Chobbes's recent activity

  1. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Also good fucking god, I would love to have the source code for my TV so I could debug it and fix it when it segfaults >_<. Quality.

    Also good fucking god, I would love to have the source code for my TV so I could debug it and fix it when it segfaults >_<. Quality.

    1 vote
  2. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Oh, I totally agree that the overreach is ridiculous. I don't know if I agree that user-space anti-cheat software could be effective, though. It seems like something you would need some kernel...

    Oh, I totally agree that the overreach is ridiculous. I don't know if I agree that user-space anti-cheat software could be effective, though. It seems like something you would need some kernel level / hardware support for, to be honest. Not that that means we should accept these things, of course :). I'm honestly a little surprised we haven't seen more usage of TPMs and security extensions for DRM, and frankly I hope we never do because that gets dystopian very fast.

  3. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I kind of understand the desire for anti-cheat software, because cheating sucks... I've kind of ducked out of online gaming for the past decade, but I feel like part of this problem is that games...

    I kind of understand the desire for anti-cheat software, because cheating sucks... I've kind of ducked out of online gaming for the past decade, but I feel like part of this problem is that games have moved towards servers which are controlled by the companies instead of community servers so you have to rely on official moderation and stuff. Anti-cheat seems a lot more important when moderation is in the hands of the company and costs them money and there are no community servers which can enforce their own rules (which has its own problems too, of course, but I think it can be a win).

    3 votes
  4. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    There's a little bit of translation because of differences in calling conventions between Windows and Linux, I think, but yeah with WINE you're essentially just running "native code" (insomuch as...

    There's a little bit of translation because of differences in calling conventions between Windows and Linux, I think, but yeah with WINE you're essentially just running "native code" (insomuch as native code is a real thing, anyway, haha, the boundaries are a little fuzzy imo).

  5. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    binfmt_misc is a really cool Linux kernel feature that will let you transparently run executables from different architectures under QEMU and stuff. I imagine it can be put to great use for this...

    binfmt_misc is a really cool Linux kernel feature that will let you transparently run executables from different architectures under QEMU and stuff. I imagine it can be put to great use for this kind of stuff.

    3 votes
  6. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I'm not sure how much it will matter to be honest. There will almost certainly be games that don't work or perform poorly, but I'd probably wager a good chunk of games will be just fine with a bit...

    I'm not sure how much it will matter to be honest. There will almost certainly be games that don't work or perform poorly, but I'd probably wager a good chunk of games will be just fine with a bit of CPU emulation bottleneck, especially if the ARM chips keep getting more performant over time. I imagine it could be a bit like Proton on Linux where most games (particularly if they're not bleeding edge / really CPU bound) will just work fine, with a few notable exceptions.

    Still, I do find it disappointing that we have all of these proprietary x86 binaries out in the wild. It'd be really nice if we just had the source code so we could make proper ARM builds out of existing software, haha.

    ALSO... I dunno, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't really trust Qualcomm? Like I hope these chips are great, but doesn't Qualcomm kind of suck at supporting their old chips? Isn't that a huge part of the reason why Android phones had terrible long term software support? I really don't want to buy a laptop that will only be supported for 9 months T_T. I'm sure it will be better than the Android situation was, but god am I ever bitter about that lol.

    2 votes
  7. Comment on Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Yeah, this is something that's a bit unclear to me too. There's definitely stuff that's nice about ARM vs x86, but I don't think anybody fully knows how this will shape up, and sometimes I...

    I haven't seen any compelling arguments that one ISA is inherently more efficient than another, as neither ISA is truly representative of how their respective chips work under the hood anymore.

    Yeah, this is something that's a bit unclear to me too. There's definitely stuff that's nice about ARM vs x86, but I don't think anybody fully knows how this will shape up, and sometimes I convince myself that the x86 slander is kind of overblown and the differences don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things. Like... I wouldn't be terribly surprised if ARM ends up coming out on top, but overall I haven't seen great arguments for why it would dominate in all spaces vs x86. Like having a simpler instruction set with fixed-width instructions and more registers available feels like a win... But it's at least not obvious to my amateur eyes that stuff like the number of named registers matters when you start having register renaming and stuff in hardware anyway. All of the computer architecture people I talk to seem to be a little unsure too?

