Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google “how to do X on Linux” you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can’t just make install something from GitHub (not that it’s recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that’s all you could find, it’s your best option).

    It’s not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.

    Once you’re familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.

    I don’t like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn’t uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it’s easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you’re tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.


  • API documentation isn’t a tutorial, it’s there to tell you what the arguments are, what it does and what to expect as the output and just generally, what’s available.

    I actually have the opposite problem as you: it infuriates me when a project’s documentation is purely a bunch of examples and then you have to guess if you want to do anything out of the simple tutorial’s paved path. Tell me everything that’s available so I can piece together something for what I need, I don’t want that info on chapter 12 of the example of building a web store. I’ve been coding for nearly two decades now, I’m not going to follow a shopping cart tutorial just in the off chance that’s how you tell how the framework defines many to many relationships.

    I believe an ideal world has both covered: you need full API documentation that’s straight to the point, so experienced people know about all the options and functions available, but also a bunch of examples and a tutorial for those that are new and need to get started and generally learning how to use the library.

    Your case is probably a bit atypical as PyTorch and AI stuff in general is inherently pretty complex. It likely assumes you know your calculus and linear algebra and stuff like that so that’d make the API docs extra dense.


  • In my first apartment, I had a smoke detector that was mains powered. The wire metals weren’t compatible and eventually the wirenuts burned and cut off power to half the room. The smoke detector’s wires were all burnt up. It never alarmed unfortunately so I only learned about it when half the room just went dark. That could absolutely have turned into an electrical fire.

    Definitely worth getting it checked.


  • Yeah mine’s doing that too, and my dmesg is flooded with USB disconnect and reconnects.

    The thing probably is overheating and shutting off. I believe I’ve seen videos of them catching fire too, not sure if it’s that one or another webcam that looks similar.

    Mine’s on a USB hub with buttons for each port so I just leave its port off until I need the camera and only turn it on when needed.






  • What kind of filename do they have? How big are they?

    My guess would be that they’re Android thumbnail files or some sort of hidden metadata file. Possibly some raw jpeg because all the parameters are expected to be fixed size so they didn’t bother with the header. Or it’s a custom header.

    But even then, that’s a lot of zeros for an image format.

    Does it seem to have a JPEG header later in the file? It could be a header followed by a normal JPEG file too.






  • I have one (FW 16 AMD), I don’t have any complaints so far. It comes mostly assembled but you put your RAM, SSD, screen bezel, keyboard, touchpad and all the port modules yourself. The machine is well built and genuinely very easy to work with. You can swap the keyboard and touchpad without touching a screw.

    For the most part it seems like they’re holding up to their promise, you can buy a new motherboard for a CPU upgrade, remove the old one, put the new one in, and you’re good to go with the rest of your existing stuff (as long as it’s compatible, if the new board needs DDR5 instead of DDR4 then you need new RAM too but that’s expected). So far everything I’ve disassembled as part of the firs assembly has been a breeze. It’s a very nice laptop to work on and swap parts that’s for sure. You get the assurance that you can swap the battery, input modules, IO modules for the foreseeable future.

    Where I’ve been disappointed is the third-party ecosystem for it is not what I was hoping it would be, there’s not a lot of third-party modules for it. But the designs are all open-sourced so you can 3D print parts for it. Maybe in the future we’ll have more modules. Overall though, it’s not like you could even think about that on any other laptop brands, you get the laptop and it’s what it’ll be for the rest of its life.

    Runs great on Linux, most of the company actually uses Linux so support for Linux is very good. All of the models will run Minecraft very well, Minecraft in particular has been known to run significantly better on Linux to begin with, especially on Intel graphics where the OpenGL drivers on Windows are terrible.



  • I would trust them more than Microsoft because at least they would actually store it encrypted safely and not just basic ACLs that are easy to bypass.

    Even with a root shell on macOS you can’t bypass certain things like access to the camera for example. You’d have to work way harder to access recall data, not in a way that malware can trivially access.

    I still wouldn’t use it though, because I think the whole thing is dumb and I don’t need my computer to spy on me so I can remember what I did yesterday. I have browser/shell history for that.


  • They share the same partition, but they’re treated like independent filesystems. They can have different mount options, so on one you can enable compression but not another some you may want to disable Copy-on-Write, etc. That’s also useful so you can rollback a system update without also rolling back your data or vice-versa. You can also store multiple distros each in a subvolume and boot different ones all while sharing the same partition and not wasting space. If you have multiple users it’s worth having a subvolume each so each user can independently rollback their home directory. Maybe you want your projects on a subvolume so you can snapshot and btrfs-send it frequently.

    I don’t use btrfs but on ZFS I have tons of datasets: steam library gets large recordsize and light compression, backups are heavily compressed and encrypted, VMs have a dataset tweaked for disk images, my music and movies also have a larger recordsize but no compression. I have one that’s case insensitive that’s shared with Windows machines and Wine stuff. I cap the size of caches and logs.

    It’s very versatile.



  • My feeling about that is that I should assume anyone who could monitor my traffic should be assumed to do so and I therefore should apply reasonable defenses regardless. Even if the government doesn’t do it, hackers around the world will. That means the moment it leaves my router, it’s assumed compromised.

    Same for smart Internet connected devices. The government might be listening, but I certainly don’t trust the manufacturer to not be listening for the purpose of advertising either.

    How many stories broke out recently of ISP router having been compromised by foreign hackers for years? Yeah. The Internet is the wild west.