Atemu

Atemu, 1 month ago

Your browser cannot block server-side abuse of your personal data. These consent forms are not about cookies; they’re about fooling users into consenting to abuse of their personal data. Cookies are just one of many many technological measures required to carry out said human rights abuse.

Atemu, 1 month ago

I’d look further into that bug because it’s not happening on my end.

Atemu, 1 month ago

The usual; check the server and client logs.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Do you have a better source than a 5 y/o comment in an issue?

Atemu, 2 months ago

Drive is under a different org:

github.com/ProtonDriveApps/android-drive

Atemu, 2 months ago

Freetube won’t have anything to do with h265 as youtube does not serve that format in any way.

Atemu, 2 months ago

more and more customary that (for some reason) they want your photo

Gotta keep the people with different skin colour out

Atemu, 2 months ago

What does this have to do with privacy? It’s just a userscript to modify the regular Twitter website with all its human rights abuse.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Realtek LAN is usually not too bad.

For WiFi, you want mediatek or Intel though.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Steam is its own package manager and native games usually assume that an FHS-conformant is present. Neither of those mesh well with Nix notoriously has nothing comparable to an FHS and usually requires everything to be defined in its terms.

Atemu, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

They’re in the middle of a rollout of a rewrite and have promised to publish the source soon.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Right from the horse’s mouth ;)

mastodon.social/users/…/112162248226735964

Atemu, 2 months ago

v3 is worth it though

[citation needed]

Sometimes the improvements are not apparent by normal benchmarks, but would have an overall impact - for instance, if you use filesystem compression, with the optimisations it means you now have lower I/O latency, and so on.

Those would show up in any benchmark that is sensitive to I/O latency.

Also, again, [citation needed] that march optimisations measurably lower I/O latency for compressed I/O. For that to happen it is a necessary condition that compression is a significant component in I/O latency to begin with. If 99% of the time was spent waiting for the device to write the data, optimising the 1% of time spent on compression by even as much as 20% would not gain you anything of significance. This is obviously an exaggerated example but, given how absolutely dog slow most I/O devices are compared to how fast CPUs are these days, not entirely unrealistic.

Generally, the effect of such esoteric “optimisations” is so small that the length of your unix username has a greater effect on real-world performance. I wish I was kidding.
You have to account for a lot of variables and measurement biases if you want to make factual claims about them. You can observe performance differences on the order of 5-10% just due to a slight memory layout changes with different compile flags, without any actual performance improvement due to the change in code generation.

That’s not my opinion, that’s rather well established fact. Read here:

• Producing Wrong Data Without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong!
• STABILIZER: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation

So far, I have yet to see data that shows a significant performance increase from march optimisations which either controlled for the measurement bias or showed an effect that couldn’t be explained by measurement bias alone.

There might be an improvement and my personal hypothesis is that there is at least a small one but, so far, we don’t actually know.

More importantly, if you’re a laptop user, this could mean better battery life since using more efficient instructions, so certain stuff that might’ve taken 4 CPU cycles could be done in 2 etc.

The more realistic case is that an execution that would have taken 4 CPU cycles on average would then take 3.9 CPU cycles.

I don’t have data on how power scales with varying cycles/task at a constant task/time but I doubt it’s linear, especially with all the complexities surrounding speculative execution.

In my own experience on both my Zen 2 and Zen 4 machines, v3/v4 packages made a visible difference.

“visible” in what way? March optimisations are hardly visible in controlled synthetic tests…

It really doesn’t make sense that you’re spending so much money buying a fancy CPU, but not making use of half of its features…

These features cater towards specialised workloads, not general purpose computing.

Applications which facilitate such specialised workloads and are performance-critical usually have hand-made assembly for the critical paths where these specialised instructions can make a difference. Generic compiler optimisations will do precisely nothing to improve performance in any way in that case.

I’d worry more about your applications not making any use of all the cores you’ve paid good money for. Spoiler alert: Compiler optimisations don’t help with that problem one bit.

Atemu, 2 months ago

I’d define “bloat” as functionality (as in: program code) present on my system that I cannot imagine ever needing to use.

There will never be a system that is perfectly tailored to my needs because there will always be some piece of functional code that I have no intention of using. Therefore, any system is “bloated” and it’s a question to which degree it is “bloated”.

