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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.

    The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.

    For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.

    At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.

    I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.


  • I have found that with Arch I don’t run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.



  • Yeah, it is a fairly large dataset depending on the tower location. For example, in an inner city locale you may have hundreds of devices on a single passenger train going past a local tower. These transient handsets used to cause a massive issue with drop outs and loss of signal as they would acquire and then drop service from a given tower. Nowadays we have solutions for this which centre around shaped beams along the direction of travel with communication between towers to ignore handsets which are moving along a travel corridor.

    To make that clearer, imagine the overhead train line has passengers moving along and under the train line people are walking on the street. The various towers which are along the train line will pass information about which handsets are moving and which are local so the local towers can handle local handsets and specific towers above can handle the train customers. This keeps the lower towers from changing their directionality and dropping calls and data confections, but also allows the train handsets to have reasonable connection to the network.

    Another interesting case is what used to happen at the edge of the range for a tower. The whole tower could modulate its power so it could reach a far off handset if nobody else was around, extending the effective range. This unfortunately meant that if someone came closer to the tower it would have to lower its power to not harm the handset and the person far away would lose signal.

    Nowadays the power level can be handled per handset. Each handset gets a small portion of a second, actually a small handful of parts of a second, and the power of the tower is adjusted to reach them at their required level for their time slots. If someone comes online close to the tower you may have competition for the time of the tower and thus lower speeds but the power will still match your handset independently of the rest. Very cool technology, way better than what it was with GSM, and also much more secure.


  • Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.


  • Put simply the radio broadcasts a sort of hello message to the tower so the tower knows where to listen (this is about signal direction or beam shaping, but imagine the eye of Sauron swiveling to see Frodo). This includes the identifier of the handset, the IMEI number, so that the tower can keep track of who is who. The second step of getting connected to the network is done with the details inside the SIM card, specifically the IMSI number.

    If your phone has no SIM card you can still make an emergency call. You can also have an eSIM which is a software version of the SIM card. In both cases you can bypass the SIM and get connected.

    If you turn airplane mode on the radio is powered off in theory, but this is not absolutely guaranteed. It should be off, the system will report it is off, but there are fringe cases where it may still be very slightly active, usually from malware or similar things.

    So no SIM means no IMSI, but the radio itself has the IMEI and that handset is hard coded to that identifier. If the radio powers on it will broadcast the IMEI to negotiate connection with or without the SIM and IMSI.


  • The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

    A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

    So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.


  • Is this running with Vulkan? Have you tried using other graphics backends like DX or similar?

    Have you tried windowed mode? That had fixed a similar issue for me before.

    Have you tried running the graphics settings all down to as low as possible, like absolute potato mode, to see if it continues there? If it works as a potato then adding a few things until you replicate the issue will help you narrow it down. If it happens on potato mode then maybe try verifying the game files?

    Lastly, maybe consider trying an earlier driver version? Same for kernel? Sometimes weird issues like this are regressions and it was actually solved a few versions back but someone recreated the problem because they thought they were being smart and regressed the issue.


  • Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.


  • Yes, this can be done through WINE.

    Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

    Hope that works out for you


  • Sex is indeed a spectrum. Intersex presentation makes up a meaningful though small percentage, somewhere around the 0.05% range. If it were a binary there would be two options, mutually exclusive. This is a bimodal distribution, with two very strong peaks for XX or XY karyotype and a bunch of variation around either different karyotypes, XXY etc, or differing activation or expression of those karyotypes, eg androgen insensitivity etc.

    On top of that, what would you say sex is exactly? Which gamete is larger? In seahorses the males have the smaller gametes but the females use something very similar to a penis to deposit the egg into the male who then raises it and performs all the roles we associate with females in humans.

    Is it based on which chroonosomes? In some animals it is a WZ or W karyotypes, so that can’t be it. In others it is just a presence or absence of a sex chromosome. In some plants they have more than two sets of everything, like strawberries with 7 copies of each chromosome. In others they have one, two, or four in some parts of the life cycle, but sometimes the thing we see is the higher number, sometimes it is the lower number. Some have a mix of male and female parts, having sperm and egg producers on the same plant but separated, some have both right next to each other in groupings. Some animals can undergo sex changing due to environmental factors.

    Nothing in biology is as simple as the models we use to represent them. Sex is complex and while it sometimes seems simple that is the less common state. Genes are not often all the way on or all the way off, they are usually moderated and running at different levels across the organism cell by cell, and changing with time. The same goes for traits.

    I would recommend learning more about ut biology if you really do believe sex is a simple binary. The world of biology is far more complex and varied than that idea can capture and honestly it is fascinating, I find it extremely exciting to find the examples of my own ignorance, they are usually super cool. Good luck!







  • I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.


  • So broadly you will find categories in games like Smash Bros and so on. Some characters will be heavy, some light, some fast, some slow, some strong, some weak, but each trait creates an axis. The ideal distribution of characters is to have all areas of the multidimensional space filled or if not filled at least alternated.

    For example, you should have one heavy, fast, weak character, one heavy, slow, strong, but maybe not a heavy, fast strong or a heavy slow weak. You can chart them on a two dimension axis at a time, then use the characters from Tuxcart etc to fill the space based on what makes sense, eg the Gnu should be heavy but also fast, but it is definitely a prey animal, while penguins are smaller and fast with a more moderate attack level, maybe even weak.

    Once you have some of the extremes filled you can consider subversions of the paradigm. For example, a compiled language is slow at creation but fast at use, so maybe a mascot for one of those could have two modes, switching state and therefore characteristics.

    Another thing to consider would be the dynamics of your interactions. Are you going for the jumping around of Smash Bros? If so, lots of the details about their camera work can guide your decisions. What about the overall pacing? Do you want frenetic play like Smash Bros? Combos? Strategy? Lots of things to look at there with a narrative approach to the characters as representing their projects, for example Wilbur is smaller and supposed to be super modular, so maybe having quite a few modes with different characteristics would work, while something like puffy is great for water levels alongside tux and any other aquatics.


  • I was holding back so hard on recommending EndeavourOS. I love it, it is my main distro and honestly everything else seems unrefined by comparison. The Timeshift setup with BTRFS is insanely useful and largely preconfigured. The lack of a GUI for package management is not a big deal if you can learn to use pacman and yay, and honestly cheat sheets are a win there. Hopefully EndeavourOS will work out for you, and if not then we can go with next steps for the WINE issue.


  • Oh, great, that actually limits what it is a lot. If it were related to video we could spend ages looking at codecs, drivers, all sorts of stuff.

    If it happens in all windows including winecfg we have to be looking at a few causes.

    Do you have a high polling rate mouse? That can cause a stutter issue. To test remove the mouse before launching something in wine (by terminal if you have to), then see if it replicates the issue. If no change, move on, next item.

    You could be having a problem with your audio system trying to give things too quickly and falling over itself. Prefix the wine command with the below line.

    PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60

    So it would be something like

    PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 winecfg

    That should stop it if it is that audio issue, so see how you go.

    Lastly, if you have winecfg running it is slowing itself down, but is it impacting other programs as well? I assume so, but want to make sure, so if you are for example playing a video in your browser and then launch winecfg does it start stuttering the video?

    If none of the above helps can you dump the output of ps , mount, lspci -k, and iostat while no wine is running and while wine is running? Iostat is in iotools in mint I think, you may need to install it. Also, probably use a pastebin for the outputs.