    Either way, I'd love for a more power efficient laptop, and the Apple Silicon chips seem really great for that use case... Hoping we can get some of those benefits in Thinkpad land.

    4 votes
  8. Comment on Titanfall is still EA's most innovative shooter ten years later in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Maybe you're just making a joke, but isn't that essentially what Apex Legends is?

    I'm pretty confident that EA will dig the IP up again sometime, but probably as a life service looter shooter. Come to think of it, I wonder why they haven't done so yet.

    Maybe you're just making a joke, but isn't that essentially what Apex Legends is?

    7 votes
  9. Comment on Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I think I legit just missed that sentence when I was reading it, lol. Apologies :). Yeah, absolutely. In theory the sending mail server could enforce names for senders... but like... no personal...

    That said, I did address SPF and DKIM when I said the following:

    I think I legit just missed that sentence when I was reading it, lol. Apologies :).

    ...and even then, if your email domain has DKIM and SPF setup correctly, and Glassdoor's email server has done likewise, none of that stops you from saying in the From: header that your name is John Doe when it's actually Jane Smith. So even with proper email standards implemented, just taking the sender name from an email as gospel about who you're talking to is an absurd failure.

    Yeah, absolutely. In theory the sending mail server could enforce names for senders... but like... no personal e-mail services will enforce that.

    Anyway, this was all just me tangenting to nerding about e-mail. At the end of the day none of this matters, and the point is that this is kind of a crazy decision on many levels. I can understand glassdoor wanting to ensure you actually worked at the company... But people should absolutely be allowed to be anonymous on that platform.

    2 votes
  10. Comment on Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I don't think there's any protections at all for the name in the From field. But at least for the e-mail addresses themselves, this is getting less true over time. I still wouldn't fully trust it...

    There's no ensuring that the name in an email To: header is the legit sender of the message.

    I don't think there's any protections at all for the name in the From field. But at least for the e-mail addresses themselves, this is getting less true over time. I still wouldn't fully trust it and it's not something most users are capable of verifying, but if the domain for the sender has set up SPF and DKIM and the receiving mail server actually checks those things, then anybody trying to spoof an e-mail from your address should get sent to oblivion, at least... But it's not quite a guarantee.

    1 vote
  11. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    And the 5 users that claim they don't want it will inevitably never use --no-update-keyring because there's basically no reason for anybody to ever do that.

    And the 5 users that claim they don't want it will inevitably never use --no-update-keyring because there's basically no reason for anybody to ever do that.

    2 votes
  12. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I don't do android dev, but it always seems super painful. I hope you find a solution lol.

    I don't do android dev, but it always seems super painful. I hope you find a solution lol.

    1 vote
  13. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    The only justification I can think of is that they might want to keep things minimal and not have a special case to update the keyring first or something... But frankly, I just don't respect that...

    The only justification I can think of is that they might want to keep things minimal and not have a special case to update the keyring first or something... But frankly, I just don't respect that line of reasoning. This is constantly a problem for everybody, and it feels like the package manager is broken if it doesn't take into account the fact that updating any package depends on the keyring. I think they finally addressed this by adding a systemd timer to update the keyring recently, but it just feels like a kludge and the fact that it took YEARS to do that is disappointing. I was a Gentoo user, and I switched to Arch temporarily when I got a new computer because I needed to get set up fast and didn't want to compile everything... But I was pretty disappointed with my Arch experience to be honest. It just feels like there's a bunch of places to stub your toes because Arch users want to have a couple of manual tricks they have to do every so often to feel smug about. It's like the Linux equivalent of having to add eggs to cake mixes so you feel like you're doing something.

