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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I agree desktop is not top priority. And I know their money largely comes outside Desktop. In fact, I would be surprised if consumer products came close to their b2b products. Just saying they have more than zero incentive to care about the Linux desktop. And apparently, Nvidia agrees, because they are finally putting more effort in.

    I still use and recommend AMD for Linux desktop, and I’m hoping Intel will become competitive in that space so we have more options and competition. I personally don’t like how closed off, uninvolved, and impassive Nvidia has been in general and I don’t trust them in general to collaborate much, as shown by their history.


  • Well they do lose some business in the Linux world to their issues and will probably take some time to recover their reputation in the Linux desktop community. I know not everyone hates them and the Linux Desktop community isn’t huge right now, but there is some incentive to show the world you care about your customers

    And if Linux Desktop ever gets super popular and easy for everyone but Nvidia, that’s not a necessary risk Nvidia should take. And the catching up later on could be really slow and painful if Nvidia lets themselves get even further behind. GPUs are among the most complicated hardware components to support and develop drivers and other software for.


  • I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.

    Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.

    This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.


  • It wouldn’t shock me. A lot of improvements to 14 are reeling in idle usage. In fact, that’s a big focus on the last 3 or 4 Android versions, and something Android is doing to catch up to iOS.

    It seems better for battery life to do batching and budgeting of background activities as much as possible, instead of continuous, unregulated usage.

    I think the one thing I miss is that Android used to have idle background battery usage estimates, so that you knew which apps were killing your battery in the background. It’s not quite as easy to figure that out anymore, but maybe something new will come along to help out with that.



  • Bluetooth still has its place in several instances. From what I can tell, this wifi protocol depends on you having a WiFi network mediate the connection, such as at your house or at a Cafe. Bluetooth is true ad hoc requiring no middleman.

    Bluetooth struggles with bandwidth enough that it affects sound quality and latency, but that doesn’t mean it’s unusable. It also has enough range that I beats some other competing wireless protocols as well.

    I’d love to see WiFi or a higher bandwidth option come out, and I’m hoping this is the beginning of that. They may have to resolve issues with channel conflicts and the need for network mediation. It would be awesome for gaming.






  • OnlyOffice is amazing if you need compatibility with MS Office products. Not saying it’s perfect, and I have and use LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice is better fit than LibreOffice if your goal is to use MSOffice files in FOSS software. I don’t get to decide what files and software my school or work uses, and they use only MSOffice. If I hand my boss or coworker an ODS, they’ll have no clue what to do with it. LibreOffice doesn’t handle XLSX files nearly as cleanly as OnlyOffice.

    If I make a table in LibreOffice, even using their open formats, I am giving up some nice features from OpenOffice.

    There’s no way OO is just a cheap repackage of LO. They look very different and have different features.



  • Said pilots are not being locked in a chamber where they will undergo execution. I’d wager most who are in bliss aren’t even aware that they’re very close to death. It seems probable their bliss is exclusively dependent on their ignorance of the present circumstances, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

    My point isn’t that nitro is worse than what we’re doing now. It’s that I don’t think we know it’s humane in every case. If the inmate is already suicidal or indifferent, it’s probably how they’d want to go out. I just can’t say that about the rest.

    And I have no trouble believing that we can screw up getting 100% nitrogen saturation in a prisoner’s containment. That would be a terrible thing to put someone through.

    All these concerns are mitigated if we at least give the prisoner some choice in their exit, or especially if they are permitted life without parole as an alternative.

    I’m not convinced Nitro is a silver bullet to this problem.


  • I think Nitrogen asphyxiation has a lot of problems. You can’t absolve the terror a person goes through knowing they will die unwillingly. The process can take up to 15 minutes. I’d probably have a panic attack just watching or especially partaking.

    People who ordinarily go through nitrogen asphyxiation have the advantage of not knowing they’re dying, because it’s usually by accident or negligence. An inmate can’t possibly share this benefit, unless they’re quite drugged during the process or mentally unfit for execution due to general unawareness. Inmates who get executed in this way live through the entire process fully aware they’re being suffocated, even if Nitrogen suffocation is better than CO2 suffocation.

    Also, I owe you a source for this last section that I’m about to provide, so you don’t have to take my word for it. IIRC, if you do not get the nitrogen and oxygen ratios right, the person will experience some symptoms of sickness due to low blood oxygen and will survive barely. The process is a akin to waterboarding IIRC, and has a history, in at least one country, of being used to intentionally inflict that effect as a means of torture. Again, citation needed on my part, and perhaps someone can help me out here find the source.


  • Two big issues with the death penalty aren’t solved, and may never be solvable.

    1 - We cannot know perfectly that a person is guilty in every case.

    There is often evidence that exonerates suspects and criminals. Sometimes, we really do know without a doubt, but we don’t necessarily have a process of “we know this person did it because there is no reasonable doubt” vs “we know this person did it with perfect certainty because this person admitted it proudly, ad nauseum, there were cameras, there was plenty of DNA and lots of witnesses. Their own mother testified against them.”

    This issue may not ever be perfectly solvable. This means we execute innocent people, too. You can look up famous cases where we executed innocent people. We can’t know exactly how often we do this, but we are aware of doing it regularly.

    2 - Our methods of execution are often inhumane and torturous. Some of them char the person being executed. Others paralyze them and put them in a state where their whole body is in excruciating pain but they cannot move or make a sound. There’s a good John Oliver episode on this fact.

    We might be able to improve in this area with better methods and technologies, but we’d need federal enforcement to ensure all states are using these.

    Also, people who perform executions have no medical expertise, so they wouldn’t necessarily be able to clearly tell we are torturing someone. If an execution fails, we have to revive the victim, who is probably traumatized and tortured, and we try again later.

    This process seems inhumane and we definitely would rather get it right the first time, quickly and painlessly, than legally torture people on American soil.



  • You can build in subscriptions or support licenses to your open source apps. Look at cryptomator and bitwarden for example. I know others do it. (And the free version is about as good as paid. But you can pay for a few near features and to support the devs)

    And the beauty is that the package management takes no cut and puts no rules on payment methods.