Atomic wafers made by the techo-church-state? Or have I got this back to front and this is how the non-technical society irradiates its children?

*mooshrooms

Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn’t affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

We rented our technology and could not read nor write.

Brilliant book.

I like the bit about how proud the author was to develop a purple liquid rocket fuel, but then discover it wasn’t useful :(

25/10 for 65AUD/m (43USD/m). Australia, NBN (monopoly across entire country, technically government owned but run like a private corp because of politics). It’s the lowest speed now available, but it’s already overpriced. $780/year is far more than all of my wifi capable equipment is worth together, including laptops.

I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

**In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.

In Kerbal Space Program your ships sometimes catch the NaN virus. If one fuel tank level is reading NaN then whatever you do DON’T try and fill it from another (full) tank. I’m not sure if it can spread to physics (thrust, mass, etc) EDIT: Yes it can happen to physics, oh dear.

I wonder what would happen if you landed a NaN-infected spaceship on a planet.

Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.

“Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!”

“Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?”
“No Thomas, that would just make them lazy.”
“Then shouldn’t you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?”
“No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy”

Hiring: Low level guys.

Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.

– Dungeon management

I’m very curious about the downvotes to this one. May I ask people’s thoughts? Perhaps I’m too vague? I can put a bigger story about my experiences with various init systems in production & research if people are interested.

https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

A custom discord client that supports streaming with audio on Linux

Jaysus, I wish this were a world where stuff like that wasn’t necessary.

Uneducated question: what’s the benefit of a dedicated client over running it in a normal browser?

That absolutely sucks :| Thankyou for the detail.

The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…

I probably made the overlap unclear, sorry:

• Pipewire issues: My 2023 desktop and 2016 laptop, very different hardware.
• Pulseaudio issues: All of my pre-2023 desktops and several family laptops

I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us).

Eep, that’s annoying. You also probably don’t have direct interaction with the users most of the time (they’re not your customer) which makes this worse, people in a vacuum follow each other’s stories.

In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)

There might be a bias here because these problems are not persistent, ie a reboot fixes them.

In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.

That’s potentially more things different distros can do differently and more issues your middleware will start getting blamed for.

Yes it’s not a problem for user-friendly distros, but why does the user friendliness problem exist anywhere anyway? It’s better to fix problems upstream, not downstream.

If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now

I think that’s a “winners write history” situation. There were other options at the time that might have been better choices. Everyone uses it now because of Redhat and Debian being upstream to most users, desktop and corporate. I was not surprised by Redhat adopting it (it’s their own product) but Debian was quite the shock.

Yes systemd is definitely a step up from traditional initscripts (oh god). In terms of simplicity, reliability and ease of configuration however it’s a step below other options (like runit). I don’t have distro management experience but, given the problems I’ve encountered with different init systems over the years, I suspect there would be less of a maintenance burden with the other options.

The formerly successful site known as Twitter.

I’ve been using PipeWire this year on my Void Linux laptop & desktop. It’s been mostly OK but has a few problems. For years I have been using plain ALSA (with no custom configuration) because pulseaudio causes me regular issues across multiple machines (mostly silently failing).

Pros:

• I don’t have to use Chromium for my mic to work on online video conf (WTF Firefox)
• “EasyEffects” lets me quickly fix crappy youtube audio (bad gain normalisation, way too much sibilance) with a minimum of effort.

Cons:

• Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
• First time setup is complicated, involving environment variables, dbus user session buses and multiple daemons (running just pipewire isn’t enough). Why can’t it handle this all itself? Surely it should notice if these things are missing and just fix it itself? Compare this to straight ALSA where you (1) do nothing and then (2) everything works (except Firefox mic support)
• I can’t have multiple audio outputs all unmuted at the same time. Eg my headphone output and my rear speaker output. If I override this (using alsamixer) then it gets forgotten next boot anyway, it seems to be out of scope of PipeWire’s understanding.

Can you describe the issue? I don’t use Discord (and I presume the problem might depend on what browser you use).

Probably Windows update running in the background. On laptops it’s a particularly garbage experience (fan spins up & runs hot as you say) with no communication until it’s “done”. If you have deigned not to turn on Windows for a while (tisk tisk) then it might require multiple reboots and a forced fullscreen blue questioning about why you’re not using OneDrive and sharing more information (OOBE).

Are they still doing the MoDeRn standby thing where windows update runs when your laptop is “in standby” in your bag?

My approach to handling Windows Update is to use my imagination. You’re in an alternative dimension where a medieval super-powerful church-state controls technology. Windows update is a regular procedure required to obtain the necessary computing purity and state that has been deemed appropriate for your status. Those who choose to ford their own lazy path without it risk requiring the penance of reinstallation, or even worse, revocation. An occasional skip of your sessions is tolerated, but if you no longer habitually open your laptop for a few hours each morning then you will develop the symptoms.

Exactly this. Second hand thinkpads are stupidly cheap – I’m currently typing on my $180AUD laptop. I never buy new.