Linux loads the “firmware” into the GPU on boot. It does need to be updated from time to time, separately from the driver and everything else. On my system it’s kept in /usr/lib/firmware/amdgpu. And bios updates can often fix weird bugs, usually worth doing.

I don’t know, but one possibility to consider is that running amdgpu-pro (or its non-pro counterpart) might’ve done something that stops mesa from working if you didn’t completely undo everything it did.

amdgpu fails to load

If you’re referring to the old “amdgpu pro” software, you probably don’t want to be using that. It isn’t necessary for the stuff you want to do, and I’m surprised to learn that it still exists at all — it’s still talked about as if it’s current on the arch wiki. Get rid of that, update the firmware package, run a recent kernel, and then figure out whatever specific thing you actually need for the AI stuff you’re trying to do such as rocm-related things.

I dunno, I’ve just seen a few weird ones over the years. My search didn’t turn up any better place to start than the wikipedia page on musical notation which does cover quite a few of them.

I don’t know what you’re proposing exactly that you think would “fix” it, but you might be surprised at how many attempts to reform music notation have come and gone over the years. Perhaps the one you’re looking for has already been invented.

Yeah by “do whatever you like” I mean install MO2, edit the registry, run dyndolod, mess around with system dlls, whatever. One thing I’ve just learned about that might be useful: https://github.com/SulfurNitride/NaK

The “immutable” thing shouldn’t be a problem I’d think. Games installed through e.g. steam aren’t affected by that — it just does its own thing creating a wine prefix for the game somewhere in your home directory. You should be free to do whatever you like in there.

If that thought seems novel to you, your homework for this weekend is to watch a few Jackie Chan movies.

“What’s up?” It’s the direction in space opposite to the local gravitational field, why are you asking me?

date -r reports current date instead of date specified by reference file

Seems like it was not simply a “difference compared to GNU coreutils” — it was just giving completely the wrong date.

Reading more carefully I see that the real reason is "the /run directory is created as a tmpfs filesystem specifically for run-time files by systemd-tmpfiles.

I forgot that systemd had been allowed to take over /tmp and /run.

Why on earth would the permissions on /var/lock be something for systemd to decide?

Generate Random Numbers

I prefer to generate random words (mostly for generating passwords):

alias randword='head -$[$SRANDOM % `wc -l /usr/share/dict/words | cut -f1 -d" "`] /usr/share/dict/words | tail -1'

You can adjust the dpi setting in winecfg to fix the font size, but in recent beta versions of proton I find it necessary to set it back to the default (and restart wine) to actually play the game.

There was one fairly popular fo4 mod that didn’t work for me, but the only skyrim one I found that seemed to have a problem with linux was nemesis, and that has now been replaced with pandora. All the other thousand or so mods I tried (currently using 600 or so) seem to work about as well as they do for anyone else.

MO2 runs just fine for me. I don’t actually use it for Skyrim — I do that all manually — but it worked for e.g. Fallout 4 without me doing anything special. I just ran its installer the same way I’d run skse64_loader.exe using the same prefix as the game.

There are some ex-smokers who claim that they never enjoyed it. Then there are some who go on to claim that nobody ever does. The former, I can believe.

Hi future kids! If you tracked down this account you probably either work for the NSA or you’re a super-talented hacker. So I’m either very proud of you or very disappointed.

Not bad considering it’s only been around for a couple of years.

Sort of hard to believe they’re going through with it. I guess many people in Texas will be wandering the networks looking for alternative distributors of apks in 2026. No doubt that will greatly improve everyone’s security.