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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • What error? It gave you a string of tokens that seemed likely according to its training data. That’s all it does.

    If you ask it what color is the sky, it will tell you it’s blue not because it knows that’s true, but because these words “fit together”. Pretty much the only way to avoid this issue is to put some kind of filter in front of the LLM which will try to catch prompts that are known to produce unwanted results, and silently replace your prompt with something like “say: sorry, I don’t know”.

    I’m being very reductive here, but that’s the principle of how these things work - the LLMs are not capable of determining the truthfulness of their responses.


  • But Wayland isn’t a thing on its own, there’s no “Wayland server” or anything else equivalent to the X server. The compositors like Kwin or GNOME’s Mutter are Wayland implementations fully responsible for handling the display output.

    You can blame Wayland for the lack of universally supported global hotkeys or for issues with apps that need to know exactly where on the screen they are - these are issues with the protocol - but not for bugs in one compositor’s implementation of display management.




  • I can’t speak for these specific laptops, but unlike x86, ARM generally doesn’t have a way for an OS to discover the available hardware, and most ARM platforms historically didn’t do anything to help. There is a standard for UEFI on ARM where the UEFI is supposed to tell the OS about the hardware, but as far as I know this is only a thing on ARM servers and these laptops might not support it.

    Without any way of probing for hardware or getting the information from UEFI, Linux has to somehow be compiled with all the info about the hardware built-in. And the build will be model-specific (there’s a way to pass a file describing the hardware to Linux from the bootloader which enables a single kernel to be used on multiple models and have just a small part of the bootloader be model-specific, but somebody still needs to make that file and the manufacturers clearly don’t intend to do that).





  • Vista’s problem was just the terrible third party drivers and the fact that it was preinstalled on machines it had no business running on. 7 didn’t improve much on it (except fixing the UAC prompt so that it no longer made you feel like you’re using Linux with misconfigured sudo timeout), but it had the benefit of already having working drivers from Vista and proper hardware capable of running Vista/7.


  • Zig didn’t come to my mind when I was writing my comment and I agree that it’s probably a decent option (the only issue I can think of is its somewhat small community, but that’s not a technical issue with the language).

    My argument against Go and Java is garbage collection - even if Java’s infamous GC pause can apparently be worked around with a specialized JVM, I’m pretty sure it still comes at the cost of higher memory usage and wasted CPU cycles compared to some kind of reference counting or Rust’s ownership mechanism (not sure about the proper term for that). And higher memory usage is definitely not something I want to see in my browser, they’re hungry enough as is.



  • Probably a bit of a TL:DR of the other answer, but the short answer is: the execute bit has a different meaning for directories - it allows you to keep going down the filesystem tree (open a file or another directory in the directory). The read bit only allows you to see the names of the files in the directory (and maybe some other metadata), but you cannot open them without x bit.

    Fun fact, it makes sense to have a directory with --x or -wx permissions - you can access the files inside if you already know their names.

    Edit: not a short answer, apparently



  • If it doesn’t come at the expense of battery wear, then sure, lower charge time is just better. But that would make phone batteries the only batteries that don’t get excessively stressed when fast charging. Yeah, phone manufacturers generally claim that fast charging is perfectly fine for the battery, but I’m not sure I believe them too much when battery degradation is one of the main reasons people buy new phones.

    I have no clue how other manufacturers do it (so for all I know they could all be doing it right and actually use slow charging), but Google has a terrible implementation of battery conservation - Pixels just fast charge to 80%, then wait until some specific time before the alarm, then fast charge the rest. Compare that to a crappy Lenovo IdeaPad laptop I have that has a battery conservation feature that sets a charge limit AND a power limit (60% with 25W charging), because it wouldn’t make sense to limit the charge and still use full 65W for charging.


  • It doesn’t slow charge, at least not on Pixel 7a. Well, you could argue whether 20W is slow charging, but it’s all this phone can do.

