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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • My question: How do I actually physically notice the difference between these kernels?

    Generally, you don’t. You can look for some benchmark to try and find a difference between them, but if you don’t notice a difference in your day to day tasks, then it’s all the same. In my experience you should pick a kernel based on your desired experience. For my needs this is how the kernels differ:

    • Generic kernel: a sane default for most regular users
    • LTS: only makes sense if you’re worried about regressions in the generic kernel causing issues, and only viable if you can afford to stay behind on hardware driver updates, ie you use old hardware and/or optimal performance is not required
    • Zen: sometimes better for gaming, but often indistinguishable from the generic kernel
    • Realtime: rarely what you want, it sounds “faster” but it’s basically optimized for very specific use cases and if you’re not among them you’ll see the same or worse performance



  • These are valid concerns but to me they sound more like lack of tooling rather than inherent disadvantages of immutable distros. Linux distros have not historically been designed from the ground up for immutability and it makes sense that there are issues that aren’t handled optimally. Surely we can come up with clean and simple solutions to basic problems like setting up daemons and drivers if we work on it!





  • There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

    All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.


  • The sooner the screen stops moving the sooner your eyes can lock on, focus and read.

    On the other hand, if I’m reading through a command’s output and searching for something, abrupt movement of the contents make me lose track of where I am and it costs more time to reorient myself than the smooth scrolling animation would take to play out. More importantly (to me), it takes less mental effort as well. It’s just a more comfortable experience. Ever since I switched to neovide instead of plain nvim I find myself enjoying long coding sessions much more.

    It sounds like you just might not be negatively affected by the abrupt movement as much as some of us are. You might now get why we care about smooth scrolling because it happens to not do anything for you. That’s fine and a good implementation would allow the user to toggle it on/off based on their needs.

    Also you could scroll and end up with half a line visible on the top or bottom, which is just kinda weird and wasting space.

    No, I imagine that’s not the way most terminal emulators would implement it. Scrolling would still be done in whole lines, it would just animate smoothly towards the final position rather than jump instantly to it. You would not be able to end up on a half-line or something.



  • Take note Bluesky fans: Your “benevolent” controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board…

    Isn’t Bluesky an open-source implementation of an open protocol? And isn’t Bluesky already a for-profit organization? The point is you don’t trust the corporation. You trust the availability of the code and the protocol specification. People should be setting up instances just like they did with lemmy.



  • On HDMI 2.1, you can do 8K30fps before you have to compress the stream with DSC, which is “visually lossless”, so actually lossy. We don’t even have 5K120fps or 4K240fps without compression. These are common refresh rates for gaming. So you could say that the highest resolution that supports all use cases without compromises is 1440p. That’s definitely not enough even by today’s standards. I think you’re underestimating the time it takes for standards to reach widespread adoption. The average viewer is not going to have access to it until the technology is cheap and enough time has passed for at least a few hundred million units to have reached the market. If you think you’re going to be using it in 2030 or later for your “average broadcast”, then it needs to be designed today.

    Of course HDMI is shit for reasons you mention. DisplayPort is better, but it’s not an open standard either and it supports DRM as well. But designing for higher bandwidth is necessary and it has nothing to do with HDMI’s problems.


  • Yes, this is normal and it’s a good thing (unless you’ve come across a bug). I don’t know exactly what app the screenshot is showing, but I’m guessing that the caching shown is referring to the filesystem cache. The kernel is keeping a cache of files you are likely to access again so that it doesn’t have to read them from storage again. So what you’re seeing here is that some memory contents were moved to swap to make room for filesystem cache. This is because the kernel believes you’re more likely to access those files again rather than the memory contents. If it’s right, then this a performance improvement despite the fear surrounding swap usage.

    Setting a low non-zero swappiness value is telling the kernel that memory contents have priority over filesystem cache for remaining in RAM, or conversely that file cache is more likely to be evicted from the RAM. A value of 100 would mean that they have equal priority. So that memory content must have been very stale to be evicted despite having a significantly higher priority to reside in RAM.