    I think my other major gripes (which may be wrong, it's been a while) were 1) when a kernel update happens Arch removes all of the old kernel modules immediately, so if you have a USB device that needs a module that you haven't loaded before and you plug it in after running an update it won't work (yes, you should reboot after a kernel update, but no, I'd like it if you don't break the current system while updating), and 2) downgrading packages wasn't a great experience when the packages broke (rollbacks with btrfs or whatever would help, but iirc you just had to hope you still had the old version in your pacman cache, because I think the Arch repos only keep the latest version available? Annoying when the intel wifi drivers break lol). Maybe this is just another "get gud" situation, and you can certainly manually put things in place to ease these problems, but doing that always makes it feel like a hack (and you have to manually do this for every machine, ugh). I also never really understood why 3rd party packages from AUR couldn't be added to pacman, so you have all of these unofficial package managers like yay and aura to install things from AUR... I get that it's slightly different because you have to build the packages from source, and AUR is an untrusted repository... but it feels like it should be integrated better. I'm probably just bad at Arch, but I honestly don't understand why everybody uses it... I guess it's the main option for a binary minimalistic distribution, but it just feels unpolished to me. It's easily the distro that I've had the worst experiences with personally, but other people love it so fair enough, I guess!

    3 votes
  14. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Sounds like you could use some nix in your life! On the plus side you don't have to install NixOS in order to use the nix package manager for development environments on your main machine, it can...

    This has me thinking it might be worth it. I work from home and I rely on virtual machines to isolate work environments which is a huge pain in the ass because they have to live on an ext4 drive and I have to manually backup important stuff with shared folders and it's pretty gross.

    Sounds like you could use some nix in your life! On the plus side you don't have to install NixOS in order to use the nix package manager for development environments on your main machine, it can exist alongside your current distribution, so you can try it out incrementally pretty easily :).

    It should be much more lightweight than having a bunch of VMs O_O. I had a huge amount of pain dealing with projects with different dependencies before... I also frequently had to backport fixes to older versions of a project and it was super painful to keep track of all of the valid dependencies from the past and the valid dependencies in the present. Now all of the dependencies are pinned in the git repo using nix so when I switch branches my shell automatically picks up the new dependencies for everything and switches everything over... If I've used that version of things before it's cached locally so I don't have to download anything or build any dependencies and it's instant. It's actually amazing. No VMs, no containers, nothing in the way... I can just use my normal text editor and access everything directly from my normal operating system.

    Plus, even if you do want VMs or docker containers you can use nix to build those! One cool thing you can do with nix is build a VM of a nixos system to test it before you even reboot. There's so many nifty things nix lets you do.

    Nix looks weird and seems complicated at first, but fundamentally it's not much more than funny looking JSON with recursive functions for specifying dependencies / build steps for a project.

    2 votes
  15. Comment on A Max password-sharing crackdown is coming in ~tv

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I mean Netflix even advertised based on password sharing in the past, didn't it? I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to crack down on 20 people sharing the same account or whatever, but it's...

    the streamers themselves are to blame for letting that slide for over a decade

    I mean Netflix even advertised based on password sharing in the past, didn't it?

    I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to crack down on 20 people sharing the same account or whatever, but it's not cool if it causes problems for individuals using their own accounts from multiple locations or whatever. I'd be pissed if the account I pay for was flagged erroneously, so I would hope they're fairly cautious to avoid false positives...

    6 votes
  16. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I feel like Gentoo is actually more stable than Arch and does a better job at avoiding basic footguns. The archlinux keyring update issue is just embarrassing, and in my experience there's a...

    I feel like Gentoo is actually more stable than Arch and does a better job at avoiding basic footguns. The archlinux keyring update issue is just embarrassing, and in my experience there's a number of similar issues with Arch. It's not completely unmanageable, but some small quality of life improvements would be very welcome.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    I use both NixOS and btrfs, and frankly you can pry NixOS from my cold dead hands. I'd rather shove everything on a terrible fat32 partition with NixOS than btrfs without. I feel like anybody who...

    I use both NixOS and btrfs, and frankly you can pry NixOS from my cold dead hands. I'd rather shove everything on a terrible fat32 partition with NixOS than btrfs without.

