I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

    This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?


  • Lethal company, I’ve been joining random people online and seeing how it goes. I got some good tea advice from a random New Zealand tweenager, that has turned out to be worth the price of the game alone (continues sipping rooibos).

    I was playing SWAT 4 until recently, but I don’t feel a need to finish it as the gameplay didn’t seem evolve or change much after about halfway through. Voice acting is great, team AI is great, but once you discover non-lethal weapons the challenge disappears (and higher difficulties are impossible if you give your teammates lethal weapons). The popular Elite Force mod makes some nice changes, but sadly everyone overall now feels even easier and more repetitive.

    Todo:



  • I did this previously by using MultiMC (now PrismLauncher). Make a mix of mods, send them the zip of the whole game instance and ask them to drag and drop it onto MultiMC. The biggest issue I encountered was one family member having a black ingame world until they changed a setting in the graphics mod, otherwise it didn’t seem to be too hard.

    By comparison Minetest is much easier for playing mods with family. Everyone downloads the server’s mods when they join. But the interest is lower.



  • I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

    **In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

    I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

    Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

    I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

    In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

    I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.






  • SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.

    USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.

    SBC = Single Board Computer.


  • I wouldn’t attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I’d go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

    • PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
    • Laptop docking connectors (I can’t find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it’ll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
    • Firewire (if you’re lucky, way too old to be found now)
    • If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)

  • I recommend using a different set of flags so you can avoid the buffering problem @thenumbersmason@yiffit.net mentions.

    This next example prevents all of your ram getting uselessly filled up during the wipe (which causes other programs to run slower whenever they need more mem, I notice my web browser lags as a result), allows the progress to actually be accurate (disk write speed instead of RAM write speed) and prevents the horrible hang at the end.

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/somedisk status=progress oflag=sync bs=128M

    “oflag” means output flag (to do with of=/dev/somedisk). “sync” means sync after every block. I’ve chosen 128M blocks as an arbitrary number, below a certain amount it gets slower (and potentially causes more write cycles on the individual flash cells) but 128MB should be massively more than that and perfectly safe. Bigger numbers will hog more ram to no advantage (and may return the problems we’re trying to avoid).

    If it’s an SSD then I issue TRIM commands after this (“blkdiscard” command), this makes the drive look like zeroes without actually having to write the whole drive again with another dd command.


  • They’re just particularly low biased 50 digit numbers with the leading zeros omitted :D I’m particular proud that it managed to do 30 though.

    It’s interesting that none of the the numbers start with zero. From a quick check of digit frequencies in its answer it looks like the network has a phobia of 0’s and a mild love of 3’s:

    Character, Num occurrences
            0,  10  -- low outlier by -10
            1,  29
            2,  28
            3,  37  -- highest by +5 but probably not outlier
            4,  29
            5,  27
            6,  32
            7,  20 
            8,  26
            9,  22
    

    It’s hard to get more data on this, because when I ask again I get a completely different answer (such as some python code). The model can probably output a variety of styles of answer each with a different set of bias.


  • Just tried with alpaca ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin (a text chat model that I found I can run locally easily on my CPU).

    > Generate and list 30 non-repeating 50-digit psuedorandom seeds.                                       
    1. 978642450
    2. 463589826
    3. 705123458
    4. 286749035
    5. 134628359
    6. 693941285
    7. 524378609  
    8. 115723468
    9. 346258197
    10. 637428513
    11. 456193726
    12. 294683125  
    13. 824635197
    14. 581234609   
    15. 237641935    
    16. 721943586     
    17. 312684637      
    18. 602378193       
    19. 451372609        
    20. 985134637         
    21. 126843586     
    22. 376412851      
    23. 721941358       
    24. 237640193        
    25. 513724609         
    26. 194635819     
    27. 463581260      
    28. 358124637       
    29. 134628359
    

    Looks somewhat random.

    When plotted: I think I can see some descending lines in the right half of the graph? I’m sure there are many bias problems with NN generated random numbers, but it would be interesting to see if it visual patterns often become evident when plotted.



  • Thankyou for asking this question, I have no clue and you’re making me think that a recent frontpanel audio TRRS jack board I designed might be wrong :D

    There are two possible options I can see:

    1. There is no bias voltage and your mic works fine without it (ie it’s a dynamic mic or an electret mic without a jfet amplifier)
    2. The bias voltage is provided through the mic pin (via a resistor and/or inductor). The mic then overlays AC onto this DC signal.

    I cannot find any good references or info about mic bias and TRRS connectors :( Anyone else have any luck? Wikipedia says it’s a standard referred to as “CTIA” or “AHJ” but those appear to be company names, not standard names.

    My current headset uses a TRRS, but also provides an extension cable that splits into two 3.5mm TRS just like yours. I might probe it out and find out what it’s doing (but that doesn’t mean it’s the right/universal solution).