The degree depends on which kind of resources the “bloat” uses and how much of it. The more significant the resource usage, the more significant the effect of the “bloat”. The kind of resource is used defines how critical some amount of usage is. 5% Power, CPU, IO, RAM or disk usage have varying degrees of criticality for instance.

Some examples:

This system has a calendar app installed by default. I don’t use it, so it’s certainly bloat but I also don’t care because it’s just a few megs on disk at worst and that doesn’t hurt me in any way.

Firefox frequently uses most of my RAM and >1% CPU util at “idle” but it’s a useful application that I use all the time, so it’s not bloat.

The most critical resource usage of systemd (pid1) on my system is RAM which is <0.1%. It provides tonnes of essential features required on a modern system and therefore not even worth thinking about when it comes to bloat.

I just noticed that mbrola voices sneaked into my closure again which is like 700MiB of voice synthesis data for many languages that I don’t have a need for. Quite a lot of storage for something I don’t ever need. This is significant bloat. It appears Firefox is drawing it in but it looks like that can be disabled via an override, so I’ll do that right now.

Atemu, 2 months ago

While I wouldn’t put it past tech bros to use such unethical measures for their latest grift, it’s not a given that it’s actually claudebot. Anyone can claim to be claudebot, googlebot, boredsquirrelbot or anything else. In fact it could very well be a competitor aiming to harm Claude’s reputation.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Usually, fundamental rights cannot be “sold”

It’s really quite perverse if you think about it.

Atemu, 2 months ago

parents are a motor to innovation

Absolutely. No parents -> No children -> No innovation.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Pretty sure it’s even inside a secure element; inaccessible to even the OS.

Atemu, 2 months ago

I used to not but I wish I did. I want to know where pictures were taken. Photo album software like Immich can also make cool maps out of your photos this way and group photos by location.

As long as you’re not sharing the pictures with anyone, there is no loss of privacy whatsoever in doing this. I don’t see any reason to generally label it as “not great for privacy”.

When sharing publicly, you need to be careful of course and run the images through an EXIF metadata stripper.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Why is this being downvoted? It’s clearly labelled as Japanese; if you don’t want to see foreign languages, filter them out.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Not that I can tell; just an explanation how df works on Linux and macOS.

Atemu, 2 months ago

I’ve heard that some VA panels can get a bit wonky with text.

I haven’t. Where did you hear this?

OLEDs tend to have issues because of their subpixel layout and I don’t know the current state of font rendering support on M$'s stupid OS.

I can’t be giving people jaundice, I mean. The Acer isn’t exactly perfect either, but it’s good enough.

If your current cheap monitor is good enough, any monitor of this class will be at least as good.

If you need proper colours though, you should rather invest in a calibration device. Even good monitors should be calibrated for your specific room conditions if colour accuracy is of importance.

Whatever I choose will be my daily driver for probably 7+ years.

Then I’d get a newer OLED that isn’t prone to burn in or wait a few months for said OLEDs to do down in price.

LCDs are not future proof. The vast majority has no proper support for HDR for starters (HDRn’t).

I’m concerned that there will always be adjustments and compromises if I go curved.

Curved isn’t as significant as you imagine it to be. You usually don’t notice it at all.

Even extreme curvature as is common on Samsungs newer VA panels is only a little noticeable when you actually sit in front; eventhough it looks like a lot from the outside.

With VA, you actually want curvature as there is somewhat of a significant gamma shift when looking at a horizontal angle and the curvature helps mitigate this effect.

I really enjoyed 240hz G-Sync smoothness, but I don’t play serious competitive stuff and I could downgrade to 144hz, as long as the other benefits are worth the trade-off. I also think QHD will hover around 180fps in my current games, and UWQHD around 140 maybe. I’d probably only get the full benefit of 240hz QHD in older games.

Unless you really love playing E-sports games competitively and that makes up most of your gaming time, 144Hz is good enough. Though VRR with LFC is a must, look out for that.

Do any of you own either of these or similar monitors?

I’m not too familiar with the current market but what I can tell you is that you must always look up real-world measurements of rise and fall times, overshoot and colour accuracy. Ideally read or watch a review (TFT Central, RTings, HWunboxed/monitors unboxed).