    I feel like anybody who is doing rollbacks of any kind is probably already not an "average user", so I dunno. You're probably right that the approach NixOS / Nix takes will never be mainstream for the typical Linux person, and that CoW filesystems will slowly migrate into the defaults for more and more distros over time, and if package managers and grub or whatever automatically handle snapshots then people will probably use it pretty transparently (though ideally the average user is on a stable enough distro that doesn't break everything all of the time, but you know... nothing's perfect, lol).

    But, average user or not, Nix / NixOS are huge wins for me personally and more game-changing than btrfs was for me. Rollbacks are one big benefit for sure, but they're not the only one. Personally I'm happier with NixOS for rollbacks and "system 'backups'" because it's much cheaper to backup and ship around a small configuration file than all of the binaries (but NixOS also lets me cache all of my binaries too, and distribute them to other machines, even custom-built binaries). The NixOS configuration contains everything so it's trivial for me to get a new machine, plop the config file on it, and have it build everything exactly how I want it, without going through the painful process of figuring out what directories and things I actually want to copy over to the new machine and permissions and whatnot and waiting hours to copy over every little thing from an external hard drive or whatever. If you have multiple machines (even just a desktop and a laptop) NixOS is a game changer for keeping everything in sync between them, and it makes having additional customizations feasible because I don't have to worry about copying things over and maintaining the configurations manually (a good example of this is maybe my wireguard configuration, normally it's kind of a pain to set up all of the peers in wireguard, but my nix configuration just has a list of hosts and it automatically generates all of the connections between nodes in the wireguard configuration for a given machine so everybody can connect to each other and be merry). It's also often easier to make big sweeping changes with NixOS, like when I wanted to try pipewire it was basically just a matter of replacing services.pulseaudio.enable=true with services.pipewire.enable=true and everything happened like magic. But honestly, the biggest thing for me is that it's a godsend for development environments, especially when you need multiple versions of the same package for different projects.

    Nix definitely isn't perfect, and it's no sweat off my back whether or not you try it, but if it's something that works for you it's absolutely game changing in so many ways.

    6 votes
  18. Comment on Returning to Monkey Island in ~games

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Never played a Monkey Island game (it's on the list to eventually try!)... But I'm very much in favor of shorter games. There's a lot of people who seem to want games you can put thousands of...

    Never played a Monkey Island game (it's on the list to eventually try!)... But I'm very much in favor of shorter games. There's a lot of people who seem to want games you can put thousands of hours into, and I can totally understand why people value that (especially if you're a kid / teenager on a tight budget), but especially as I get older I find that often what I like the most are games that will give me a unique experience and a well-crafted story that last a few sessions at most. My absolute favourite experiences have been games that you sit down and play in a single sitting... There's something kind of immersive about just sitting down and seeing something to completion, and it's nice to not have to worry about when you're going to pick it up again and what you will have forgotten, it's something you can just keep in your head throughout. My biggest issue with short things, though, is that sometimes I feel like things have to be kept simple because you cannot develop a lot of skill and muscle memory in a short timeframe... Which is definitely okay, but it's a bit of a limitation on what can be done, and I also value when people put a lot of effort into achieving perfection in something, so it sometimes makes me a little sad to think that something is a little more ephemeral and not something I'd really focus on?

    5 votes
  19. Comment on G-Sync/Freesync - What's your opinion? in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    Not on the internal display, though, which is why I was confused about it being brought up in the context of gaming monitors that support VRR.

    Not on the internal display, though, which is why I was confused about it being brought up in the context of gaming monitors that support VRR.

    6 votes
  20. Comment on G-Sync/Freesync - What's your opinion? in ~tech

    Chobbes
    Link Parent
    The Steam Deck doesn't support VRR. Do you mean that you can just change the refresh rate of the display to something arbitrary?

    The Steam Deck doesn't support VRR. Do you mean that you can just change the refresh rate of the display to something arbitrary?

    1 vote