Hell, even if it became more profilic than english without it, mandarin is very prolific but you don’t see many LLMs throwing in random mandarin when you prompt it in english, unless it’s a question about language (and the one time I did, the LLM was clearly breaking down entirely).

And even if it did work and caused LLMs to insert undesired characters, it’s trivial to do a text replace on the output and undo it.

Though how risky is it in reality? Eg for bread, if visible mold means there’s also invisible mold, wouldn’t that imply that there’s a period with just invisible mold that goes unnoticed and eaten? We’re constantly inhaling and consuming mold spores anyways, so is this more of a “I know it’s there and thus deem it icky” or “if it’s soft and has mold, toss it all, and hope that you don’t get unlucky and eat mold you couldn’t see in the first place”?

Solar wind is a decent flavour, though much better if it’s ions sourced from 1000km below the sun’s surface. They say they are the same ions as just one km below the surface, but I can tell the difference between 1km and 1kkm (or 1Mm if you will) jam as soon as those ions start striping the electrons from my tongue (at which point I spit it out because it has become chemicals).

When I was in school, I wanted a Linux machine (since my school stuff was mostly linux and I wanted to be able to work locally instead of having to ssh in to school machines) but wasn’t comfortable doing it on my main PC, so I bought a cheap laptop and inatalled linux on that. Had the extra bonus of being smaller and lighter than my gaming laptop that was my main PC at the time, too.

Your options will probably be a bit more expensive (and apologies for suggesting a solution that involves throwing money at it if you aren’t in a position to get even a relatively cheap one) since it’s running windows and needs the hardware for that, including TPM if your school stuff requires win 11 (though if you can get away with win 10 or 7, you could probably get a cheaper machine). Though on the other hand, your tasks might not require a GPU, which can save a lot right there.

Then you can truly isolate your personal stuff from winsows, especially if you set your LAN up to never let the windows machine know that the linux machine even exists.

I also use this with consoles to play games I’d like to try but they have DRM or anticheat that I don’t want on my PC. Also kinda doing it with work, though the laptop belongs to them.

I didn’t have the patience to try out a few, but luckily Fedora has met my needs without annoying me as much as windows did. Though I am feeling a bit of an itch to try out some of the others, but am currently just chilling in this local minimum of effort and not regretting going from windows to Fedora one bit.

Yeah maybe. Could be trying to make it clear it’s not uploading to a cloud or something lol.

Or maybe it means “put it down” (as in record, not discard).

I’ve noticed libreoffice has changed their save symbol. It’s a grey rectangle (taller than it is wide) with a darker grey arrow pointing down.

Libreoffice does this without forcing you to allow them to store all of your files. Because it’s a feature that doesn’t rely on any kind of cloud bs, MS just added that requirement because they are assholes that have no respect for their users.

Hmm I think now they meant the original “switch to linux” bit sarcastically and are stuck in a mindset thinking that it’s way more complicated than windows and thus anyone claiming to have already switched must be lying…?

Though thinking about it more, it kinda feels like a bad faith response, posting about a vague windows solution that they want people to know exists but doesn’t want to share, while treating Linux as big and scary and requiring more effort than fighting against what your OS really wants you to do.

My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.

It would tell me about updates, but wouldn’t do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).

It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn’t want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.

So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it’s actually been easier and I haven’t even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.

Not saying that it’s been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven’t had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn’t even need as much settings tweaking).

And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I’d instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.

I don’t get why it’s not common for people to cut out the middleman with these services that just connect a provider with a seeker. Then the seekers can stick with a reliable provider when they find one and the provider can take the full amount rather than giving away a cut (or, more accurately, accepting whatever the middleman thinks is the least they can give without driving the provider away). By the time they come in contact, the middleman has already added all of the value they can to that interaction.

It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.

Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).

I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.

Yeah, “I’m busy” isn’t your roommate’s problem.

This meme can have an entirely different meaning in reply to that comment. I chose to interpret it as the guy is taking a moment to look at his thumbnail before returning to the private discussion, saying “yeah, he’s got a point”.

Is that method different from using the hot keys to swap layouts? Like can I tell it to always use that mapping for that game or do I need to remember to run it each time I play the game and then set it back after I’m done (or automate that)?

Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).

But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.

I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?

I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.

Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.

Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.

This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.

Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.

Tbf that could have been done by tenants who figured the landlord would use that damage to argue they should lose their entire deposit despite not costing nearly that much to repair properly.

Not that it wouldn’t be plausible that the landlord did it themselves or hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing but were willing to do it cheap, like Ricky.