    So:

    • don’t worry about swap usage unless you’re experiencing actual performance issues
    • for ssd’s the value should be close to 100
    • for hdd’s it should be low
    • if you’re using both on your system, the default value of 60 is probably a decent approximation of the optimal value

    Source: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html




  • For anyone stumbling onto this who actually wants to be educated, the science has practically unanimously agreed that climate change is mainly caused by human activity. No expert is unaware of the cycles that temporarily affect climate. They are well studied, modeled, and found to pale in comparison to human-made climate change. You can find comparisons between human and natural drivers, with sources from expert organizations and scientific studies, here and here. Funnily enough, the NOAA, which this commenter used as a source for El Niño and La Niña below, also hosts this article which literally starts by linking to a page that points out how climate change is mostly caused by humans.




  • I’ve also read Vaxry’s response and it’s complete nonsense. It’s even apparent in your condensed version.

    Uh, we don’t have a CoC

    Exactly. This is more than “an incident” as you put it. It’s a long-lasting pattern of Vaxry refusing to commit to any standards of behavior. He explicitly calls “upholding any value” nothing but an inconvenience. His only reaction to his community ridiculing the concept of a CoC is to say “nice one”.

    What’s funny is that the person who opened the issue said “Instead of attacking the post, could you provide some evidence against it? (e.g. say “Trans rights are human rights”)” and it was completely ignored. See, the CoC is not about the text itself. It’s about taking an open stance against bigotry. Vaxry can cry all day about how this one incident is misrepresented and how moderation has become more strict now, but nowhere in this discussion or the FDO emails or his own blog about the issue have I seen him take an actual moral stance on the issue.

    we don’t belong to your organization

    What does this have to do with anything? FDO, a space that aims to be LGBTQ+ friendly, banned a bigoted person from participating, as they should. It’s such a stupid childish argument to say “but I didn’t out myself as a bigot in a commit message I submitted to you, checkmate!”. No-one cares. You can’t leave your “fuck trans people, lol” sign at the door and walk in, mate. You’re still a toxic asshole and you’re still a threat to the LBGTQ+ people we want to participate in our community.

    He also said that the misrepresentation got to such point that a another transgender coder made a contribution to Vaxry’s project, expecting that it would be rejected, and got surprised that her PR got merged.

    This is just so funny to hear from Vaxry himself. After people have repeatedly tried to explain to him that not enforcing any code of conduct on a toxic community is going to make it an unsafe space for LGBTQ+ people, Vaxry is shocked to find that LGBTQ+ people are afraid of being discriminated against!

    Oh, but no, you see it’s because of the “misrepresentation”! Vaxry’s had made it so clear through his words and actions that trans rights are human rights and that bigotry is unacceptable, so it can’t possibly be on him. Even as he’s posting pictures this conversation where he’s accused of being a transphobe, and a trans person is expecting to get rejected, does he point out how he’s not a transphobe and how he respects all human rights? Nope, he only says that he only cares about the code.

    But that’s just me picking apart his comments in a few specific discussions. What if he has in fact taken a moral stance, but just not in these particular discussions where’s he’s felt attacked and pressured into making a statement?

    He did post this in one of his blog posts:

    With that, I believe that every human’s opinion is valuable and important, and most crucially, equal. There is no point in having some people’s opinions be more important than others. That is the essence of discrimination.

    Hey, that’s not bad. There’s mention of equality here and he seems against discrimination! Now let’s read the rest of this Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS blog post and see what it’s really about! Oh no, the above statement was only to set the stage for accusing SJWs of not understanding that not everyone agrees with them and how they shouldn’t “cancel” us for “saying bad words”. So he does think to talk about equality and discrimination, just not in any of the above discussions. But he’ll do it here to defense people acting like assholes on the internet!

    And then he says this:

    if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

    that is inclusivity

    So there you have it. Vaxry will literally accept Hilter into his community, just casually interacting with Jewish people (presumably he doesn’t ban them from participating). It’s all fine, just as long as the gassing happens outside his own platform. Gosh, I wonder why people are feeling unwelcome in his community. Surely it is the misrepresentation of his views.

    Here’s an archive link for the above article just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20240511145845/https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists