NeatNit

joined 2 years ago
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*Ties blindfold, lights cigarette* in c/memes@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Valve is in the same position of power, or an even greater position of power, as Sony. But Valve has never (to my knowledge) removed games from customers' libraries without compensation. Valve has the track record of not abusing their position of power to the detriment of gamers.

Personally, I still don't like the amount of power they do hold, which is why I prefer to get my games from GOG when I can. But historically, Valve is not anti-consumer. Valve/Gaben are no angels, they have their fair share of billionaire behavior, but there is simply no comparison with Sony.

OP doesn’t like Linux in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it's fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don't know enough about package management to know for certain.

Why would there be anything wrong? in c/memes@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

Literally reading this on a trolley where everything is fine.

(by which I mean train, I actually have no idea what a "trolley" actually is)

If you speak another language: do you know examples of mistranslations via subtitles? in c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 20 hours ago

Watched Avatar: The Last Airbender with Hebrew subtitles, there were loads of mistranslations. Sometimes stating the exact opposite of what the English original said, other times the transistor just completely doesn't understand what they're translating and results in random nonsense statements. Sorry I don't have any specific examples, but really it's too common.

Lest you think it's because it's a kids show: more recently I've been watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators with my mom (a British cosy mystery comedy-drama television series, thanks Wikipedia), and mistranslations in the subtitles are just as common.

It really makes me worry about how common similar mistakes could be in e.g. Japanese content (anime, video games) subbed to English. I don't know any Japanese, so my ONLY source of information is the English sub, and if it's as flaky as the Hebrew subs for English sources, I really could be missing out :(

Which national flags would you change? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world I believe this reply ^ was intended for you

Which national flags would you change? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

Happy to accidentally be of service :)

Why do tires have the width and diameter they do? in c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

When the vehicle weight increases while tire PSI stays the same, the contact patch (area squished flat against the pavement) increases in size.

If the vehicle gets heavier, doesn't the tire pressure increase?

Cat causes a 2-day flight delay in c/cat@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The article doesn't mention a "million-dollar loss", where is the picture from?

The only mention of money in the article is at the end:

... the unauthorised cat posed a serious risk at cruising altitude and could have cost the Irish budget airline thousands of dollars in damages.

Who wants some sour cream and onion chips? in c/cat@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

There's something much too sweet in that Pringles can.

Which national flags would you change? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Note: some flags (like 🇸🇾Syria) were changed recently enough that the emoji could look different depending on your operating system and which app or browser you're using for Lemmy. Gboard shows me the new flag (green on top, 3 red stars), but Voyager/Android 16 shows the old flag (red on top, 2 green stars). It's unavoidable when Unicode is used to encode things that can change, like flags. But it's better than nothing!

The only way around it is to embed pictures of flags, but that takes more effort. And data.

Which national flags would you change? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A reply for one that hits too close to home... Israel's flag, it was our flag long before and I don't think it necessarily represents the atrocities of the past few years. I definitely hope for (and try to work towards) a "regime change", by which I mean more of a regime resuscitation as it is kind of a democracy on its death bed, which has always been flawed to some capacity but isn't unsalvageable. I think. (Honestly though, what do I know about regime change...)

Getting sidetracked, but back to the flag. Israel has flown this flag basically since its first independence, and while it never actually was at peace (welcome to the middle east...), there have been long periods where it actively sought peace and even made great concessions to try to achieve it. It seems wrong to disregard that history, and only associate the flag with what the state has done in recent years. The flag doesn't need to change for the state's policy to change. If it did, then it would already have been changed.

As a point of comparison, the flags used by the British Empire are not so tainted by the atrocities of imperialism that they can't be used today. England has changed, but its flag doesn't have to. It carries its history, the good and the bad.

Which national flags would you change? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

Petition for you to add flag emoji to each country mention, e.g. "🇵🇱 Poland", for those of us (me!) who are vexillologically challenged and don't remember any flags.

Edit: an attempt, based on gboard's emoji search functionality and with zero verification:

great post

Let's make a tierlist sbout how urgent it is for them to change:

S:

  • 🇵🇱Poland's flag is supposedly derived from a white bird against a setting sun. To me it would make sense to include that imagery on the flag, or a historical coat of arms.
  • I think places like 🇸🇾Syria, 🇪🇬Egypt, 🇱🇾Libya, 🇮🇶Iraq need to agree on a different colour scheme for themselves. At the moment they're confusingly similar

A:

  • 🇮🇱Israel (changing flag after a hopeful regime change would be prudent because it's like a symbol of genocide now.)

B:

  • 🇱🇺Luxembourg (too similar to 🇳🇱Netherlands),
  • 🇨🇳China (i find china's flag really dull even if it is iconic. They surely want to invoke their historical longevity rather than just Communism. Stars represent the key chinese regions, which seems like a good feature - the red does not.)

F:

  • I don't think i'd change it, but 🇨🇦Canada seems as/more close to britain than 🇦🇺Australia so it makes more sense to give a little 🇬🇧Union Jack in the top left corner.
55
Is there a parenthesis gesture like there are air quotes? (discuss.tchncs.de)
 

This is something between a question and a shower thought. People use air quotes to stimulate "quoting" a word or short phrase in the middle of a sentence. Are there any other punctuation marks that can be stimulated this way? And in particular, is there a gesture for parentheses (like this)?

If not, then why not? How did quotes get special treatment?

And if yes - how many people would actually understand what those other gestures mean? (I am reminded of that scene from Friends where Joey admits he doesn't know what air quotes mean)

Image taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Airquotes.gif

65
Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
42 comments fedilink
 

I recently bought a Steam Deck and I have a lapdock on the way, intending to use the Deck as a dual-purpose gaming handheld and laptop replacement. So on that front, I was wondering what more experienced users could tell me about using it.

