bsimpson

I have a Z1 Extreme that has 16GB shared between the CPU and GPU (what AMD calls the APU). I've noticed that mangohud, the SteamOS utility that shows performance diagnostics, often reports RAM + VRAM numbers that exceed 16GB. I've been curious as to why. I presume it has to do with compression or something.

I opened this thread to see if he was active in it. Disappointed that I haven't seen him in here.

> installing official updates should extend the warranty.

That sounds like a big incentive to never ship updates.

Lenovo also just had it happen with their Legion Go. They finally pulled the BIOS from distribution, but doesn't sound like they're doing anything to help the victims whose devices got bricked by a bad update.

So the euphemism treadmill is spinning the other direction

It's so frustrating that Social Security reform became the "are you a good progressive?" litmus test in the early 00s. We've had our wages tithed for our whole lives - money that would be actually worth something in retirement if invested - to go into a Ponzi scheme that will go bust before we're retirement age. You could see it coming decades away, and political infighting ensured nothing would be done about it until the discourse tired and started arguing about pronouns instead.

HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!

THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.

It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.

I had the Mac version of Quake II.

They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!

Same.

Weird to see a DLC for a game that's older than Steam. Would have been more interesting if they released the WADs or whatever that you could play on the open source version of the game. (All of this is interesting in light of MS's recent hallowing of their game studios.)

When Quake was popular, CDs were far and away the most popular install method. They're locking a lot of OG owners out (unless they're hoping to drive a trickle of $4 Steam sales).

I know that now, but I'd only heard the hysteria around it as a kid.

> Ugo feels that he ran a good business, and the government unfairly barred him from operating. In his view, if the government wouldn’t allow him to sell the product, they could handle the disposal. Ngo paid off his debts before leaving, and feels the matter is settled. Although prior coverage of the factory closure portrayed Ngo as a ghost who absconded his duties, he doesn’t feel that way. To this day he spends half of the year in Canada, though not often in St. Mary’s. “The community is still very good to me,” he says. “When I go there I see my failure; that’s the reason I don’t want to go there.”

From the linked article https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...

The talk of glutamic acid made me wonder if fish sauce is related to MSG. Gemini confirms MSG is just salt and glutamic acid, which is to say fish sauce is naturally derived MSG.

Fun story:

I was riding a motorcycle across Vietnam a few years ago. Made some friends on an excursion, and we all went to dinner together. The restaurant was a little outdoor kitchen and some picnic benches in front of an apartment building.

When we arrived, the mom was taking orders. She spoke enough English to serve travelers. One of my new friends ordered a sandwich, and fell in love with the sauce it came with. I offered to find out what was in it, but the mom had gone upstairs. Dad didn't speak a word of English.

We managed to ask him about the sauce, and he beckoned us to follow him behind the counter. He pointed at a mason jar of white powder: sugar. He pointed at another: salt. He pointed at a third: salt … wait, we already did salt…

It was MSG. This chef in a rural mountain town had just a handful of ingredients in his kitchen, and one was MSG.

As a 90s kid who grew up hearing of MSG is the same breath as processed foods, sulfites, and other health boogymen, it was wild to encounter it as just another ingredient in someone's pantry.

My mom wanted to stop in Savannah, GA on a roadtrip when we were kids.

We got out of the car for a few seconds, got back in, and unanimously decided we were continuing on. It smelt like every bad smell you can imagine all at once, riding on a backbone of soggy cardboard.

Brotato is also a Godot game.

You can look up engines on SteamDB.

> The Anthropic copyright case set the precedent — the US court ruled that by making a digital copy and destroying the physical in a one-for-one transfer, the process is deemed “transformative” and therefore protected by fair use.

They're destroying books on purpose to launder the copyrights.

"Bring your whole self to work" was HR virtue signaling to the people favored by DEI, when it was still en vogue.

I wonder how you'd actually go about prosecuting that. What's the line between crass and illegal?

People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.

Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.

What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?

Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.

What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?

This is also why Steam hardware matters.

If something runs on a Steam Deck, you can be sure it will run on your >= Steam Deck-equivalent device.

Yes, but PDT = MST

Glad to see progress made on this.

In my 20s, I strongly considered taking some time off to create and drive petitions across the Pacific states to put us all on permanent PDT (matching Arizona). In my research, I saw it would take an act of Congress to make that happen, so I stood down.

It's tempting to sell a bunch, but then you've got cash. What do you do with cash when the government keeps printing money and assets are all overpriced?

The Rock Band guitars have a photoresistor for precisely this purpose: the screen flashes and the guitar responds when the light hits it. It helps make the otherwise very painful calibration process transparent.

It would be so cool to get that to work in Linux. I know the instrument code is in hid-sony. Here are some open tabs I've got in case anyone's curious:

- https://pascal.giard.info/techreports/nguyen-daniel-autocali...

- https://www.niangames.com/articles/reverse-engineering-rockb...

- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...

As my dad told us every time we crossed a bridge when we were kids:

"Tolls are a ratchet - they only move in one direction."

The employee experience was very different 9y ago.

SteamOS got me to migrate from a Nintendo.

There's a lot that I love about it, but "choose which of these thousand settings permutations to get the game to look good without crashing" is a major chore.

One nice thing about Valve/Steam leading with hardware is that it gives console-esque performance targets. If you know your device is a bit better than a Steam Deck, you can probably start at the Steam Deck preset and adjust accordingly.

> DirectX is losing ground too thanks to Proton and Vulkan

[citation needed]

My understanding is that Proton is effectively a distribution of WINE + DXVK, which does for DirectX what WINE does for Win32. Valve is even on record saying "make one good copy of your game and trust our compatibility tools to port to other platforms" which is effectively saying "use DirectX if you want - Proton will run it just as well."

Include "add" and other potential weasel words

I was wondering if this would be a worthwhile upgrade to my Legion Go Z1 Extreme.

Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.

I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.

> or they might be legally obligated to post a job publicly, even if they’ve already identified the person they want to hire

Famous/obvious bug in the H1B process, but not sure how this legislation would address it. If they're legally obligated to post the role, won't they just say "we'll fill this job <whenever the H1B process says we can take this down>"?