Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Care to provide a few examples of borked games?
I'd say that simply trying a different Proton version from the drop down is hardly 'dicking around', you could try that.
No need to wedge SteamDeck onto the desktop, just enable SteamPlay (aka Proton support built-in to Steam) and play as you would on Windows.
I have several "Windows-Only" VR games that work out of the box on Linux, e.g. The Forest, Dead Effect 2, The Thrill of the Fight
Anyway I'd argue that Gaming on Linux is a superior experience, due to the horrendous experience of having to run Windows at all
...Oh.
That's a bit more than "we don't support Linux", that's more like "We unfairly discriminate against all Linux users because we think they are all cheats and hackers"
Any examples of games that are doing this? Their publishers need a talking-to.
But yes, in your earlier post, I agree it is time to ditch them, and tell your friends why
Well, i'd say the difference is that cars are very well standardised. There's only really one user-interface choice to make when buying a car: Automatic or Manual. And that too, thanks to EVs, is slowly becoming irrelevant. OK, EV or not EV is an important choice too, but it's one three-way choice since there are no manual EVs.
But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed, nowhere will you find a car that uses an aeroplane-style throttle, or one so customisable that you have to buy the doors and wingmirrors separately.
I agree with the OP and our Reg columnist Liam Proven that there is poor standardisation in the Linux world, however I disagree that better standardisation would necessarily make Linux better. Linux is built by enthusiasts/tinkerers, for enthusiasts/tinkerers and that is IMO what makes it great. There will be drawbacks in that people new to the Linux world don't know who to follow and what tech to learn, but that is better than the alternative, which is to remove choice from those who want it.
Perhaps try Syncthing to a local NAS to avoid the need for a cloud. There is an open-source phone app for it too, which is handy for accessing phone pictures on the PC.
As for Sky Sports, I assume they don't have a web client then?
Probably you could (see icon) find an alternative distributor, and as long as you are still paying Sky for the subscription, I'd be surprised if they could make a case against you for simply watching what you have paid to watch.
Personally, I would never trust a GUI to handle system upgrades. Even if I was on Windows, I would much prefer to see Windows print a log of wtf it is going to do, what it is doing, with the option to stop it. But no, all you get from Microsoft is "Hang Tight! We're getting everything ready for you!"
TBH, anti-virus is a losing battle, and comes with many drawbacks, i.e. most AVs are basically rootkits in of themselves. ClamAV is somewhat useful for scanning suspicious files, but in the days of infinitely permutable obfuscated code thanks in part to AI, as well as supply-chain attacks, you'd be a fool to rely on AV.
Run anything potentially-dodgy in a VM, monitor the network traffic and disk contents of the VM from outside. That's about the best you can do.
Just because a game "doesn't support Linux" doesn't mean you're out of luck. Check them on ProtonDB.
These days, it's a rare occasion when I find a game that doesn't work out of the box on steam. Just "apt install steam", go to options and "Enable SteamPlay for all titles" and try your favourite Windows game.
Not to defend Facebork at all, but the original deleted post wasn't about Linux generally, but specifically about openKylin, which is a somewhat-shady Chinese Linux distro that er, definitely doesn't contain malware.
The Reg article should have been clearer about that.
What IS extra shitty/incompetent though is that Facebork seem to have extended it to ban distroWatch itself, just because one of their posts was about openKylin
> Both Mathematica and Matlab tell me that 1 + 1 = 2. I suppose I could have worked that out myself...
> Testing on a 48 GB Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada graphics card, R1-70B at 4-bit precision required over a minute to solve for X.
I'm sure neither mathematica, matlab, or even one's own 20-Watt Brain would use anything close to 300W*60s=18kJ to solve "27 = X * 3 / 67"
If it takes you less than 15 minutes to solve this simple equation in your head, as might appear on a Year-9 SAT paper, then congratulations, your Mk1 brain has beaten the world's latest AI
> You can run the models yourself, at home. On pretty limited standard PC hardware.
