It’s quite a valuable skill to be able to do it. You appreciate how all the bits of Linux fit together when you’ve done the whole installation from scratch, and know that’s there’s nothing particularly hard about compiling the kernel. Indeed, it’s one of the easiest packages to compile, got a great module selector and very few dependencies. You’re far more likely to be able to recover a borked system if you’ve got all the low-level skills.

Actually using Gentoo as your daily driver? Well, that’s a different matter. The problem with having complete control over every aspect of your system in every detail is that you’re also responsible for it. Arch (btw) is a bit more of a sensible middle ground. You retain most of the control and responsibility, but also have all those packages prebuilt and ready to work together, plus loads of great documentation.

Two mattresses? Is he expecting guests?

I’m assuming that his beer fridge is just out of shot, as well.

We can only hope so.

I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.

Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.

Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.

“We’ve made a bang-average live service game that both costs money upfront and has ‘monetisation’ features built in. In addition, it’s in a somewhat niche hard-to-describe genre, has a nondescript name, and we pissed our advertising budget up the wall.”

Nice one, AWS. 100K players, easily.

Like you say, if you’re paying money upfront, you want it forever. From the initial “four player dungeon crawler” description, I thought they’d remade Gauntlet or something - I might be up for that, if it was made with love. Instead, they appear to have made an online collection of bonus levels from Spyro, with corporate-approved zaniness and 'tude that’s always asking you for your credit card details, and that they can shut down whenever they like. How about no?

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.

AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn’t really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.

Something needs to change, but I’m not convinced that would be enough…

Which is strange, because Azure’s documentation is complete dogshit.

We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure’s own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don’t exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

Just as long as they keep their hands off our beans.

Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)

Well, in which case, I’m super-gay. Don’t need to organise a three-some when I can just have three one-somes.

Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

I’d be happy if plasma looked a bit more like WinNT. Completely functional, all the information there at a glance. Nothing hidden away in hamburger menus, no guessing about what you can and can’t click on. Does what it needs to then gets out your way. The best-designed that Windows has ever been.

The studio is mostly ex-Ubisoft employees. So yeah, it’s their first game as that studio, but they’re by no means novice developers. Fair play to them for following their passion though, it’s paid off.