distract8901

No, I'm a totally normal human. I love to walk and have individual thoughts and speak with other humans. Just regular human things, you know.

I would pay a shameful amount of money for a big, fat laptop in the style of the old school thinkpads with modern hardware.

I don't give a fuck how thin or light my laptop is. I want it big and beefy with some monstrous heatsinks and fans that don't sound like a jet engine after 3 seconds of CPU load. I want all the ports and a battery that weighs five pounds.

Current design trends for laptops has resulted in significantly worse machines. It's why I still use a T530 from 2013 as my daily driver. I'll probably keep using it until it finally develops a fault that I can't repair. Barring a catastrophic accident like a spill or a drop, I expect it to keep on chugging for at least another 5-10 years.

I bought a used T530 6 or 7 years ago. The machine is 10 years old and it's still my daily driver. My desktop is of a similar vintage, probably 2011 or so.

It's perfectly fine. I do wish I had more CPU cores, but it's probably better for me to get up and step away from the computer while it runs a big C++ compilation or something

We should absolutely, without question go poking at it. Surely there won't be any consequences

I had a Brother brand B&W laser printer with a duplex scanner many years ago. I had it for 10 years and it was still working when my ex took it. As far as I know its still going.

Unfortunately, laser printers are just bigger than inkjet. The paper route is more complicated and the mechanism has to be larger. That's the benefit of inkjet, it's an extremely simple mechanism that can be reduced to a very small footprint.

IMO, laser is better in almost every way. It's well worth the drawbacks.

Does anyone have a good explainer for how the NTP protocol works? I can't quite wrap my head around how you could possibly synchronize two machines in time over a network with unknown and unpredictable latency.

The code was convincing renewable energy companies to finance the upfront cost of building renewables. It's pretty much just seeking loans in a way that doesn't inflate their national debt.

My insurance automatically assigned the geographically closest doctor as my PCP.

That person was actually a nurse at the local high school.

That's exactly what my current job does. I buy a policy on the government marketplace, submit my premium statements, and I get reimbursed every month.

My allowance is quite generous, and it pays for 100% of the cost of the most comprehensive insurance I could find for both me and my husband. The platform is called PeopleKeep.

It's really, really nice to pick my own policy. Now I never, ever have to deal with CVS Caremark ever again.

The question mark to denote a nullable type is inherited from the .net framework days. You'd use that to mark a value type as nullable, which is syntactic sugar for Nullable<T>. Internally, that object stores a bool for IsNull and it packs your value into an Object. When dealing with value types, this results in a copy-by-value every time you access it, which is bad in most cases.

I don't like this solution because it reuses something that I've learned is a Bad Thing. Though I'm sure the current implementation just stores a reference to the object in question.

But fundamentally, I think nulls are a good thing. Null carries information. If C/++ can handle null pointers for the last 40 years, I think C# can handle it. But then again, maybe this is a problem domain that I've just never encountered. The only problems I have with nulls is around ergonomics, but the null coalescing and safe access operators solve that for the most part. Maybe it's a bigger problem at scale, I really wouldn't know. At the scale I operate at, non-nullable reference types causes more headache than it solves problems

CLI is one of my biggest pain points with C# on Linux. A lot of the Console functions simply don't work because they're expecting an entirely different kind of console. Just clearing the screen doesn't work, you have to sneakily pass a "clear" string to the input stream, or something like that.

Console drawing is an enormous pain. I went to a lot of effort to optimize my console writes to construct graphics quickly, and it just does not work on Linux. I'd have to switch to a curses type library and it just makes me sad :(

Lots of reasons, but mainly that I don't consider null values to be a fault of the language. Even if it were, this doesn't solve that problem.

But now we're in a situation where we still have nulls, but compiler warnings force us to decorate them and treat them the same as before. It obscures the difference between value and reference types. Plus the syntax implies Nullable<T>, which is something everyone should have learned to avoid when all it did was box value types.

The more correct solution would have been to finish the contract system that allowed you to declare a function argument as non-nullable.

Ultimately I think it was the wrong solution to something that wasn't a problem to begin with. Now we have muddied the syntax and the null situation is the same as it always has been.

I've been keeping up with the language and I am... Less than enthused.

Maybe I'm just yelling at clouds, but I see more bloat than useful features recently.

Non-nullable reference types as default was a bad idea and I will die on this hill

Of all the posts I've seen on this website, this one is the worst

C# on Linux is only slightly more annoying than Windows. You have to make some effort to install the SDKs and naturally some of the system APIs behave slightly differently, but overall I have only a very slight preference for windows here.

