According to ShinyHunters, the records contain extensive data on Premium members including email addresses, activity type, location, video URL, video name, keywords associated with the video and the time the event occurred. Activity types include whether the subscriber watched or downloaded a video, or viewed a channel and events include search histories.

This sort of thing is one of those examples why “no log, no profile” service is probably a good idea. The service could have offered the option to charge a fee for access, but not retain customer activity data. They didn’t do that. At some point down the line, someone got ahold of the data, which I imagine that their customers are not really super keen on having floating around attached to their identities.

Probably a lot of companies out there that log and retain a lot of data about their customers.

It’s not, and I think that Excel is often used where other tools would be more-appropriate because of existing expertise with Excel, but you don’t necessarily need to use a database for all tasks where a bunch of data gets stored.

I have plenty of scripts that deal with large amount of schlorped up data that just leave it in a text file, and Unix has a long and rich tradition and toolset for using text files for data storage and processing data in them in bulk.

GNU R, a statistics package, has a lot of tools to schlorp up data from many sources, including scraping it from the web, and storing it large data frames to be processed and maybe visualized. It’s probably rather more performant than databases for some kinds of bulk data processing.

Okay, so…is it appropriate here?

One thing that spreadsheets can be handy for is for making specialized calculators that plonk some data into some simple model and spit out a result. Having, say, the current temperature in a given city may be a perfectly reasonable input to make available to a spreadsheet, I think.

Hmm. Kinda a long shot, but if it’s easy to reproduce and you’re looking for switches to try throwing, the amdgpu driver does have a number of options.

$ /sbin/modinfo -p amdgpu

Might try rebooting, and at GRUB, editing the kernel command line, and disabling some features, seeing if things magically go away.

Like, the bug report there is talking about some ring timeout. Maybe irrelevant, but could try amdgpu.async_gfx_ring=0 on the kernel command line.

Hmm. If you don’t mind sharing, when you hit the problem, were you concurrently running a video game and an LLM on the card? That seems to be what the guy there was doing.

This is a new issue that started after an update and downgrading everything I could didn’t fix it.

considers

I don’t know if buying a new laptop is necessary to resolve that. I don’t know if this is the same problem, but I was just in a discussion with someone who said that he had had instability on RDNA3-based cards (I don’t know what distro) on kernels above 6.12.

Someone else responded saying that they were fine on Arch, on kernel 6.18, IIRC.

I also use an RDNA 3 card on my desktop (an XT 7900 XTX, on 6.12.48+deb13, Debian trixie’s current kernel) and haven’t had problems.

You might just try installing a 6.12 kernel and seeing if the problem goes away, if whatever you’re hitting is whatever that guy is hitting.

EDIT: Yeah, looks like Arch is currently on Linux 6.18.2.

The discussion in question:

https://lemmy.today/post/45004502/21377977

And he said that he was on 6.18.2.

I use a Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook 15.

Pros:

• Vendor Linux support. I don’t care about using a supported distro, but if a vendor ships with Linux, it’s pretty good odd that the hardware will work with any distro without any weird quirks.

• Being able to order with a fairly large amount of memory (I use 96 GB, and it’s available with 128GB now), though with what memory prices have done recently, memory may be limited more by price than motherboard capacity. I’m sure that it’d blow a 900 euro budget.

• Large battery (can get 100 Wh, the most you can fly with in the US).

• Screen can get up to be fairly bright, which is nice for use in brighter environments. My past laptops, mostly Thinkpads, tended to fairly dim screens.

Cons:

• Ships from Europe (Tuxedo is German). With Trump-era tariffs, buying them in the US is going to be more-painful. It also took a while to ship to the US when I bought it. You’re using a euro sign, so it may not be a con for you.

• I’m not rabid about the trackpad, which is large and doesn’t have physical buttons. I find myself bumping the trackpad occasionally, and have set up keybindings to disable it in some games where it’s a problem. I’m a fan of Synaptics trackpads of the sort that Thinkpads have, a smaller pad with three built-in physical buttons (Linux being a good environment to use three buttons), but very few laptops have this; some Thinkpads do.

• The power light does not pulse when the laptop is in sleep (not hibernate) mode; if there is a way to remedy this, I have not found it. I have my system set up to, on lid close, sleep, then hibernate after ten minutes or so, so tapping the power button will shut the system down depending upon how long it’s been sleeping; something that I don’t want to accidentally do when it’s still just in sleep mode. Many laptops are able to do this.

• There’s more flex to the case than Thinkpads, which are mostly what I’ve used in the past. Putting a lot of pressure on the bottom of the case below the fan, like squeezing the case hard, is enough to make it impact the fan when it’s spinning.

