[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Proton is still wine with extra sauce. It's just that occasionally the sauce tastes bad :)

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago

Ahhh got it. I thought it was a "I know this is inadvisable, but dammit I'm going to do it anyways" type of post :)

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You can't run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck's solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you're using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I've seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

Gamescope isn't necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don't need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can't speak to either of those options directly.

But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you'd be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There are currently 252 Catholic cardinals, but only 135 are eligible to cast ballots as those over the age of 80 can take part in debate but cannot vote.

You're telling me the Catholic church has more term limits than the US Supreme Court?

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago

My favorite overheard undergrad story:

I was walking past the lecture hall right after an organic chemistry midterm, and there was a cluster of 4-5 students talking about the exam. One asked about question 8b, and another one said "you're not supposed to mix nitric acid and ethanol, that makes TNT, right?" I had to stifle a chuckle as I walked by.

So close, and yet so far! Nitrated acetone is explosive, and TNT (trinitrotoluene) is also made with nitric acid, but toluene is a much more complex molecule than acetone. If those undergrads could figure out how to turn acetone into TNT efficiently, they'd get a Nobel!

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Doesn't exist. Some metals can form organometallic complexes (with CO, CN, methyl groups), in which case you get for instance "organic mercury" compounds. Iron can also do that, but that's not what theyre talking about here.

What they mean is "biogenic" iron. The snail precipitates dissolved iron and sulfur in the water to form its shell out of iron sulfide. Its a different physical structure, but chemically similar to iron pyrite (fools gold).

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago

Jeeeeez that was a lot. I get the sense that the kernel has worked as well as it has because people saw it as separate from geopolitics and so didnt discuss them...now that politics has wedged its way in I feel like it may have opened that door permanently.

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Well we wouldn't want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s

It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.

101

To deal with all this Intel CPU disaster, I've been having to manually check MSI's website for mobo updates. It occurred to me that keeping BIOSes and other drivers that aren't delivered through your OS's update manager of choice is such a pain, and it's common knowledge that a lot of critical BIOS updates just don't get applied to systems because folks don't check for updates unless there's a problem.

Thinking about that, I realized that it would make life a lot easier if you could just have section in your RSS reader for firmware updates, and each mobo manufacturer published BIOS update announcements as an RSS feed. All your updates are in one place, and you're notified promptly! Of course, this would also apply to NVIDIA drivers, so you can get automatic updates on Windows without having to download Geforce NOW bloatware, but of course that's very intentional on NVIDIA's part.

Does anyone know of other easy ways to passively keep track of BIOS updates?

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 21 points 2 years ago

To be honest, their demand that OpenSUSE rebrand left a bad taste in my mouth. I get the logic behind it, but the time for that passed a long time ago (probably about 15 years ago).

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if it's science if the methods are transparent and you have access to data, as well as critiques from unbiased parties.

This thread seems to have formed two sides:

  1. unless it's published, peer reviewed and replicated it's not science, and
  2. LeCun is being elitist, science doesn't have to be published. This point of view often is accompanied by something about academic publishing being inaccessible or about corporate/private/closed science still being science.

I would say that "closed"/unpublished science may be science, but since peer review and replication of results are the only way we can tell if something is legitimate science, the problem is that we simply can't know until a third party (or preferably, many third parties) have reviewed it.

There are a lot of forms that review can take. The most thorough is to release it to the world and let anyone read and review it, and so it and the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.

If "closed" science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever has access to the work and critique can know it's science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure.

The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this; I'll use Oppenheimer as an example.

In the 40s, no one outside the Manhattan project knew how nuclear bombs were made. Sure, they exploded, but no one outside that small group knew if the reasoning behind why they exploded was correct.

Now, through released records, we know what the supporting theory was, and how it was tested. We also know that subsequent work based on that theory (H-bomb development, etc.) and replication (countries other than the US figuring out how to make nukes, in some cases without access to US documents on how it was originally done) was successful and supported the original explanations of why it worked. So now we all know that it was science.

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 24 points 2 years ago

Photoshopped, unfortunately. They change, but not that much.

12

OK, y'all. I'm trying to find a book I read many moons ago. I feel like it was by Diana Wynne Jones, but it's not in her bibliography. Massive spoilers incoming, obviously, but I can't remember what the spoilers are for.


The book starts on an island nation in the south of the world, with a rigid code of conduct which one of the main characters is being disciplined for breaking. The main characters leave on a quest to the oppressive and powerful kingdom in the north, and its revealed that one of the other main characters is the crown prince of the evil kingdom in the north, and can use their magic. If I recall correctly, his use of that magic makes dark veins stand out under his skin, and he has to fight against it controlling him. There's some kind of time limit, I think if he uses the magic too much, it'll take him over and he'll become the new ruler.

To gain some advantage over the evil kingdom, they visit an abandoned city, break into some kind of temple, and have an encounter with some kind of deity, which might then take over one of the characters?

Later in the story they make it to the evil palace, and there's a plotline about multiple children of the evil king trying to kill this guy, so they can inherit the throne. I think the evil palace is embedded in a mountain somehow.

Anyone who can set me on the right track, it'd be much appreciated!

[-] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 19 points 2 years ago

They're ways to search on a specific site from the engine's search bar. For instance, !gsch cows will search for cows on google scholar from DuckDuckGo. I don't know how stamdardized bangs are across engines, but they're super useful if you use a bunch of obscure search tools on the day to day.

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IrritableOcelot

joined 2 years ago