Some people dual-boot to play games with anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, so a recent “AAA multiplayer” release might skew the numbers for a bit as people boot Windows instead.

Linux installations are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, and much much higher than in China. The “use of Linux online” has a bit of a sinusoidal pattern every day depending on who’s awake. But a big Chinese release - Fallen Feathers, for example - will suppress the Linux percentage for a while as well.

Steam do publish the number of concurrent users as well, it should be possible to multiply through to get roughly the “absolute numbers” you want. I think they publish the numbers of players online for multiplayer games too, and since those are the games that Linux will be locked out of, it might be possible to point fingers at the specific games causing the problems?

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Problem being, of course, that you can add more certificates, but you can’t revoke the original M$ one. And since it’s vulnerable and you can’t get rid, then these exploits still work and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

I’m all here for the green energy. I think it’s worth investing in “both sides of the coin”, though. Now that I’ve replaced all the energy-wasting bulbs in the house with LEDs, and the house is well-insulated enough that there’s just no need to run a three-bar electric fire to keep warm, then I’m at the point where solar panels would be sufficient for nearly all my energy requirements. That’s partly because solar has got better, but mainly because I’m just using loads less

On that note, the secret to not having power and cooling issues running tens of thousands of super-hot GPUs in the desert, is not to build them. Which as they’re not being built, might be enough ;-) But investing in more effort processing units and more efficient models would do it too. They wouldn’t have their “no one else can afford this” moat if it was all made more affordable, tho.

He’s mentioned in the third paragraph of the link. But yes, it is. In order for it to be “worth” burning a trillion dollars every year on AI, then there has to be a time in the near future, 2030 or so, where AI will be making unimaginable trillions. If the datacentres aren’t being built, then that money can’t possibly be coming in as planned. That makes the massive investment in NVidia’s GPUs look extremely shaky - why buy them if they’ll never be turned on? - and it means Oracle will be completely in the shit.

Ed’s arguments have been, “if any link in the chain fails, the whole thing falls down”. I think he’d been leaning towards “banks being unwilling to keep financing datacentre builds on debt” as the most likely stumbling block, but just being unable to power the damned things for want of infrastructure and skilled engineering, as here, is a problem he talks about frequently too.

He thinks it’s likely it’ll bring down the entire tech industry, since they’re now full of idiotic MBAs with no other big ideas. And frankly, it’s about time.

Can’t comment on the Lemur Pro, but the Pulse has an excellent screen. Was wanting more pixels than a 1080p screen but 4K incurs ridiculous cost and tends to be available on “laptops that don’t fit on your lap”. 2880x1800 @ 120 Hz means your fonts look really crisp and updates are smooth.

When my Tuxedo Pulse arrived, I turned it on once to marvel at the fact that it started up straight into Linux. Then restarted it to install Arch btw and never looked back. Fantastic laptop, tho.

Fill up a jerry can or two with petrol next time you fill up your car, and save the vodka for making martinis.

I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:

• the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
• functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
• directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
• terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago

It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.

I’d like to think that the bag is step 1. Step 2 is to balance an old car tire on top, and set it on fire.

It’s extremely easy to fuck up cryptography code; you require both extraordinary mathematical insight and the programming skills to defend against every known and future side-channel attack. I would suggest instead trusting software where you can read the source yourself, and which has been openly reviewed by a selection of experts in the field.

“Also, be sure not to hallucinate and don’t make any mistakes.”

Our forever-DM is all-in on AI generation of stuff. Which I understand; it’s a role that requires a lot of thankless prep, and he wants all of the in-game maps and character artwork to look fancy. But on the other hand, I play D+D for the human interaction of it, and actually prefer the ‘theatre of the mind’ way of playing it. Dry-wipe pens on a whiteboard, there’s your adventure map. Now get roleplaying. If I wanted to play a computer game, then I’d play a computer game.

My wife used to work for a company that manufactured the glass for solar panels in the UK, but there was just no way that they could compete with Chinese prices. They would have had to have sold it below cost to match, let alone make any profit. It’s not the most labour-intensive of industries, but the energy costs are massive to melt all the glass. China has made massive investments in hydro and has a lot of cheap power for industry, which ironically means that making solar panels for green power is easier too.

An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there’s much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can’t be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn’t changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there’s not much point in redoing it.

When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don’t touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can’t touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That’s not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.

And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn’t any Linux at that point.

Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I’ve found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it’s unbeatable.

I’ve also found that “fancy Git dialogs” just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.

I just don’t see the thinking here.

• buy a decent steak
• leave it out at room temperature for an hour so that it will cook properly. During this time, prepare the vegetables, potatoes, sauce that will go with it.
• cook the steak for two minutes a side in a heavy frying pan on high heat
• let the steak rest somewhere warm for ten minutes while you finish assembling everything else.

I could spend a fucking fortune, enough to live on for months, to cook my steak upright in a toaster for 90 seconds instead, for a worse end result, and it would save me zero time, because cooking the steak is not the time-critical step here.

Would only save you time if you’re buying the kind of steak that can be cooked in 90 seconds, and taking it straight from the fridge, cooking it, and then putting it in sandwich, and anyone who thinks that sounds a good idea frankly doesn’t deserve to have a decent steak.

They’re quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

Fortunately, there’s businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won’t run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it’s my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.