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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Having had one of the old Windows phones with a keyboard dumped on me at an old workplace, can confirm it’s completely possible for a phone to have a keyboard and be a complete piece of shit.

    A good phone with a good keyboard may have some use cases. If you do a lot of writing but not any more computing power or screen space than a phone has, plus you want to be doing that on the move, then yeah. For me, can shitpost on forums using my phone in my spare time, and dealing with on-call work issues - having multiple tabs of Jira and Slack open, for instance - just isn’t really practical on a small screen.

    If your job is very email-centric, then yeah, sure. Blackberry were very good for just having the stuff you need - email, vpn, ‘corporate’ office documents - in a form that worked.




  • My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy ‘todo’ list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It’s a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you’ve been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

    Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can’t do with the command line and ssh. But it’s free, so there’s no downside.


  • Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I’d been working on.

    Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it’s a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, “very Github inspired” interface. Time to run some updates…


  • We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.

    Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.


  • When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

    Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

    I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.



  • Cheaper for now, since venture capitalist cash is paying to keep those extremely expensive servers running. The AI experiments at my work (automatically generating documentation) have got about an 80% reject rate - sometimes they’re not right, sometimes they’re not even wrong - and it’s not really an improvement on time having to review it all versus just doing the work.

    No doubt there are places where AI makes sense; a lot of those places seem to be in enhancing the output of someone who is already very skilled. So let’s see how “cheaper” works out.


  • Yes, because it doesn’t do as much to protect you from data corruption.

    If you have a use case where a barely-measurable increase in speed is essential, but not so essential that you wouldn’t just pay for more RAM to keep it in cache, and also it doesn’t matter if you get the wrong answer because you’ve not noticed the disk is failing, and you can afford to lose everything in the case of a power cut, then sure, use a legacy filesystem. Otherwise, use a modern one.



  • Yeah.

    There’s a couple of ways of looking at it; general purpose computers generally implement ‘soft’ real time functionality. It’s usually a requirement for music and video production; if you want to keep to a steady 60fps, then you need to update the screen and the audio buffer absolutely every 16 ms. To achieve that, the AV thread runs at a higher priority than any other thread. The real-time scheduler doesn’t let a lower-priority thread run until every higher-priority thread is finished. Normally that means worse performance overall, and in some cases can softlock the system - if the AV thread gets stuck in a loop, your computer won’t even respond to keyboard input.

    Soft real-time is appropriate for when no-one will die if a timeslot is missed. A video stutter won’t kill you. Hard real-time is for things like industrial control. If the anti-lock breaks in your car are meant to evaluate your wheels one hundred times a second, then taking 11 ms to evaluate that is a complete system failure, even if the answer is correct. Note that it doesn’t matter if it gets the right answer in 1 ms or 9 ms, as long as it never ever takes more than 10. Hard real-time performance does not mean good performance, it means predictable performance.

    When we program up PLCs in industrial settings, for our ‘critical sections’, we’ll processor interrupts, so that we know our code will absolutely run in time. We use specialised languages as well - no loops, no recursion - that don’t let you do things that can’t be checked for an upper time bound. Lots of finite state machines! But when we’re done, we know that we’ve got code that won’t miss a time slot in the next twenty years of operation.

    That does mean, ironically, that my old Amiga was a better music computer than my current desktop, despite being millions of times less powerful. OctaMED could take over the whole CPU whenever it liked. Whereas a modern desktop might always have to respond to a USB device or a hard drive, leading to a potential stutter at any time. Tiny probability, but not an acceptable one.