The Computer Thread

Removed Windows from my computer the other week for... honestly, I don't really think I had much of a reason, except maybe vague irritation at having to keep things updated entirely out of sync. Finally got all my drives reformatted the other day without losing anything, so that's a plus, and I haven't really run into a game that I can't just play, so it's good to see the Steam Deck's continuing to have a positive effect.

Do still have a few pain points with window scaling and flicker, though, but those are both results of having an Nvidia GPU—explicit sync only just started getting merged into upstream branches, which is why things (especially Steam and Discord) have been super flickery, and X does not do per-monitor scaling, which is not great when I only want one monitor scaled. So hopefully down the line I can just move over to Wayland and that'll work...

Weirdest issue I've run into is actually in Hollow Knight of all things, and that's a native port. Keeps deciding it doesn't like my controller's left analogue stick. <_>

Google's new AI thing is making me consider other search engines and web browsers again. From my amateur research it seems like the least offensive are Firefox and Duck Duck Go.

Hang on, what's this AI thing Google is doing?

I seen it use AI to assist with your searches, basically giving a snippet from a website that matches what you were looking for.

And frequently those snippets can be sourced from AI articles that are straight-up incorrect.

Hmm, so, another week on and... honestly, it's actually surprising how little has gone wrong, compared to every previous time I've used Linux. The work put in because of Valve has made things way more compatible on the game front—to an honestly frightening degree; there's still occasionally stutter but I think that's just shader compilation and it doesn't seem to repeat. It's also nice that there's way more distros that have some focus on including things like patched kernels (for performance reasons) rather than the default—setting up stuff like that yourself... never all that fun. And those that make it easier to add in the not-open-but-freely-available stuff like media codecs or proprietary drivers or just installing discord are also great.

Or you could still set it all up personally, but I'm not that much of a tinkerer.

Also pleasantly surprised that my soundcard got supported tbh, but that's apparently the work of one dev and newer models he didn't put in the work for. Ah well, it's not like it's a big issue, I don't actually plan to replace it and if I ever need to then I'll probably go for some sort of external DAC with selectable outputs instead (I just want to leave my headphones plugged in all the time). I think that issue is why I hadn't touched things for several years.

But, nice to see how seamlessly workflows can be transferred over. At least for the fairly minimal non-gaming use I actually do at home (flip side, if I want to actually work on learning Rust like I kept putting off, at least compilation will now be easier), where a lot of the things I had set up on Windows were probably just to replicate the same thing—especially on the save-screenshot-in-neatly-organised-folders-as-webp-images front. Although, it doesn't copy those to the clipboard properly, which is slightly inconvenient. Might be the file format, though.

Other neat things (at least where KDE is concerned, I'm very unlikely to go to other DE's—I really dislike Gnome's layout, the smaller ones just don't seem to offer anything I'd want, and I've never really seen the appeal of tiling WM's) that I didn't expect to get working at all are support for animated backgrounds. Hell, there's even a plugin specifically to get Wallpaper Engine of all things (mostly) working as a desktop option, although the actual desktop plugin for that hasn't been updated from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 yet, so... might be a while before I can use that option which will actually scan the folders neatly and work with most scenes rather than "find a nice video file in my wallpaper options and use that with this plugin".

Still, it feels weird for things to be this seamless for anything more than, like, light office or web browsing use (what I mostly used linux for when my laptop was appalling and/or game support was shoddy—using it on a desktop PC has always been more of an experiment for me, when I'm not playing games, although I did check it out a bit when Proton initially released). Game support? Sure! Games with anti cheat? At least the one I've felt like playing; obviously that's always going to be a little hit or miss. Streaming gameplay? Yup, that works no problem, though I had some hardware issue in a wired connection so I got a new wifi card and a better antenna than my much older setup (so far hasn't hitched at all) to stop dropping out. Bluetooth support? Well, connected one of my PS 4 controllers perfectly fine, and Steam then handles all the input, so that was easy...

I'd say things look rather nice, too.◊ Even if the monitors line up a bit oddly (that is how they're respectively positioned due to one just being on top of a dresser, so...)

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 21st 2024 at 3:47:53 PM

Glad you are having such a positive experience with Linux. I'm not a gamer myself, so it's good to hear that they are making advanced even on that front. I'm a Gnome man, myself, but to each their own!

I wonder if the gaming progress carries over somewhat to non-ported professional applications? I know a lot of the improvements have specifically been focused on graphics APIs, but Valve also feeds back upstream to Wine.

Mmm, thinking about it—first time I used linux was, I think, dualbooting on a laptop with only integrated graphics, which I think I more or less used exclusively up until I started university. Obviously, few problems there—it wasn't like I could run anything of note on the graphics that come with a 2nd-gen mobile i5 or whatever it was. Then I did dualboot quite heavily on the replacement laptop I got for about a year—this being about ten years ago, running games on it (especially with the headache optimus-related stuff always was, and maybe is) was just not worth it. I ended up removing linux entirely my second year because the university's new VPN solution at that point was so asinine.

I did install Arch on a really old laptop around that time as a fun experiment, though.

Moooooostly ignored it after that until I had a desktop again. Specifically, since Proton was announced and I was super curious, and I was interested in doing a GPU upgrade anyway, so I got a Vega 64 (talk about unfortunate timing in regards to AMD's GPU series) and played around with that. Did have a whole bunch of networking related issues though (incompatible wifi dongles etc.) but it was okay. Had an argument with someone about Gnome's UX, so I used that for a while, but eventually went back to using the Windows partition for simplicity's sake. Then I needed an nvidia GPU for easy AI acceleration (AMD's finally got something good for that, but I won't be replacing this GPU for a while, and it's not like I have a need for that now) and just reclaimed the Linux drive for additional storage.