In the past, I have used mostly Thinkpads, but Lenovo has tended to take them in an increasingly inexpensive-but-not-as-good direction from where IBM originally had 'em. For me, the two front-runners when getting this one were either Tuxedo or Framework.

I am currently encountering issues with AMD hardware on my main machine

I have an AMD processor. I’m not sure what your concern is — like, are you wanting a laptop with an Intel CPU, or just not to have a discrete AMD GPU, or are you just frustrated at that other laptop?

I’m not familiar with FreshRSS, but assuming that there’s something in the protocol that lets a reader push up a “read” bit on an per article basis — this page references a “GReader” API — I’d assume that that’d depend on the client, not the server.

If the client attempts an update and fails and that causes it to not retry again later, then I imagine that it wouldn’t work. If it does retry until it sets the bit, I’d imagine that it does work. The FreshRSS server can’t really be a factor, because it won’t know whether the client has tried to talk to it when it’s off.

EDIT: Some of the clients in the table on the page I linked to say that they “work offline”, so I assume that the developers at least have some level of disconnected operation in mind.

The RSS readers I’ve always used are strictly pull. They don’t set bits on the server, and any “read” flag lives only on the client.

Uh, have you not heard of Heroic? It’s by far the most comfortable method to install and run GOG games on Linux

To reiterate the above:

I’ve got better tools to launch programs

I don’t want a GUI “game launcher”, thanks. I have a number of general-purpose, more-capable systems for launching programs. Not Lutris, not Heroic, not any program that requires throwing up a window and is intended to just start games. I don’t have a “word processor launcher” or a “web browser launcher”, and I don’t need a “game launcher”.

I’d dump the Steam client if a number of Steam games didn’t require it to be running for their DRM to work. Hell, for a few games, like Caves of Qud, which don’t rely on Steam for DRM, where I want to run the thing on other systems and don’t want Steam even installed, I do exactly that.

EDIT: Sorry, guess I was a little snappish, if you were just suggesting it WRT OP’s concerns. Having to use the Steam client to launch Steam games has been something of a pet peeve of mine; ordinarily, one can configure pretty much whatever one wants on Linux, but Steam’s a closed-source black box, and the source of several of my “my computer doesn’t do precisely what I want” irritations.

Fractal Design makes nicer, more-expensive PC cases. That is kinda a good point — if you make PC components that don’t involve upgrading an existing system — and few people are going to move the guts out of an existing system into a new one — 2026 is gonna be a bad time.

I kind of wonder if there’s a market for premium drive array enclosures. Like, for people who want to store a ton of drives, but not in a rack. Fans, air filter, USB interface, temperature sensor, settable power-on-after-power-loss switch. I’d think that that’d kinda be up a PC case manufacturer’s alley, something that they could do with slack time — hell, they could do matching PC/drive array cases.

Does that exist?

GOG is a store. What you’re wanting is some frontend app to do downloads and act as a launcher.

GOG has some frontend, GOG Galaxy, but GOG doesn’t do a Linux release of it.

I personally dislike using Steam’s client as launcher, and don’t like that model (I’ve got better tools to launch programs and would just as soon not have Steam interjecting itself and would rather not even having it run). One of GOG’s selling points is that once you buy a game and download the installer, you don’t have any dependency on GOG — if the company goes under, you still can play the games.

For GoG, there’s a command-line program, lgogdownloader, that can, among other things, batch-download all your games, but I don’t believe that it will auto-install them (and in fact, I don’t know if all of the games on GoG have installers that can do headless installation). The open-source, command-line downloader and not having to run software from the company is more-or-less my ideal model, though I can understand wanting to do a headless install.

EDIT: It does look like GOG Galaxy can run under WINE, which is how you’d likely run most of the games you’re obtaining from GOG, so you could just use the Windows client in WINE. I suppose that you’d download the Windows client here if you wanted to do that.

EDIT2: The Wine AppDB entry says that you will need corefonts (a collection of Microsoft fonts) to run GOG Galaxy, so if you’ve never used WINE, setting up a 64-bit WINE environment in ~/.wine and installing corefonts in it will look something like this (on a Debian-family system):

$ sudo apt install wine winetricks
$ winetricks corefonts

Download the GOG Galaxy binary for Windows from its website.