I did read through the official FAQ, and a few questions pop up. In no particular order:

  1. Is there a way to boot the Steam Deck directly into desktop mode, without going through the Steam environment first? (Strictly as a time saver)
  2. In practice, how well does sudo steamos-readonly disable and installing things from pacman work out for you? In particular, I want to use PWAs For Firefox and it requires this package in order to work. Do packages actually get wiped with SteamOS updates, as the FAQ warns?
  3. Is it possible to re-enable the read-only filesystem after installing a package, to safeguard it from accidental changes?
  4. Any other tips, tricks or warnings you'd like to share.
52
How is RAM size measured? Why doesn't it match the marketed size? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
23 comments fedilink
 

I have 64 GB of RAM, specifically this model (I think): https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/396/1731653269/F5-6000J2836G32GX2-FX5-Specification fortunately purchased just before RAM prices went insane.

Last night, I ran memtest86+ and noticed it showed I have "61.6GB" of RAM. This is 2.4 GB less than the stated 64 GB. I know that storage sizes are specified in GB (1000³B) instead of GiB (1024³B), so it wouldn't have shocked me if RAM is the same, but this actually doesn't explain it: 64 GB makes 59.6 GiB, so if that was it then I got 2 GiB extra, which makes no sense.

To be clear, I'm not complaining and there's no issue to fix, I just want to understand where the numbers are coming from.

My friend has 96 gigs of RAM, and for him Windows reports 93.6 GB, which is also 2.4 GB less than stated, same as me! So it seems more likely right now that RAM is actually measured and marketed in GiBs, and the same effect is causing both of us to "lose" 2.4 GB. But what effect is it?

It gets weirder.

In the FAQ of memtest, there's this:

Why is Memtest86+ testing more memory than I have?

It doesn't. The memory on a modern computer is not necessarily mapped in a linear way. E.g.: 16GB of RAM can be virtually mapped from 0-15GB and 16-17GB with a hole between 15GB and 16GB.

Which I thought might be related, so to get to the bottom of it I tracked which regions of memory it tests. This is what it showed:

  • 4MB - 1GB (1020MB)
  • 1GB - 2GB (1GB)
  • 2GB - 2.4GB (416 MB)
  • 4GB - 5GB (1GB)
  • 5GB - 6GB (1GB)
  • ... more 1GB regions with no gaps ...
  • 62GB - 63GB (1GB)
  • 63GB - 63.4GB (478MB)

Summing them all up gives a total of 60GiB + 1914MiB = 61GiB + 890MiB = 61.87GiB if my math is right, so it doesn't even match the 61.6 figure it reports!

... What's going on? WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS COMING FROM?!

If there's a better community for this, let me know and I'll cross-post it there.

10
How about some political science? Why “Peace President” Donald Trump Fights So Many Wars - William Spaniel (www.youtube.com)
 

I really like this guy's videos. William Spaniel is a political scientist, a professor in game theory. He covers conflicts from an academic point of view, and personally I can't get enough. Pretty much all of his videos are worth watching. He has been uploading regularly since the start of the Ukraine war, so a glance in his list of videos will probably find you something you'd like.

He is still a professor actively publishing new research.

There is a bit of subtle humor thrown into the mix too :)

19
Comments on this webcomic (SMBC) are only available on the first few days of every month (discuss.tchncs.de)
 

SMBC comics have a comments section, run by Hyvor Talk. It used to work great, but after SMBC parted ways with the Hiveworks Comics, it seems the Hyvor Talk service tier was downgrade massively and now it shows the error "Embed temporarily disabled (limits exceeded)" almost all the time. Only on the first day or two of every month, the limits reset and we can both post and read comments again.

And yet, on those two days lots of people comment. There's an active community, but we can't talk!

Can be observed on any individual comic, e.g. the most recent one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language-6

1
Since we're doing magic eyes now... (sh.itjust.works)
 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/42134968

My time has come!

The above stereographic image is for cross-eyed viewing (most stereograms are wall-eyed, so you may need to put your finger in front of your screen until this one comes into focus)

This is an image of Honolulu, Hawaii, published by NASA. Note Diamond Head (the volcanic crater) in the south.

Here are some other stereopairs published by JPL:


Wheeler Ridge, California


Mount Saint Helens


Salt Lake Valley, Utah


Wellington, New Zealand

1
A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband (discuss.tchncs.de)
 

A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband. As she's about to say hello to him, she notices the man is filthy: his clothes have stains from spilt food and drinks, his face and hands are dark with mud and grime.

"What happened to you?!" she asks, skipping the hello.

"Oh, it's nothing, don't worry about it..."

"What do you mean don't worry about it? You're dirty like a pig! At least go home and shower!!"

"No, I can't... There's something I have to do. Sorry, honey, I'll see you later tonight."

"Well at least tell me how you got so muddy!"

"I really can't tell you. It's nothing, I promise."

The woman starts getting angry. "Listen to me. Either you tell me what's going on, or go home with me right now to wash yourself!! If not, I'm packing your things and kicking you out!"

The husband thinks about it for a while, then makes a deep sigh and says: "Alright... I'll come clean."

1
What are these? They keep turning up on my floors (discuss.tchncs.de)
 

I'm in the middle east in case that helps narrow it down. Very hot few days probably have something to do with it.

Where are they coming from? Are they hiding somewhere in my apartment? They seem to be flightless. They are all the same size and very small, here's one on my finger for scale:

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