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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I agree. The best part of the fediverse is the diversity.

    However, for someone who doesn’t speak this language, having it marked as English content is not helpful. Would be very nice to have content properly tagged as the actual language it is in, so that users can opt to see content in languages they understand, would be great.

    I don’t have a language filter on, so this wouldn’t affect me, but language tags and filters exist for this very purpose, so it would be nice to see them properly used.


  • We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should.

    My mother in law says things like “Wow, your son is just so good with computers.” She was impressed at how “tech savvy” he was because he was able to change the brightness on her phone for her so she could show him a picture better.

    A lot of our UIs are built for absolute no-thinking usability. How would you propose changing the brightness on a phone that would make it more “old people friendly”. It’s not a matter of difficulty. She just doesnt remember these things, and a different flow may not necessarily be remembered either.

    And I’m not saying its her fault or that she’s bad because of it. She was raised learning how to do and remember things a certain way and that has necessarily changed over the years.

    A phone can do a lot of things, so unless you want to have 100 apps on your home screen, you’ll have to group some together. For instance, putting WiFi into a Settings app. Having every individual setting just available on the home screen potentially complicates things even worse by being overwhelming.

    Genuinely curious how you think things like this could be redesigned to be more old people friendly.




  • To help you better understand, the way I see it, every time I do something that financially benefits <Company>, I assume I am giving money to the executives/owners/etc.

    For example, if I spend $30 on a Harry Potter book, I assume JK Rowling gets $0.10 of that (i dont know how it works, but lets assume), and she spends a substantial portion of her income on anti-trans rights. If we assume anywhere near 10%, then me giving her 10 cents is the same as donating 1 cent to anti-trans rights. Is Harry Potter a good enough book that I am willing to donate money to hate groups to obtain it? Personally no. Other people may look at it and say “It’s only $0.01, and I really like the story!” and think it is worth it. That’s up to you where your threshold is for when the good outweighs the bad.

    Contributing legitimacy to something can financially benefit it. Even if I never spend any money on Firefox (for example), user metrics allow them to make bargains with Google to get more money in exchange for default search status. So me using Firefox gets money for Mozilla. And if Mozilla was spending that money on hate groups, I wouldn’t want to be involved in that.

    Yes, I am aware that basically every company out there is super shitty. And giving money or support to almost any major corporation is basically funding hate groups in some way. But when the CEO is loudly outspoken about these things, I’d very much rather just swap to a brand that at least isn’t outwardly proud of it’s stupidity. Unless the other options are just as bad and I need a thing: if my local ISP was run by murderers, I still need internet. That’s not something I’m willing to compromise on. But I do have other choices in browsers and Brave doesn’t have any features I can’t live without.

    So to answer your question: it does not reflect on the product quality, but it does impact how much quality I demand from a product.




  • If the CPU clocks are dropping to ~200-300 MHz while the temps are 40-45C (like in the screenshot) then it’s not thermal throttling. The clockspeed would go back up when the temps go down. And it would only throttle enough to keep the temps under the desired temp.

    I would investigate what performance profile the CPU is using.

    There is a tool called cpupower that will list out all the information about the CPU clock states.

    I have a Ryzen CPU so the desired governor is going to be different than an Intel laptop, but for example, the output of cpupower frequency-info for me:

    analyzing CPU 13:
      driver: amd-pstate-epp
      CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 13
      CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 13
      energy performance preference: balance_performance
      hardware limits: 600 MHz - 5.76 GHz
      available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
      current policy: frequency should be within 2.98 GHz and 5.76 GHz.
                      The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                      within this range.
      current CPU frequency: 4.39 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
      boost state support:
        Supported: yes
        Active: yes
      amd-pstate limits:
        Highest Performance: 166. Maximum Frequency: 5.76 GHz.
        Nominal Performance: 124. Nominal Frequency: 4.30 GHz.
        Lowest Non-linear Performance: 86. Lowest Non-linear Frequency: 2.98 GHz.
        Lowest Performance: 18. Lowest Frequency: 600 MHz.
        Preferred Core Support: 1. Preferred Core Ranking: 231.
    

    Which you can see lists the hardware clock range, the current governor’s policy frequency range, the actual current CPU frequency, and how it picks different frequency ranges.

    I used to use cpupower on an old laptop to force it into the performance governor, because it would not clock up high enough without it. This obviously does negatively affect battery life, but i was plugged in most of the time anyway.

    But either way, look into cpupower for determining the governor/power profile and also figuring out which governor you should actually be using.




  • Counter point… Both are generating perfectly valid JSON, so who cares?

    Python 3.13.2 (main, Feb  5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 9.0.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    Tip: IPython 9.0+ have hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.
    
    In [1]: import json
    
    In [2]: json.loads('{"x": 1e-05}')
    Out[2]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    In [3]: json.loads('{"x":0.00001}')
    Out[3]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    Welcome to Node.js v20.3.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > JSON.parse('{"x":0.00001}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    > JSON.parse('{"x": 1e-05}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    

    Javascript and Python both happily accept either format from the string and convert it into a float they are happy with.





  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

    even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it’s not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

    It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn’t be able to follow along.

    Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on… but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

    You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

    Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as “undecipherable” and move on.