Mono does still exist, but since like 2015 or so C# has been supported natively on Linux. No one really uses mono anymore AFAIK. Its only purpose is running dotnet framework apps as opposed to dotnet core

Oh, I had no idea jellyfin was based on C#.

I started my career as a C# dev, but now I only write C++. I miss C# dearly and have been badly wanting a project to flex those muscles on.

I guess I'll dive into jellyfin now. I've got a list of annoyances and now that I know it's C#, I'm ready to get fixing

The point is that they're unrelated, but Google "helpfully" interprets your search to show you things it thinks you want instead of what you asked for.

Had a lovely experience with this a few months ago. I built a little WPF GUI as an internal tool for my company. Literally all it does is read some data from an XML file and squirt some bytes out of a serial port. I zip up a build and send it over to the production team and windows refuses to open it. It absolutely insists it's a Trojan or something. Fortunately there's an option to ignore Defender and keep doing our jobs.

I submitted the build to Microsoft for verification and it reports totally clean. Gee, thanks.

We also get Defender warnings for anything that isn't signed. We also get Defender warnings for things that are signed. Apparently we have to pay an extra couple hundred dollars a month for the "real" signing certificate. The one we already pay for apparently isn't secure enough to disable Defender warnings?

Sounds like an absolute racket to me

I actually really like VeraCrypt. Last time I used it was 5 or 6 years ago and the UI looked like something straight out of the 90s, which is a good thing IMO.

At the risk of ruining your life... There's a free demo on the Factorio website

I'm a little scared to play Satisfactory. The only thing keeping my Factorio addiction in check is that I get bored after a few days. A new game just as bad might ruin me

The game has been on steam since 2016. That's a bit more than 1000 hours a year, which isn't as much as you think

> Blessings be upon you and may you not end up in hell.

I've played Factorio for 1800 hours. I'm already in hell.

I played one map for 700 hours over the span of a full year.

This game does something terrible to my brain

> Elevated rails

Oh. Oh no.

No, I'm not ready for this.

The restrictions on rail placement keep train layouts sane. There has to be a demarcation point between your rail and belt network. Now I can just fly in a train over top of my factory and drop materials everywhere. Now I can overlay two distinct rail networks in the same space.

I already have 1800 hours in Factorio. What more do the devs want from me?! My body can't take any more abuse!

I don't think I've ever been as excited about a game update as this new Factorio. I can't wait to make unholy train abominations floating atop my normal belt abominations

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.

To sum up:

- Qualcomm mandated that manufacturers use their power supply chips with their processor

- these power supply chips are wildly inappropriate for laptops, requiring 4-6 in parallel when a single properly spec'd chip would work

- said chips are designed for space-constrained phones, and are so small they require a different type of PCB

- those PCBs can't handle the power and need to double the layer count

- cost of PCBs becomes absolutely ludicrous at this scale

- Qualcomm refuses to allow manufacturers to use a more appropriate power supply

- manufacturers literally cannot afford the design and stopped using Qualcomm

- Qualcomm is now paying manufacturers to use their chipset, and are losing money in the deal

I don't even know how to express what an absolutely terrible idea this is. The Qualcomm chips are not fit for purpose, at all. Totally inappropriate for the application. No engineer in their right mind would go for this.

Qualcomm is mandating that manufacturers eat a fuckton of cost in raw materials, drastically reduce the efficiency and battery life of their product, and charge way more than the market would pay for an underpowered, overheating laptop with a pitiful battery life. For... Reasons?

It makes no sense at all. No one is going to use this chipset. If any devices do make it to market, their terrible performance will absolutely trash Qualcomm's reputation in this space and consumers won't buy them in the future.

Absolutely insane

Weird. I don't know anyone who uses WhatsApp or similar in the US. MMS is well supported and usually billed the same as SMS these days (AFAIK).

Mastodon doesn't care to replace twitter, that was never the goal.

Mastodon is happy in the niche its found for itself

Something I encountered recently: I have a jellyfin server hosting shows and movies that I would like to play on my Chromecast on my local network.

This is 100% not possible. The Chromecast always hits Google's DNS to resolve the media server's address. Which means you must host your media under a resolvable domain name, exposed to the internet.

This kind of thing (assuming it can resolve through Google DNS) would short-circuit that requirement. You could feed it a domain name that points back to a local address and not expose your server to the internet.

Of course there are other ways around the problem, but this would be far, far simpler. Honestly it seems like it'd be faster and simpler than setting up a subdomain and reverse proxy, which is what I did.

It's nearly universal parlance in the USA to call MMS and SMS 'texts'. They are shown and treated as the same thing by the phone OS. I wouldn't expect the average layperson to even know there's a difference.

I'm honestly surprised that's not the case everywhere. Do you distinguish SMS and MMS in casual conversation?