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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.

    I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/

    I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.


  • Should ask what platform here, IMO: virt-manager is Linux-only. (Or, I suppose, doing remote X stuff to run it elsewhere but that’s probably not what OP is after.)

    There’s some command line stuff you can run on Windows, but then at that point, you can just use virsh on the host itself.

    I’m of the opinion that virsh to manage and then a spice or vnc client to access the VMs is the “best” way to go so you’re not tied down to having to have a specific OS running a specific tool in order to do any admin stuff, since I mean, after you deploy how often are you screwing with the VM settings?


  • IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.

    That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.

    Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.




  • Fair points on VR games being fairly social. I was more thinking of the in-person social experience, which is still involving some portion of people sitting around stuffing their face into a headset and wandering off into their own world.

    IMO, this is something that AR/MR stuff could do a great job of making more social by adding the game to the world, rather than taking the person out of the world to the game but, of course, this also restricts what kind of games you can do so is probably only a partial solution and/or improvement on the current state of affairs.

    I also agree that it’s way too expensive still, and probably always will be because the market is, as you mentioned, small.

    PCVR is pretty much dead despite its proponents running around declaring that it’s just fine like it’s a Monty Python skit. And the tech for truly untethered headsets is really only owned by a single (awful) company and only because the god-CEO thinks it’s a fun thing to dump money on which means it’s subject to sudden death if he retires/dies/is ousted/has to take time off to molt/has enough shareholder pressure put on him.

    Even then, it’s only on a second generation (the original Quest was… beta, at best) and is expensive enough that you have to really have a reason to be interested rather than it being something you could just add to your gaming options.

    I’d like VR to take off and the experiences to more resemble some of the sci-fi worlds that have a or take place in a virtual reality world, but honestly, I’ve thought that would be cool for like 20 years now and we’re only very slightly closer than we were then, we just have smaller headsets and somewhat improved graphics.



  • Train to Busan, Parasite, Unlocked, Wonderland, Anatomy of a Fall and Close have been ones I’ve seen recently that I liked.

    I think some of those are available on Netflix, but as I don’t use Netflix I can’t say which ones and for certain, though.

    Edit: I just realized some of those are vague and will lead to a billion other movies lol. The first 4 are S. Korean, the last two are French and they’re all from 2020 or newer so anything not from there or older isn’t the right one.


  • You’re not wrong (and those are freaking enormous dies that have to cost apple a goddamn fortune to make at scale), but like, it also isn’t an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

    nVidia/Intel/AMD have gone for the maximum performance and fuck any heat/noise/power usage path. They haven’t given a shit about low-power optimizations or investing in designs that are more suited to low-power usage (a M3 max will pull ~80w if you flog the crap out of it, so let’s use that number) implementations. IMO the wrong choice, but I’m just a computer janitor that uses the things, I don’t design them.

    Apple picked a uarch that was already low power (fun fact: ARM was so low power that the first test chips would run off the board’s standby power and would boot BEFORE they were actually turned on) and then focused in on making it as fast as possible with the least power as possible: the compute cores have come from the mobile side prior to being turned into desktop chips.

    I’m rambling but: until nVidia and x86 vendors prioritize power usage over raw performance (which they did with zen5 and you saw how that shit spiraled into a fucking PR shit mess) then you’re going to get next year’s die shrink, but with more transistors using the same power with slightly better performance. It’s entirely down to design decisions, and frankly, x86 (and to some degree so has nVidia) have painted themselves into a corner by relying on process node improvements (which are very rapidly going to stop happening) and modest IPC uplifts to stay ahead of everyone else.

    I’m hoping Qualcomm does a good job staying competitive with their ARM stuff, but it’s also Qualcomm and rooting for them feels like cheering on cancer.



  • Power consumption numbers like that are expected, though.

    One thing to keep in mind is how big the die is and how many transistors are in a GPU.

    As a direct-ish comparison, there’s about 25 billion transistors in a 14900k, and 76 billion in a 4090.

    Big die + lots and lots of transistors = bigly power usage.

    I wouldn’t imagine that the 5000-series GPUs are going to be smaller or have less transistors, so I’d expect this to be in the die shrink lowers power usage, but more transistors increase power usage zone.