This is especially important with VA panels as the vast majority use older tech that can have very slow rise and fall times that are often not actually sufficient for high refresh rates and/or bad overshoot. You need to filter these out.

I would not buy a monitor without having seen real-world measurements of rise and fall times aswell as overshoot.

If you have other recommendations in the $450-600 range

HW unboxed usually has many “current” monitors for comparison in their charts. I can highly recommend watching a few of their reviews.

---

I personally bought a UWQHD Nano IPS panel (LG 34GN850) after attempting to buy a working Samsung G9 VA UUWQHD twice a few years ago (yay Samsung QC…). It’s decent but I wouldn’t buy it again nowadays. I really miss the contrasts of the old (S)VA panel I had before. Decent VA panels have ~3000:1 ration while rather good IPS panels only have ~1000:0; it’s really that much of a difference.

I’d only buy IPS if I couldn’t find a VA with fast enough transition times for my specific constraints or desperately needed a colour accurate display.

These days, I’d buy LG WOLED or Samsung QD-OLED (or wait for them to go down in price).

Atemu, 2 months ago

VA has historically been terrible for high framerate, decent for colour accuracy and great for image quality (contrast is so much better on VAs compared to IPS).

VA panels with decent rise/fall times and not too much overshoot are far and few between. You really have to do your research and even then it’ll be close or even slightly over the refresh cycle target. Only Samsung’s more recent panels are actually good for high refresh; incredibly good actually.

Atemu, 2 months ago

At $200, that’s a great deal.

It’s IPS, so contrast is quite poor but I’d consider it a great stop-gap until OLEDs are feasible to buy for you.

Make sure you set the overdrive to “Fast” for the optimal VRR experience.

I’ll use the rest of my budget to invest in some Ergotron arms

Note that the “Amazon Basic” branded monitor arm is an Ergotron one but a lot cheaper with no obvious quality deficit. It’s currently holding the monitor I’m typing this on ;)

Atemu, 2 months ago

They should register a trade mark.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Yes.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Monitor I/O on the drive; is anything using it while your system is idle?

What’s I/O like when loading an album?

Atemu, 2 months ago

Typing anything in another window that is not my browser

Which windows exactly? The apps you’re typing things into might be spying on you.

M$ and their 738 parters really value your privacy, so if you’re typing things into Excel…

copypasting the words “trans” and “talking”

What applications were running on your computer while you did this? Any of them could be recording clipboard history; it requires no special privilege.

Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows itself was recording this and sent it to daddy M$ to train LLMs and maybe sell it as a little multi-billion side hustle.

transgender videos about “How to change your voice” start popping up in my feed. Please know I have zero interest in transgender politics/culture/anything, it is not something I have ever searched for or engaged in online.

Maybe Google knows something you don’t? JK.

A more plausible explanation is that Google knows that you’re in the Fediverse (ever Googled it?) which has a far above average concentration of queer people.

What is also plausible is that someone living with you (i.e. your family) or a friend is trans and you’re obviously associated with them.

Google doesn’t recommend queer content because they think you’re queer but because it’s what their data-defined statistical algorithms (““AI””) predicts you are likely to be interested in and therefore watch ads for. If you know a queer person or are often in contact with them, you are simply quite a bit more likely to be interested in queer people than the average and therefore more likely to click on queer content.

Possible that Youtube is reading my clipboard? Reading my keystrokes?

Youtube itself? Near impossible.

Other applications? Possible but likelihood unknown.

Listening to an album via VLC, while Youtube is open in my browser. Suddenly, more tracks from that album start showing up in my suggested feed. Possible Youtube is reading the titles of other apps current open on my machine? (VLC changes its active title to the name of whatever file is currently open)

Again, Youtube itself directly isn’t doing anything like this. If that album is related to what you were listening to on YT or is even simply also popular with people who listed to the same things on YT as you do or are just generally similar to your person; that’s all it takes for YT to attempt to show it to you.

Also note again that any application on your Windows or Linux PC can read the window titles of any other application or even simply scan your media library or other files.

Discord does this for instance for their rich presence function for instance and I would again not be surprised if there was a little multi-billion side-hustle going on.

