random projects.

    Languages have strengths and weaknesses and developer ecosystems build on the strengths.

    For example if I was writing a web application with a database backend I would choose C#, Java or Node.js because there are loads of libraries, tools and frameworks to make it really easy.

    Rust is gaining a lot of adoption by embedded system users (replacing C mostly). Lemmy is the only Rust based web server project I am aware of. Which means the level of work to do anything and to keep it updated falls on the Lemmy devs rather than spread out amongst a larger community.

    Everyone loves to insult PHP but it has a niche in webservers and won’t disappear anytime soon. KBin effort will thus be spent on KBin.


  • There is a standard for sharing tweet style information and for threaded type information between websites.

    You have software which implements the tweet standard (Mastodon), the threaded standard (lemmy) and both (KBin).

    You’ll notice some communities will be community@kbin.social or community@kbin.cafe, etc… this indicates they are not local to the website your using and those addresses are KBin instances, its just your website has a copy of the information.

    KBin is newer than Lemmy, it has a fairly simple responsive design that works well on mobile. Lemmy has a REST api so its easier to build mobile applications, a lot of people seem to expect/need to access websites via mobile applications.

    The key difference is Lemmy is developed by Tankies, they think China’s genocide of Ughurs is justified and they administer lemmy.ml.



  • KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

    The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

    Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

    Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

    Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

    The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

    The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

    I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

    This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.



  • Thinking of Apple kit as Jewelry makes so much sense.

    I have a pair of £40 Bluetooth earbuds and recently asked a group of co-workers why they owned Airpods.

    They all admitted the sound quality was worse but it has a nifty find my airpod function. Which put me off buying Airpods.

    Thinking of them as £200 earrings explains alot. The reason you buy them isn’t for a practical purpose but to be seen in them or look pretty (which is entirely subjective).