  • Oh I wasn’t meaning to say it wasn’t predatory, merely that it’s honest about what it is. A LOT of other gacha/lootbox games are far more obscure about what’s going on and how you’re getting screwed and Genshin at least has it all clearly outlined and easily (ish) understood.

    Also, I was mentally using 21 as the gambling age since I’m an American and we don’t really trust those shifty 18-year-olds with anything other than being shot at in a war.

    I take your point, though, but at some point, you have to shrug and call someone a full-fledged adult, and let them shit up their own life.

    But call it gambling, regulate it under the same legal requirements as you would any other form of gambling, and keep the kids out.



  • movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now.

    This is not a callout of you in particular so don’t get offended, but that’s really only true if you look at the trash coming out of Hollywood.

    There’s some spectacularly good shit coming out of like France and South Korea (depending on what genres you’re a fan of, anyways), as well as like, everywhere else.

    Shitty movies that are just shitty sequels to something that wasn’t very good (or yet another fucking Marvel movie) is a self-inflicted wound, and not really a sign that you can’t possibly do better.


  • Well, that’s the doomer take.

    The rumors are that the 80 series card is 10% faster than the 90 series card from last gen: that’s not a ‘10%’ improvement, assuming the prices are the same, that’s more like a 40% improvement. I think a LOT of people don’t realize how shitty the 4080 was compared to the 4090 and are vastly mis-valuing that rumor.

    I’d also argue the ‘GAMES MUST BE ULTRA AT 4K144 OR DONT BOTHER’ take is wrong. My gaming has moved almost entirely to my Rog Ally and you know what? Shit is just as fun and way more convenient than the 7700x/3080 12gb desktop even if it’s 1080p low and not 1440p120. If the only thing the game has going for it is ‘ooh it’s pretty’ then it’s unlikely to be one of those games people care about in six months.

    And anyways, who gives a crap about AAAAAAAAAAAAA games? Indie games are rocking it in every genre you could care to mention, and the higher budget stuff like BG 3 is, well, probably the best RPG since FO:NV (fight me!).

    And yes, VR is in a shitty place because nobody gives a crap about it. I’ve got a Rift, Rift S, Quest, and a Quest 2 and you know what? It’s not interesting. It’s a fun toy that, but it has zero sticking power and that’s frankly due to two things:

    1. It’s not a social experience at all.
    2. There’s no budget for the kind of games that would drive adoption, because there’s no adoption to justify spending money on a VR version.

    If you could justify spending the kind of money that would lead to having a cool VR experience, then yeah, it might be more compelling but that’s been tried and nobody bought anything. Will say that Beat Saber is great, but one stellar experience will not sell anyone on anything.

    And AI is this year’s crypto which was last year’s whatever and it’s bubbles and VC scams all the way down and pretty much always has been. Tech hops from thing to thing that they go all in on because they can hype it and cash out. Good for them, and be skeptical of shit, but if it sticks it sticks, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.


  • Agreed on P2P gacha games. Those are just gross as fuck, since as you said, they’re explicitly pay-to-win.

    Genshin does, for the most part, provide very clear percentages and how the math works out, so you can actually do that but they’re certainly a rarity. I will say, though, that while they do provide that information it’s also in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a ‘beware of the leopard’ sign.

    You can find it if you know where it is, but your average user isn’t going to know the magic things you should click on to get from the wish screen to the page on the website where they outline specific odds and pull rates, which eh, not a fan of making that so obscure.

    Also: not a fan of the sell you a currency you have to convert to another currency to convert to a 3rd thing that then can be used for gambling thing. There shouldn’t be more than one level of obscuring between your money and the final item you need - Genshin goes from Crystals to Primogems to Wishes, and that’s almost entirely to be sure to confuse people how much that wish actually cost, since you’ve got a lot of math to do to get back to what you orginally paid for the Crystals.



  • Not really: if you’re astroturfing, you don’t do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.

    You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.

    Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we’ve not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you’d get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.

    TLDR: they’re doing this because they’re trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that’s what you do if you’re hoping to not be caught.


  • If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it’d be more interesting.

    I don’t have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

    There’s barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

    Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

    This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.