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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • I’m current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I’m fed up of playing the last of them, it’s been long enough since I played the first one that it’s once interesting to play it.

    Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.

    I’ve barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.

    It’s not even because I can’t afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it’s almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn’t have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.



  • The actual driver for an HID USB device, even on WIndows, is still just a few KB.

    Worse, the default driver for HID devices like mice, keyboards, joysticks, gamepads and so on is part of Windows since Windows 7 and all you had to do was give it an INF file that really just associated USB hardware devices that sent the PC a specific identifier (made up of a VID and a PID value) on USB protocol initialization, with that built-in driver - and that file is maybe 100 bytes. Even better, that INF file is not even needed anymore since Windows 10.

    A driver for a mouse (pretty much the simplest Human Interface Device there is) that in addition to the normal mouse thing also supports setting the RGB color of some lights is stupidly simple because the needed functionality is already in the protocol.

    Remember, modern digital electronics still uses really tiny processors sometimes with less than 32KB flash memory (and way less than that in RAM) only they’re microcontrollers rather than microprocessors now, hence the protocols are designed so that they can be handled by processing hardware with little memory (after all, many USB Hosts aren’t PCs but instead are things like USB HUDs which have microcontrollers not microprocessors)

    I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that almost the entirety of that 1GB is bloatware.








  • If we want to be realistic, then if there was a nuclear explosion that big on planet Earth all the nations around it would be nuclear wastelands from the shockwave and fallout and the rest of the planet would probably be covered in ice from the nuclear winter.

    Most nation states on that side of the planet would be gone and the ones on the other side of the planet would at the very least be collapsing from the fall in agricultural production and subsequent wars of desperation.



  • Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.

    This is not a trolley problem because:

    • It’s not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it’s a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of theirs gets elected after a Democrat).
    • It’s not a single person making a decision, it’s millions of people all at the same time and it’s not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it’s done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one’s choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.
    • Voters don’t actually know upfront what either choice will deliver. Politicians often promise one thing and do something else.

    The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical “Ultimatum Game” between voters and politicians only it’s in the best interest of politicians that people don’t see it that way (because they would be aware that they can punishing politicians in one cycle to get them to do a different split the next one, or specifically in American politics they can Punish the DNC in one cycle for fielding a too rightwing candidate to get them to field a less rightwing candidate the next cycle) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it’s an “trolley problem” and it’s companion: the idea that people must “chose the lesser evil”.



  • Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

    Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

    I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

    I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

    If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.


  • Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

    Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

    At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

    Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.