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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • We slowly need to interface with an app at work that uses fixed-width too. It does not sound that bad if you hear it but it sucks to figure out where you are missing whitespace when most fields are not used and therefore all whitespace. Oh, and of course there are a lot of fields, also are aligned/formatted differently based on their type and has thin/no/wrong documentation. And I have yet to find a simple but decent “debugger”.


  • To add a more technical explanation, the main point is about the expectation on how it behaves and not what it really does. To get windows to do something, you read the specification (interface) and make a call against it. Windows interprets your request and does what you wanted. You do not care how it works but just that it works. As a developer, you can also switch to the other side and make your own program that interprets these calls and translates, them for linux.

    Legally (I am not a lawyer), the specification is a fair game. The spicy part is how it is done and copying that gets you in trouble.

    Of course, this is also extremely simplified since linux and windows differ wildly in many regards. Also a “specification” is often incomplete or the implementaion bleeds into the real world use. This makes it not reliable to look at it alone and so, often the “original” implementation has to be observed on how it behaves.

    As a more relatable example, think about websites. On the one hand, it does not matter which browser you use. It “just” has to display the page and act accordingly. On the other side, it does not matter what server sends you the page. It could be a pre-computed static page, served via a proxy server or dynamically generated by any of the different programming languages.

    Edit: grammar


  • One I quickly gave up on trying recently was Star Citizen. Failing myself with dumb errors I found out that you need to follow a rather elaborate tutorial. I decided that it was very much not worth it. Not sure how it is possible to fuck it up that badly.

    The other I am bummed about is Talos Principle 2. Last time I played at release it worked perfectly. Now it runs so slow that it takes like 10 minutes to even get to the main menu. In the realm of tens of seconds per frame and I am at a loss how to even debug that.

    One dumb thing for native (!) Unity games (at least Valheim and Shapez 2) is that they disrespect the default audio output device.

    Otherwise, plug and play. It’s so nice!


  • I started using it on my NAS and also on root. Then I switched my personal machine to ZFS on root. I manually created both setups (somehow). This is the worst part in my opinion. The best decision, though, was to ditch grub in favor of zfsbootmenu. Skips all the brittle steps with grub and its boot partition. Now I just have zfsbootmenu directly loaded by UEFI from the EFI partition. Everything important is directly on ZFS, including… well, everything. Can also use snapshots but I have not needed that yet.









  • THAT is very shitty. My problem is that after using it for a bit apps start freezing for a split second all the time. Most notable is firefox. The frequency and duration of them increase steadily. Then opening a new program might freeze the system fully (or wait minutes/hours until it unfreezes). It has something to do with memory allocation “according to” dmesg.



  • Jumping from the default kernel with zfs to the xanmod kernel using a manually compiled version of zfs. I don’t rememeber a whole lot but it was quite… interesting. Next would be a suddenly vanished efi partition and my f* mainboard refusing to boot ZBM.

    Bonus: my currently still unfixed problem is a very weird freezing/stuttering of the whole OS and the only (useless) “lead” I have is workqueue: fill_page_cache_func hogged CPU for >10000us 4 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND




  • Not sure if it is equal on all distros but on every one I have used it’s a readable string of muliple components. One of them is “usb” for a usb mass storage, so if it is the only one you have connected to your computer it is very obvious. For like sata disks it has the manufacturer and serial on it so you can match what drive it is you want to write to. Also, the name is pretty unique (on your sysytem at least, globally I don’t know), so even if you swap hardware around, you cannot write to the wrong storage if you got the right name. Like “sdb” can be reassigned, but the id is an id.



  • Glad that you might find some games interesting! The comment chains on lemmy are not working too great for me either. In the web UI of programming.dev and the liftoff app your comment in my notifications is fully interactable and therefore I am able to vote or reply. But if I remember correctly, the web UI is fully broken and shows my reply instead of your comment in my notifications if I reply. The context stuff is also interesting. On the web UI the context is not complete and I have no idea how it chooses what it shows. In the liftoff app it shows the context but a lot more than what I personally would call “context” (the complete tree of the root comment that was replied to). AND I am sorry, I missed your notification. The notifications in the liftoff app are so subtle that I basically have to check manually if I have any. And I don’t check because I don’t expect any.

    Addendum: for Guild Wars 2 I have a shitty “guide” if you need one: https://gist.github.com/Nithanim/443362f7b76d9a8d18abea2cb0daa00e