I use Youtube all the time as my personal version of Spotify.

If you’re not reliant on YT’s recommendations, I’d recommend you to download the songs you want to listen to and listen to them on a local player.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Then for a day and a half after I was working on that spreadsheet, it showed up at the top of the suggested videos.

Again, which applications had access to your clipboard and user files at that time? If any of the applications running on your computer was stealing your data and selling it for financial gain, Google would likely be buying it and obviously using it against you.

You also have to consider side-channels. Were you or your friends talking about that spreadsheet project via Discord or some other known abuser? Did you talk about it with a person in your room while daddy Google or Amazon were listening? (Alexa in the room, Google assistant on your phone etc.)

in short: years of nothing, nothing, nothing, TWO DAYS OF TRANS VIDEO SUGGESTIONS, and then since, nothing, nothing, nothing.

This might simply be expectation bias. You may have been shown such suggestions in the same pattern before and simply didn’t notice because, contrary to the present, the topic wasn’t on your mind and simply forgot about it because you’re being shown irrelevant suggested topics all the time.

Even after reading a lot of people telling me that it is just The Algo^TM^ at work, that incident seems so razor specific to activity I was simply doing on my computer at the same time Youtube was open rather than anything that could be related to my personal interests.

That’s how “The Algo^TM^” works. Google gathers data on you directly through its applications, from 3rd parties selling data they stole from you and indirectly through the same process from people you associate with.
It’s even possible that some data broker simply made up the fact that you’re trans. Google could have then assumed it’s true because you associate with trans people here. I could very well see that happen in an enshittified system such as Google.

Atemu, 2 months ago

The process for this is that you want to set your prefix to the /boot partition in the (hd1, gpt1) syntax (use ls) and then load the “normal” module. From then on, you should have regular GRUB again and should be able to boot your OS to properly fix GRUB.

Atemu, 2 months ago

It’s too early to tell; you must investigate further.

Atemu, 2 months ago

And a ton of historical content.

Atemu, 2 months ago

You activated my trap card!

It’s entierly based on the excellent org-mode for Emacs.

Atemu, 2 months ago

XZ is a slog to compress and decompress but compresses a bit smaller than zstd.

zstd is quite quick to compress, very quick to decompress, scales to many cores (vanilla xz is single-core only) and scales a lot further in the quicker end of the compression speed <-> file size trade-off spectrum while using the same format.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Edge is so privileged you can’t remove it… well, you kinda just can’t remove it…

That will have to change with the DMA becuase otherwise M$ will get …a really big slap on the wrist or something.

Atemu, 2 months ago

internet chromesplorer

I’m stealing that.

Atemu, 2 months ago

No.

Atemu, 2 months ago

xz is necessarily in the stdenv. Patching it means rebuilding the world, no matter what you optimise.

Atemu, 2 months ago

AFAIK, affected versions never made it to stable as there was no reason to backport it.

Atemu, 2 months ago

This has nothing to do with “unstable” or the specific channel. It could have happened on the stable channel too; depending on the timing.

Atemu, 2 months ago

It was not vulnerable to this particular attack because the attack didn’t specifically target Nixpkgs. It could have very well done so if they had wanted to.

Atemu, 2 months ago

This blog post misses entirely that this has nothing to do with the unstable channel. It just happened to only affect unstable this time because it gets updates first. If we had found out about the xz backdoor two months later (totally possible; we were really lucky this time), this would have affected a stable channel in exactly the same way. (It’d be slightly worse actually because that’d be a potentially breaking change too but I digress.)

I see two way to “fix” this:

• Throw a shitton of money at builders. I could see this getting staging-next rebuild times down to just 1-2 days which I’d say is almost acceptable. This could even be a temporary thing to reduce cost; quickly renting an extremely large on-demand fleet from some cloud provider for a day whenever a critical world rebuild needs to be done which shouldn’t be too often.
• Implement pure grafting for important security patches through a second overlay-like mechanism.

Atemu, 2 months ago

Is “Grouped Results” disabled in settings?

Atemu, 2 months ago

Oh, indeed! They’re under different orgs; that confused me.

Atemu, 2 months ago

If you need languages other than “western European languages”, you’re SOL with this offline translator; whether you use it within Firefox or the extension.