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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.

    I would vote for Baldur’s Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.


  • This tool looked interesting to me until I noticed that its external dependency count is in the hundreds, each of which increases exposure to vulnerabilities and supply chain attacks.

    I hope that Rust will some day have a rich enough standard library that the “trust everything” software development model falls out of favour amongst the developers who use it.






  • It’s re-posted from a news community, where it was since removed for not being from an acceptable news site. Unfortunately, the acceptable news sites covered this more than 30 days ago, which disqualifies their articles regardless of whether they were ever posted to the community. shrug

    I couldn’t find a better article in the time I had to spare, so I re-posted this one. I think what’s important in this case is just that word gets out. I don’t see anything misleading about this one, and the EFF link (which is also not exactly a news site) is plainly visible.



  • Some of the APIs in use on Linux today come from older Unix variants. (For this reason, I probably wouldn’t call one of these a “Linux API” as the author did, though I guess it works linguistically for those that are usually present on Linux.) These APIs have semantics that were designed before threading existed on many platforms. Making them thread-safe without breaking existing code can be challenging.

    If setenv(3) is among these, it could explain why glibc’s implementation doesn’t support multi-threaded programs, and why its documentation states as much. To have used it in a multi-threaded environment, ignoring the docs, was a bug in the Steam client. Perhaps it never occurred to the people who ported Steam’s code to glibc that threading issues might be different from what they were used to on other platforms.

    To be fair, the author might be aware of this, as he did refer to glibc’s implementation as a tradeoff rather than a bug.


  • Matrix messaging apps. It’s nice to have modern messaging features, end-to-end encrypted, with no single point of failure, no Google involvement, and no phone numbers. I expect to start recommending it widely when the 2.0 features land in the popular clients.

    WireGuard VPN. It’s fast, even on low-power devices.

    Self-hosted Mumble. Excellent low-latency voice quality for chatting or gaming with friends.

    Radicale, DAVx⁵, and Thunderbird, for calendar and contact sync between mobile and desktop, without handing the data over to Google or anyone else.









  • I built a new machine pretty recently, also with an RX 7800XT GPU (factory overclocked). When sitting idle at the desktop, the system draws about the same amount of power as my old machine did with an RX 480. So I think trying to put the big GPU to sleep during desktop use might be barking up the wrong tree.

    I suggest getting a power monitor, like a Kill-A-Watt, and taking measurements while you experiment. Here are some ideas to consider:

    • Are you using multiple monitors? I have read that newer AMD GPUs sometimes draw more power than they should in this case. It might depend on the resolution and/or windowing system in use. (I don’t remember if the reports I read were on Wayland or Xorg.) It almost certainly is a driver issue.
    • Are you using nonstandard timings? Have you tried different refresh rates? https://community.amd.com/t5/graphics-cards/which-monitor-timing-parameter-allows-gpu-vram-frequency-to/td-p/318483
    • Have you been playing games for hours every day, with no frame rate limit? The graphics card can draw considerably more power pushing polygons at 1440p@180Hz than it does at 90Hz, for example, and I don’t think the wattage progression from idle to full load is linear.
    • Are you using recent kernel and firmware versions?





  • AFAIK, RetroArch is just a front-end for the emulators that actually use the controller, so getting this to work depends on the emulator you’ll be using.

    I would expect any decent emulator on Linux to work with the standard Linux joystick and/or evdev APIs, which are supported by the Linux DualShock 4 driver. This driver is built in to the Linux kernel; nothing more should require installation. However:

    It’s possible that your distro might not load that driver automatically. To check, connect the DS4, power it up with the Playstation button (if its light isn’t already on), and run lsmod |grep -E 'hid_sony|hid_playstation' in a terminal. If it responds with some lines containing hid_sony or hid_playstation, then the driver is loaded.

    It’s possible that your distro might not have labeled the DS4 as a joystick device in udev, which isn’t strictly required, but some software expects to see. On the distros I’ve used, the easiest way to get this done is to install the steam-devices package. I think most desktop distros do it automatically these days, though.

    You don’t want DS4Windows. That’s Windows software. There is a program (not a driver) called ds4linux, which creates a virtual Xbox controller alongside the real DS4, similar to what Steam Input does when you use it. You shouldn’t need this for games/emulators that were written properly for Linux, but it’s there for cases when a developer took a shortcut and assumed Microsoft game hardware is standard on our non-Microsoft OS. Alternatively, I think you can use Steam Input when launching non-Steam games in Steam.

    There are various joystick test programs for linux, to give you an idea of whether the OS sees the controller. (This can be helpful when a game doesn’t appear to see it, to determine if it’s the game’s problem or a connection/driver problem.) KDE Plasma has one built in to the System Settings. There’s a also generic one called jstest-gtk, available with most desktop distros. There are probably more out there.

    Keep in mind that test programs like that don’t necessarily know which inputs map to which buttons/sticks on the controller. Don’t panic if they look mixed up in a test program; try it in a game first. If they’re still mixed up, look for a way to remap the inputs.


  • Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.

    Well, Cloudflare is not all that old, and we can’t see what they do with our data, so I would say it has a medium-length record of not getting caught abusing that position. But that’s not the point.

    The point is that most Lemmy users’ actual browsing is in fact not private between them and their server. Many instances have a big network service corporation like Cloudflare watching everything read or written by every user, so that info is available to anyone with sufficient access or influence there, like employees and governments.

    That applies to most of the internet,

    Not exactly, but it does apply to a great many of the biggest web sites, so we could say it applies to much of the internet’s traffic.

    And that’s part of the problem. Cloudflare is in a position to watch much of what people do on the web, across many unrelated sites and services (often including domain name lookups), and trivially identify them. This includes whatever political, religious, or NSFW posts they’re reading on Lemmy, and who they are when they log in to their bank accounts.

    In any case, I replied not to be pedantic, but just to let our community know that they shouldn’t assume their reading habits on Lemmy are safely anonymized behind a made-up username, or confidential between them and their instance admins. If your instance uses a provider of DDOS protection or HTTPS acceleration, as many big instances do, then the walls have ears.




  • It’s a bit of a leap to say the “owner” changed. Ryujinx is MIT licensed, allowing anyone to clone the original code locally, build upon it, and publish it to a public host. Looks to me like that’s what happened here: a fork, but without using github’s built-in “fork” feature, perhaps to avoid being included in a mass take-down. There are others on non-github sites, although I don’t know if they have been getting new commits.

    I don’t see any reason to think the original repo was renamed or moved to another user’s account. The top contributor is gdkchan presumably because gdkchan’s commit history was preserved.

    For the record, gdkchan’s last commit to the original repo was on 2024-10-01.

    Edit: The README confirms what I thought:

    This fork is intended to be a QoL uplift for existing Ryujinx users. This is not a Ryujinx revival project.