• 0 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

    I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

    I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.


  • My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.

    I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.


  • Laptops are a crapshoot, so I’d recommend sticking with distros that are known to support your specific model.

    Desktops should, in general, just work.

    That said, I’ve never personally had a seamless experience. There’s always something I need to struggle to configure. Usually it’s because I’m very picky and I like things to work MY way. The alternative on Widows would not be that it works my way; it would be that there’d be no way to do that so I’d just have to deal with it. If you’re willing to just roll with the defaults, then yeah, most basic things should just work.

    The biggest gotcha is GPU drivers. Not all distros ship with recent kernel versions with modern drivers. You should be pretty safe with Fedora and derivatives.









  • Weight & Diet Trackers

    I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

    I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

    Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.



  • And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

    I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.




  • Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.

    If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It’s hardly fair to compare AMD’s top-end to Nvidia’s top-end when Nvidia’s is over twice the price in the real world.

    If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don’t absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can’t fit your whole model in VRAM. I’d take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.

    You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you’d take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it’d still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that’s probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.