Er, that's true of most huge GenAI models, including Facebook's LLama. They take a "large" model that has been trained at great energy cost and would require massive memory/compute resources to run the "full" model, but they reduce the parameter count via "pruning" and quantize it down to FP4 from FP16, resulting in a shit version that will run on a raspberry pi. Nothing new there. I'm sure it could be done with GPT models too, but OpenAI choose not to, for commercial reasons rather than technical. (I have come to learn that the "Open" in "OpenAI" is meant sarcastically)
But when I say that the Chinese may have lied about their energy use, i'm not talking about the running cost so much as the training cost. If they have trained it using outputs from other LLMs, then they need the energy both for training a 671 Billion parameter model (a lot) and also the energy for generating 14.8 trillion tokens using the source models (a lot)
As I said in my earlier post, using LLMs to generate training data for LLMs is horrendously inefficient. But if you want to copy someone else's LLM and add your own censorship, all you need is a big stack of GPUs and a hell of a lot of energy.
Why would they lie? Well because a) it helps to wipe trillions off of western tech stocks and b) if they told the truth about the GPUs that they used to train it, it might prove that they are evading US sanctions
> newly elected fire chief was revealed as being a convicted arsonist. You do have to wonder just what is going on there
What is going on there, is good old-fashioned nepotism, apparently:
"Despite Simmons’ record, he’s got emergency services in his blood. His dad, Herb Simmons, was the long-time director of the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency."
May I point out from the linked article, A man was "shot in a bathtub" and "officers found the man dead from what was initially believed to be a suspected overdose"
If these Keystone Cops struggle with the difference between a shooting and an overdose, I certainly wouldn't trust them to nab the right man
As you say, they have just seen another video, with the first having being too dark/grainy to identify a face, and said "that must be him!" Before passing it to Clearview to charge a random bloke who happened to be wearing the same colour T-shirt.
And then even if the keystone cops were right in their hunch, the chance of Clearview finding the right personentry in their database is significantly less than 1, as Clearview clearly state in their documents
I'm amazed that the case made it to court, never mind that the police are appealing to keep their shoddy evidence
Been there :(
Large Entities will give anything to not change their arcane/bizarre/(possibly corrupt) current working practices. And the salespeople from Oracle et al are highly adept at telling a customer exactly what they want to hear... Change nothing, our product is completely, nay infinitely customisable, for a small fee princely sum blank cheque. We will accommodate whatever dodgy system you have!
So naturally anyone who comes along and proposes something sensible will get sidelined. If they implement it on the side, then everyone non-manglement will love it, even lower-manglement will pretend to love it but will do nothing to support it. Upper manglement will actively poison it to get their way.
I now avoid working for Large Entities wherever possible.
> why the **** isn't our government (a) bringing the skill in house and (b) providing standard, modular building blocks to encourage councils to follow consistent patterns of work?
For much, much less than the amount being spaffed on the likes of Oracle, the government could expand its own IT team to supply and maintain software for local councils.
GDS is far from perfect, but they do have some expertise. Once they've solved the problem for one council, it shouldn't be too hard to replicate it for other councils.
But then again, i'm sure the local council mob would rather keep government noses out of their business, with all the dodgy deals they've done in the past, and will to do in future. (See Private Eyes ad nauseam)
Indeed, and I also fail to understand how no council seems to learn from the mistakes of other councils.
i.e. this certainly wasn't the first and certainly won't be the last council to get completely and utterly shafted by the Oracle cult.
it's almost like we could do with some er, in-house IT expertise.
I thought that, until I heard that apparently the captain tried to explain that he had weighed the anchor due to "stormy conditions"
That sounds fishy, because the ship stayed on course and only slowed down a bit, and then cut the cable. If there were such an emergency that it had to lower the anchor, then they would surely have a) stopped the engines (the anchor drops from the front, so it makes no sense to drag it for stability in a storm) and b) called for help
If he had outright denied that he ever gave an order to drop the anchor, then it would be more believable i.e. someone else on board (a stowaway from the Russian port, or a bribed crewman) could have done it without the rest of the crew noticing.