But yeah, in comparison—this time's much smoother. Everything I want to really do just works fine. Haven't tried any random programs run through Wine yet (I'm sure there might be one or two I have lying around in my downloads folder that I could want at some point), so that'll be interesting to see. And just being able to take a specific distro and get all the otherwise awkward-to-setup drivers and programs installed either automatically or through a simple UI is amazing (and not having to manually enable repositories etc.)

Having to use the terminal was always a nuisance. I can, and obviously I know how to (not like I haven't used it enough), but it's always felt like the biggest blocker in easy adoption: if you want to do something that's very standard for computer use but involves any level of non-free but redistributable software, it can get cumbersome fast.

(I also spent several hours today reinstalling so I could fix the partitions—I've broken things so many times, I don't know why I ever keep root and home on the same partition. But that's fixed now, and most of that time was just copying the home folder back to save configuration/redownloading games).

Your not going to find a search engine that doesnt use AI, that is literaly how they have worked and how they have always worked... and yes that includes duck duck go there.

There isnt any way to define every cross variable a human can be looking for when they search, so they use AI to do so and have since the 90s.

Basicly it's the equivilent of caring that a cake uses flour because carbs are bad now... its reacting to the facts of reality in denial of it because you only care now.

Although, I don't like AI written summary answers of my search topic.

please, just give me the results.

That much is true yea... I dont get the people that ask GPT to do the job of a search.

Hmm, if that were true, though, GPT should be at least as smart as Google Search, which it clearly isn't.

Like, I asked GPT for the lyrics to Rammstein's Mutter the other day, just to see if it could find and translate them, but it didn't know the song... and just made up some lyrics instead (I assume, or got them from another song?). Google, meanwhile, instantly finds the song, and a translation to it to boot.

No it shouldn't and this is exactly the problem with a lot of AI implementation by companies trying to get in right now, AI is a tool, and each tool has to be built to task.... GPT isn't as good as google because it wasn't designed to be google, it was designed to have conversation, not to check every possible synonym and permutation of what your looking for and make inferences on how close it is to what the user wants... these are different tasks.

You wouldn't use a hammer to drive a screw would you? So why are you expecting a Chat-AI to do database queries.

For some reason it is easy for people to think of physical work as different tasks, but people assume that all thinking work is the same task... it makes no sense.

Edited by Imca on Apr 22nd 2024 at 10:31:50 PM

But you can use GPT to look up things. It seems to know plenty about, say, Avatar, for instance, to the point where it can answer in-depth questions about it that seem to check out.

Edit: Oh yeah, sorry Fighteer.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 22nd 2024 at 3:34:01 PM

Honest question, but why is it such a strict requirement now, there is an incredible amount of overlap between general computing topics, and machine learning ones especially with how more aware people have become with the integration.

I can understand the need to move it if the topic starts out explicitly about AI, but like how exactly do we find the line when some one asks questions about say the youtube, and it goes to the algorithim, or in this case search engines which are again AI themself.

I feel there is a difference between AI as a field topics, and "I am using a computer and thus am interacting with one" like here.

To frame it as a topic that probably interests you more.

Where would you define the line for an automotive thread vs the EV thread.

If the topic is about cars, and then some one talks about a tesla in the context of it being a car, and not in the context of an EV breakthrough, or news specific to it.... is that not on topic for the automotive thread?

Edited by Imca on Apr 22nd 2024 at 11:02:52 PM

Well, in this case it's fairly obvious: we've blundered right into talking about the capabilities and design of AI rather than their use as a cog in a general computer environment. i.e., we're talking more about the AI than the search engine by a wide margin.

You can now buy a flame-throwing robot dog for under $10,000: Thermonator, the first "flamethrower-wielding robot dog," is completely legal in 48 US states.

Uhh... what?

Can't wait for some billionaire to buy a few of those as security dogs and set a burglar on fire. Legal, my ass.

Good luck with most of those applications on a one hour battery.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 23rd 2024 at 7:55:40 PM

Flamethrowers are indeed legal in most of the US, and often used in things like farming to burn down the feilds after harvest.

But I do think the 48 number is wrong, since off the top of my head I know flordia for instance has a ban on incidnary munitions, and while that doesn't say flamethrowers.... I don't know what lawyer worth there pay couldn't argue that a flamethrower is by default an incidnary munitiion.

Edited by Imca on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:54:14 PM

Microsoft has open-souced MS-DOS versions 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0

Anyone here into mechanical keyboards? How durable are PBT keycaps compared to ABS keycaps? I'm having a recurring issue where the paint on the edges of the S and D keys are wearing out quickly on two keyboards I've purchased within four months (keep in mind I'm playing World of Warcraft a lot which means the amount of keypresses in that left side of the keyboard is a lot greater than it used to be).

PBT is usually more durable at a higher cost.

I'm pretty sure your issue there isn't the plastic, it's that the way most keycaps are printed makes them inherently prone to rubbing off over time. It's not like the keys have actually noticeably degraded in that scenario. You'd want double-shot moulding or something (where the actual legend is a different material fused to the keycap, or some much harder printing method, rather than being too concerned about the plastic itself. Although you'd still rub the keys quite smooth over time, that's inevitable.

Since you mentioned paint, I'm guessing that these are RGB (or at least one colour) compatible keycaps with transparent stems, and they basically reverse-printed a transparent plastic base to make the keys black?

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 28th 2024 at 11:30:12 AM

Yeah I was about to chime in with more info. Like Raineh said, it all depends on the manufacturer. If anything, PBT v ABS will affect the sound they make.

Anything else is going down the Mk rabbit hole, which is deep and really expensive.

Edited by terumokou on Apr 28th 2024 at 3:33:24 AM