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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I’ve been around, there’s the technic launcher, ATLauncher (that one was the go to for making packa for playing with friends), the FTB launcher, as mentioned the curseforge launcher was part of the twitch app for a while (I think it was also something like the Curse app before that?), and then Prism Launcher is actually a fork of a fork of MultiMC, but the in-between fork was a little bit of a controversial mess that fell to a hostile takeover by one of the maintainers - which spurred the remaining maintainers to make what I see as the best launcher currently available. Oh, and I think modrinth might have a launcher now?

    Oh, yeah, I also remember the old Minecraft launcher, I think there was a modded version of that with support for multiple profiles so you didn’t have to switch mods manually!

    It’s funny how much history there is if you go digging into things like this, and I’m sure I missed a lot.


  • Right, but that requires somebody to find and document exploitable firmware revisions, create and distribute hardware/software to exploit them, develop the aftermarket software/hardware, and all that potentially separately for each car model. And then that just becomes a war with the manufacturers, who might try to update their firmware more aggressively, lock things down more, and threaten/sue people working on such things.



  • some of my games didn’t launch, complaining about missing stuff.

    I don’t know Slackware, but I know on arch there’s the standard steam runtime version, and then there’s the unofficial steam-native-runtime, which uses system packages instead of steam’s own bundled runtime. And if we’re talking native Linux games, which is where the problem is, they tend to not work with steam’s runtime, presumably because they weren’t properly built to target it, and need to be launched with the native runtime (or switch to running the windows version with proton…)




  • I use KDE, but for my file manager I stick to Thunar, which I think is from a fork of GNOME. Does cause me some issues, since Thunar uses gvfs for stuff like mounting USB drives, whereas plasma loads kio, seemingly with no way to disable it, and they fight for control over devices.

    I remember one thing in particular that pissed me off about Dolphin is how it displays folders with 4 tilted miniature icons of files inside, with no way to turn it off, or even just make them not be randomly tilted. Such a minor thing, but when I was choosing it was between clean icons and a scrambled mess, I went with clean icons.

    Ultimately, I wish gvfs/kio wasn’t an issue, but I love to have the freedom to choose.



  • I will note, in reply, one major point - there’s plenty of other arguments for going vegan, biking, using public transport. I think veganism is more ethical, and I have the impression it’s healthier as well - and both apply to biking and public transport in their own ways, health is kinda obvious, but ensuring widespread accessibility for people without cars seems like an ethical positive, and if respected for city planning it’d also make more pleasant cities to live in.

    What I’m getting at is… Well, I’m not sure how to express it, but I guess to not forget the bigger picture? I feel like the previous commenter talking about not believing going vegan will have an impact was getting kinda dogpiled on (not really the right word, but maybe close enough), for what seemed like a reasonable statement, because they were speaking in opposition to something they might very well still consider a good thing.


  • The claim is as follows

    I don’t believe being vegan is an effective method to combat [climate change]

    Do we have hard data showing that if more people went vegan, it’d significantly affect climate change? Because if not… Then yes, I’d say it is a question of belief.

    If what we have is data on the impact of the meat industry, data on the impact of things like water use and gases produced by animals on the climate, data on how the climate behaves and changes in general, and data on how other things affect the environment, you have to trust and believe that not only every part of it is right, but that it was also all put together and compared correctly.

    And it’s difficult to know who to believe, when there seems to be so much conflicting information these days.

    I’ll also say honestly that I don’t know if being vegan has a significant impact. What I’ve heard and read a lot of is that there’s a lot of blaming of individuals while supposedly big corporations are the ones causing the most pollution… Which simultaneously ignores the question of how much of that pollution is driven directly by people buying products that are polluting to produce.

    The whole thing feels hopeless, and one feeling I do get about that is that doing anything as an individual seems pointless, since countless more people… They don’t just not care, they’ll actively do things they know are polluting, either because they’re a bit cheaper, or downright as a statement of objection to caring about global warming.



  • One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.

    There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)




  • Shouldn’t it be more efficient to download only the changes and patch the existing files?

    As people mentioned, that becomes problematic with a distro like arch. You could easily be jumping 5-6 versions with an update, with some more busy packages and updating less frequently. This means you need to go through the diffs in order, and you need to actually keep those diffs available.

    This actually poses two issues, and the first one is that software usually isn’t built for this kind of binary stability - anything compiled/autogenerated might change a lot with a small source change, and even just compressing data files will mess it up. Because of that, a diff/delta might end up not saving much space, and going through multiple of them could end up bigger than just a direct download of the files.

    And the second issue is, mirrors - mirrors need to store and provide a lot of data, and they’re not controlled by the distribution. Presumably to save on space, they quickly remove older package versions - and when I say older, I mean potentially less than a week old. In order for diffs/deltas to work, you’d need the mirrors to not only store the full package files they already do (for any new installs), but now also store deltas for N days back, and they’d only be useful to people who update more often than every N days.