    It just charges normally to 80%, stops, and then resumes charging about an hour or two before the alarm. And last time I used it, it had a cool bug where if it fails to reach 80% by the point in time when it’s supposed to resume charging, it will just stop charging no matter what the current charge level is. Since that experience, I just turned this feature off and charge it in whenever it starts running low.


  • If it is an Arch-based distro (sorry, I don’t recognize the package manager), then this might just be the recent Wine update that made it 700 MB smaller (which would mean the rest of your system grew 300 MB)

    I made a post here about it: this one

    Btw, is there a way to link to a post in a way that resolves on everyone’s separate instance instead of hard coding it to my instance?


  • Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches

    Fair enough, but I’ve only ever seen this happen with cheap wireless cards / chipsets that do both Bluetooth and WiFi and don’t properly avoid interference between these two (for example, I can get perfectly functioning Bluetooth audio out of my laptop with shitty Realtek wireless card if I completely disable WiFi (not just disconnect)). I think this is less of an issue for dedicated Bluetooth devices.

    Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.

    Yeah, that’s true. As for the second part, AFAIK there was never an issue with 2.4 GHz radios (which is the frequency band Bluetooth uses) interfering with planes, it was more of a liability / laws thing - the plane manufacturer never explicitly said that these radios are safe (so the airline just banned them to be safe) and/or laws didn’t allow non-certified radios to operate on planes.

    Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does?

    Eventually yes, but it’s much more resilient than WiFi - 2.4 GHz WiFi only has three non-overlapping channels to work with (and there’s a whole thing with the in-between channels being even worse for everyone involved than everyone just using the same correct three channels that I won’t get into), while Bluetooth slices the same spectrum into 79 fully usable channels. It also uses much lower transmission power, so signal travels a shorter distance. And unlike WiFi, it can dynamically migrate from channel to channel (in fact, it does this even without any interference). 100 people actually seeing each other’s devices might be a problem, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario - Bluetooth will use the lowest transmit power at which it can get a reliable link, so if everyone’s devices are only transmitting over a meter or so, there shouldn’t be any noticeable interference on the other side of the plane.


  • I don’t really see the big problem here? Like sure, it’s silly that it’s cheaper to make wireless headphones than wired ones (I assume - the manufacturers are clearly not too bothered by trademarks and stuff if they put the Lightning logo on it so they wouldn’t avoid wired solution just due to licensing fees), but what business does Apple have in cracking down on this? Other than the obvious issues with trademarks, but those would be present even if it were true wired earphones. It’s just a knockoff manufacturer.

    Cheapest possible wired earphones won’t sound much better than the cheapest possible wireless ones, so sound quality probably isn’t a factor. And on the plus side, you don’t have multiple batteries to worry about, or you could do something funny, like plugging the earphones into a powerbank in your pocket and have a freak “hybrid” earphones with multi-day battery (they’re not wireless, but also not tethered to your phone). On the other side, you do waste some power on the wireless link, which is not good for the environment in the long run (the batteries involved will see marginally more wear)

    Honestly the biggest issue in my mind is forcing people to turn on Bluetooth, but I don’t think this will change anyone’s habits - people who don’t know what Bluetooth is will definitely just leave it on anyway (it’s the default state), and people technical enough to want to turn it off will recognize that there’s something fishy about these earphones.


  • Also, some programs, such as many terminal emulators, can cache you PW so you don’t have to enter it multiple times.

    Terminal emulators don’t (or at least shouldn’t) do any such thing. sudo itself is responsible for letting you do privilege escalation without password for some time after successfully passing once - whenever you run it and successfully authenticate, it saves your user id, current time and a session identifier (each open shell gets a unique identifier) into a file. Then, when you attempt to do anything, it will check this file to see if you’ve if you’ve authenticated within the last few minutes in this terminal, and only ask for a password if you haven’t.

    For more info, see man sudoers_timestamp


  • It should not be controlled by a company that is known to make you lose your games.

    Are you referring to the fact that Valve promotes digital game distribution (which is a very fair view), or are you talking about some incident where Valve removed games from people’s libraries? Because if it’s the second one, then I would really like to hear about it.