And then run it:

$ wine GOG_Galaxy_2.0.exe

In fairness, distros do include their own patches, and it’s possible that there is some regression that showed up somewhere above 6.12 and he’s running a vanilla kernel and the Arch guys put in some patch that fixes whatever he’s seeing that isn’t in vanilla or something. Or maybe he’s using a distro that includes some kind of kernel patch that introduces the problem, if he’s not building his own kernels. I mean, I’ve got no idea what the guy is running; he doesn’t say.

It’s also not absolutely impossible that it’s a legitimate hardware problem — I had two of those Intel desktop processors that destroyed themselves, which often manifested itself early-on as Firefox freezing; Firefox just happened to be really good at tripping problems resulting from that. I also once had a video card that would overheat — part of a line where the manufacturer hadn’t put enough thermal paste or something on the GPU, and if you ran it for a while, it would overheat. But most heat-intensive hardware, CPUs and GPUs, will throttle themselves to avoid overheating; in practice, most overheating problems today tend to result in just worse performance, not instability. I think that heat tends to be blamed more often than it’s an actual cause of instability.

I think that it can be disabled, though I can’t recall the mechanism at the moment (I always want it enabled, and have it enabled on my computer), but normally Control-Alt-F1, Control-Alt-F2, etc will switch you out of Xorg/Wayland to a Linux console. Once out of Wayland and on a Linux console, Alt-Right-Arrow and Alt-Left-Arrow will cycle among the virtual consoles, and Alt-F1, Alt-F2, etc directly switch to one. On my Debian system, the first seven run a text terminal, and the eighth runs Wayland. Especially on modern systems that use KMS (kernel-mode setting) rather than Xorg to manage the video card, that should likely get a system that has something else wrong to a usable, text-based console, as long as the kernel can at least talk to the video card. Probably a good idea to confirm that one can do this ahead of a freeze.

If you have Magic Sysrq enabled (I think that modern distros may have it off by default or restrict some Magic Sysrq combinations; I typically want it available, at least when I control physical access to the computer), that’ll often work if nothing else will, as the kernel grabs it at a low level, though the functionality is pretty limited. Might be able to do Magic Sysrq-k — dunno what happens under Wayland for sure, but that might have the kernel kill off Wayland if it can — and that might get you to a text console or restart Wayland. On my system, I suspect that it’d kill Wayland and my compositor and bring me back to an emptty login prompt, but most people don’t run emptty, so might effectively log them out and bring them back to a graphical login prompt. Can hit Magic Sysrq-t (this will hang things up for a while, then log a backtrace of the running tasks, which can sometimes be helpful to give an indication of what code in the kernel — drivers and such — are running, maybe deadlocked). If you’re on a text console, that output will probably be directly visible. If the kernel is still in a state where it can write to the disk and you’ve got some daemon (journald, under systemd, or older log daemons on non-systemd systems) still functional, that’ll not just display the log to the console, but also log it to the disk. Can persistently enable all the Magic Sysrq key combinations with kernel.sysrq=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf. That’s a bit more specialized — like, if the reason that your screen isn’t showing anything is because the kernel’s just unable to talk to the video hardware to update things, that may not provide useful clues. But if it’s a bug where drivers are actually deadlocked or something, threads are in kernel code and not exiting, that can let you know what code is running (like, “oh, there’s a thread wedged in my Bluetooth driver”). More helpful for tracking down a cause than just saying "well, my system just stopped running and nothing is updating on the screen, even if you’re not a kernel developer.

I meant that House Flipper 2 the game causes the laptop to hard crash somewhat frequently, as in, the entire computer must be powered off to do anything. Can’t open a terminal, can’t alt+tab out, etc.

Gotcha. Yeah, Proton itself shouldn’t really be able to do that absent other bugs or hardware problems. Closest one could get should maybe be eating up nearly all the memory on the system and causing it to swap heavily and run very slowly. A bug with Wayland or your compositor could cause the interface to (mostly) freeze, though not the underlying system, but just Proton alone or the game really shouldn’t.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1190970/House_Flipper_2/

It looks like this is a 3D game, and absent any additional information, making a sheer guess, I’d be kind of inclined to suspect some sort of issue related to the 3D drivers, just because that’s something in the kernel that the game would exercise.

Assuming that this is a systemd-based Linux distro — most are today — if you open a terminal, you can view the system logs via the journalctl command.

journalctl -b will view the logs for the current boot. journalctl -b-1 will view the logs for the previous boot, journalctl -b-2 for the boot before that, etc.

journalctl -k will show only the logged lines coming from the Linux kernel (which will include problems with drivers and such).

journalctl -r will show the log lines in reverse order, so the stuff right at the top is the last stuff logged before the system rebooted.