It's obvious yet still 'deniable'. Like shooting down passenger aircraft or planting grenades on board, shoving people out of windows, or staging a military training exercise on your border that turns into a special military operation, which turns out to be an invasion, which turns into a war
It's pretty much their M.O.
It's deliberately obvious, to try to send a message "here is the price of joining NATO and supporting Ukraine", while being just deniable enough to avoid directly triggering Article 5
three Four times.. Even Sal of wgowshipping (the only youtuber whom I currently bother giving my time to) is suspicious
> After all, at the end of the day a computer is simply a device for making mistakes faster.
And AI is a device for making even bigger mistakes, ones that can't easily be found, corrected or exactly reproduced (unlike, say, a wonky reference in a spreadsheet) even faster
It's not just that few people "need" AI, but few trust it, for good reason. Just because it "worked" today doesn't mean it will tomorrow, and when it doesn't, you'll have a hard time fixing it
Install Linux?
Actually, that would be hilarious if someone sets up a charity to take over the premises and offer help and training to those wishing to divorce from Borkzilla
I'd donate to it, and I'm sure it would be a lot more popular!
> Monitoring temperature and movement etc, useful for emergency alerts. Some even do chat stuff to give the illusion of not being alone.
Sounds like an interactive, "embodied" version of Oxevision (AI cameras on mental health wards)
What could possibly go wrong
Same tactic as Wetherspoons when acquiring a historic old bank or opera house building to be gutted and turned into a town's shittiest pub - they will set up a shell company to buy it, because the council would object to it being sold to Wetherspoons
---> closest thing to a sticky-carpet icon
> I drive an average of about 3 miles a week and visit a petrol station about once per year.
Er, it sounds like you could save a lot of money on road tax / insurance / MOT / etc. by not bothering to keep it, then?
Obviously you have your reasons, it might come in handy on the day before armageddon
You can have Gregg's Jumbo Sausage Roll if you like. I think he also does a "Coq au Sock", and could have given you a tour "inside the factory", until he was locked out.
(Greggs, i'm sure, would like to distinguish their rolls from Gregg's, and no doubt would be quick to point out the absence of an apostrophe in their company name)
Glad that's settled then!
Next time I am wasting the time of a telephone scammer, I will tell him that Rameshbhai says India doesn't want our hate-filled money anyway.
.. All that bollocks you posted about grand theft by a doddering nation, I wonder if that's what the scammers tell themselves when they are swindling old grannies out of their life savings..
BTW: I have many Indian friends, and you are the first I have conversed with whom I could describe as "Toxic and hate-filled". Perhaps that's what a BJP member looks like?
No.
And the required metric would be planting them *and waiting for them to grow back to useful size* faster than they are cut down
And not causing loss of habitat and biodiversity by turning natural forests into monoculture tree farms
And requiring Drax et al. to comply with the same air pollution standards (pm2.5 etc) as fossil plants are required to
And then finding something to do with the massive ash pile, composed of minerals and soil nutrients that have been permanently removed from the forest where the trees grew, thousands of miles away.. before they were chipped and dried at great energy cost and shipped across the world on Diesel-powered ships and trains
Oh and getting rid of the ridiculous carbon accounting rules that pretend the emissions occur somewhere else and thus qualify for low-carbon subsidies in the country that burns the stuff, while the country that is plundered for firewood has to pay carbon credits
How companies and energy suppliers such as Octopus can claim "100% Renewable Energy!" when on days like today, clearly that's not possible.
Yes I understand that they use ROCs or whatever to pretend they bought it at a different time than they actually did, but these things are a merrry-go-round of bullshit. E.g. how do you prove that the windfarm you bought the ROCs from hasn't just been paid Curtailment compensation meaning that the renewable energy that you "bought" at time offset x is nonexistent and shouldn't be sold as ROCs? The whole thing is about as transparent as Amazon's tax return.
Apparently we have 30GW installed Wind capacity in the UK, but I've never seen it go above 17GW. This morning it was producing 94MW i.e. 0.3% of "installed capacity".