You probably could just go back and look now, since the logs are probably still around, though I don’t know how many boots ago it was. Or, next time it freezes, you might reboot and then run:

$ journalctl -krb-1

That’ll show you what, if any, errors the kernel was logging right before you rebooted the laptop.

That might give some indication as to cause.

Might also try leaving off the “-k” flag, as it’s also possible that whatever caused the problem logged something at the userspace level, even if the problem is likely in the kernel.

It experiences frequent OS crashes

I don’t know what you mean by this. Proton is just another program for Linux. It should not be able to cause your Linux environment to go down absent bugs in the surrounding environment. It could manage to make the game itself crash or hang, but not the whole system.

If you’re seeing a kernel panic, then while Proton might be able to trigger it, there’s going to need to be a bug elsewhere.

Why do some work better than others?

In some cases, a newer version might fix bugs.

In other cases, it might introduce bugs.

Having a small PC separate from a keyboard isn’t much work to carry — you can put both in a single carrying case. And it gives you a lot more flexibility than combining the two in terms of space and heat and such.

The laptop — display+keyboard/trackpad+guts — makes sense because you can use it at places that aren’t a desk. But if you’re going to require use of a desk anyway, why forego the benefits of a separate PC and keyboard?

Maybe AMD can put some resources into fixing RDNA3 instability with the latest kernels this year? I’ve had unrecoverable system crashes (no access to TTY, keyboard/mouse locked up) when gaming with RDNA3 on any kernel >6.12, and mostly on wayland, numerous times now.

7900XT

There may be some kind of regression, but as a data point, I run 6.12.48+deb13, which is what Debian stable uses, on a XT 7900 XTX and haven’t had stability problems with games.

Edit: The viewing angle is 57 degrees. In comparison most VR headset have a viewing angle of 90-110 degrees.

FOV shouldn’t be ignored, but having a large FOV also isn’t necessarily desirable on a HMD. It’s important for VR, because a major point of that is filling one’s peripheral vision, creating a sense of immersion.

But if you wanted, say, an HMD as a monitor replacement — something that I’d be interested in — it doesn’t buy all that much, because the stuff that you can see with high detail is only in a small cone in front of you. For a given pixel resolution, I’d rather have a smaller FOV on an HMD for that, because you can take advantage of fairly high angular resolutions within that narrow cone. The real bottleneck on an HMD as a monitor replacement is the limited angular resolution you get — you can’t have something that gets as sharp and crisp as existing conventional monitors.

Secondly, is there a benefit to creating an LVM volume with a btrfs filesystem vs just letting btrfs handle it?

Like, btrfs on top of LVM versus btrfs? Well, the latter gives you access to LVM features. If you want to use lvmcache or something, you’d want it on LVM.

1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.

Ehh. Not sure I agree. I mean, I think that there is a valid insight that it’s important to keep track of what problem you’re actually trying to solve, and that that problem needs to translate to some real world, meaningful thing for a human.

But I also think that there are projects that are large enough that it’s entirely reasonable to be a perfectly good engineer who isn’t dealing with users much at all, where you’re getting requirements that are solid that have been done by up someone else. If you’re trying to, say, improve the speed at which Zip data decompression happens, you probably don’t need to spend a lot of time going back to the original user problems. Maybe someone needs to do so, but that doesn’t need to be the focus of every engineer.

3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

I think I’d go with a more specific “It’s generally better to iterate”. Get something working, keep it working, and make incremental improvements.

There are exceptions out there, but I think that they are rare.

8. At scale, even your bugs have users.

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.

This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.

This is one thing that I think that Microsoft has erred on in a number of cases. Like, a lot of the value in Windows to a user is a consistent workflow where they can use their existing expertise. People don’t generally want their workflow changed. Even if you can slightly improve a workflow, the re-learning cost is high. And people want to change their workflow on their own schedule, not to have things change underfoot. People don’t like being forced to change their workflow.

The fastest way to learn something better is to try teaching it.

I don’t know if it’s the fastest, but I do think that you often really discover how embarrassingly large the gaps in your own understanding are when you teach it.

A little kid asking “why” can be a humbling experience.

If you can make a useful MoE thing where each expert model has a small final layer in its neural net, so you don’t need to move much data between cards, then running each MoE on a different card might be viable. Regardless of whether the GPU vendor wants to segment up the gaming and AI markets.

I think that that’s one of the biggest unknowns as to where AI may wind up going. If you can get good results on gaming cards, then suddenly ordinary gaming hardware, run in parallel, may be quite capable of running the important models, and it’s going to be much harder for OpenAI or similar to obtain much of a barrier to entry. That may have dramatic impact on who has what degree of access to AI.