Such a strike would be a brazen break with President Donald Trump, US officials said. It could also risk tipping off a broader regional conflict in the Middle East — something the US has sought to avoid since the war in Gaza inflamed tensions beginning in 2023.

Um. That makes the somewhat-questionable assumption that the Trump administration has any problem with Iran being bombed.

Setting aside even all of the geopolitical stuff, Iran got caught by US counterintelligence trying to assassinate Trump twice in the past year, and the Biden administration already told them that very unpleasant things would have happened had they not caught them and had those efforts succeeded. Trump said that he instructed his administration to “obliterate” Iran if they succeeded in such an attempt. And that’s on top of Iranian intelligence trying to dick up his presidential campaign. My guess is that Trump, who has pretty much surpassed all precedent in being a vindictive son-of-a-bitch over even tiny disputes (not to mention the SecDef he selected with limited qualifications other than the Crusader and now fresh “kafir” tattoos) is probably even less-inclined than the Biden administration to take a dovish position.

Trump has publicly threatened military action against Iran if his administration’s efforts to negotiate a new nuclear deal to limit or eliminate Tehran’s nuclear program fail. But Trump also set a limit on how long the US would engage in diplomatic efforts.

In a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in mid-March, Trump set a 60-day deadline for those efforts to succeed, according to a source familiar with the communication. It has now been more than 60 days since that letter was delivered, and 38 days since the first round of talks began.

Yeah.

The US is stepping up intelligence collection to be prepared to assist if Israeli leaders decide to strike, one senior US official told CNN.

Yeah.

I don’t think I’ll ever get one until this issue is fixed.

I mean, LEDs degrade over time. That’s just kind of a fact of life. LED lightbulbs, flashlights, etc. The LED in the backlight of an LCD monitor does too — it just degrades evenly across all pixels, so you don’t get a burn-in effect. Just makes the monitor get dimmer over time (though with LCD monitors that use regional backlighting, I guess some regions could get dimmer before others).

I don’t think that there will be some technology to totally stop LEDs degrading. My understanding is that they’ve done various things over past years to try to mitigate it. I listed tandem LEDs below, which multiplies how long it takes them to degrade, lets them be run at lower power.

Maybe someday someone could track power-on time per subpixel element and model decay of each for the long term and using that data, jack up power on each to compensate for degradation on a per-subpixel element level.

EDIT: We also had burn-in on CRTs, and used those for ages. Didn’t prevent use of CRTs. I don’t know what the rate of burn-in relative to OLEDs was, but it was real.

kagis

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/what-video-games-are-burned-into

A bunch of CRT arcade monitors with burn-in bad enough that you can see it with the monitor off.

Just used screensavers or switched off monitors, and eventually, if a monitor became sufficiently problematic, tossed it and got a new one.

All that being said, if I could have significantly-improved longevity on an OLED display, it’d be nice.

I’m guessing this new tech will be quite costly to begin with?

They cost more, yeah. Probably come down as they become more widespread.

I’m not gonna say “don’t get a single-layer OLED display” — that’s a value call for you. Just saying that you kept the last one for eleven years, and if you plan to keep this one for another eleven years, you might want to keep potential for burn-in in mind, given that we’ve got significant OLED display longevity improvements happening. Depends on a variety of factors, like brightness of display and whether you have static elements onscreen. For some people, it simply doesn’t matter.

I kept my last monitor for about 15 years, so I’m inclined to favor longevity increases — switched because DVI was pretty much dead. But lots of people aren’t gonna do that, so…shrugs

I don’t know what Manga Plus is, but I assume that this isn’t actually complaining about the time so much as the amount of content, and using the time as a proxy.

This is the second article I remember reading saying that it expects greater automation in high income professions. If so, then it’ll tend to lead to income range compression rather than expansion, which might be an interesting outcome.

That way they pay off rather quickly and result in a lower electricity bill when you look at a span of 10-15 Years.

In the US, a lot of problems have arisen around residential solar installation companies providing loans using questionable, if not outright fraudulent sales tactics based around misrepresenting returns.

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be on the Verge of Collapse

A decade ago, someone knocking on your door to sell you solar panels would have been selling you solar panels. Now, they are probably selling you a financial product—likely a lease or a loan.

Mary Ann Jones, 83, didn’t realize this had happened to her until she received a call last year from GoodLeap, a financial technology company, saying she owed $52,564.28 for a solar panel loan that expires when she’s 106, and costs more than she originally paid for her house.

In 2022, she says, a door-to-door salesman from the company Solgen Construction showed up at her house on the outskirts of Fresno, Calif., pushing what he claimed was a government program affiliated with her utility to get her free solar panels. At one point, he had her touch his tablet device, she says, but he never said she was signing a contract with Solgen or a loan document with GoodLeap. Unbeknownst to Jones, the salesman used “yoursolarguyujosh@gmail.com” as her purported email address—that of course, was not her email address. She’s on a fixed income of $960 a month, and cannot afford the loan she says she was tricked into signing up for; she’s now fighting both Solgen and Goodleap in court.

Her case is not uncommon. Solar customers across the country say that salespeople obscure the specific terms of the financial agreements and cloud the value of the products they peddle. Related court cases are starting to pile up. “I have been practicing consumer law for over a decade, and I’ve never seen anything like what we are seeing in the solar industry right now,” says Kristin Kemnitzer, who represents Jones and says her firm gets “multiple” calls every week from potential clients with similar stories.

Companies running solar farms, on the other hand, have bean-counters in place who are in a legitimate position to run the numbers, and those companies take on the risk themselves. With residential solar, it’s not companies saying “hey, we’ll put our capital on the line, and just want somewhere to put a panel”, it’s “here’s a graph and some numbers, and there’s a great investment opportunity for you with your capital…just sign on the line here!” Needless to say, this opens the door to a lot of potential unpleasantness.

EDIT: If a company sends a guy to your doorstep to tell you how they have a fantastic investment opportunity for you and your money which will make you a great return, a good response is to ask them why they don’t want to make the investment themselves. Is it generosity on their part, letting you enjoy the benefit of the investment?

If a solar panel installer wants to put panels on a roof I own, that’s fine with me. All they have to do is pay me for the space on my roof and cover the cost of the hardware and its installation. In return, I will let them have the entire value of the generation done, rather than taking it myself. If this is a legitimate investment with a valid return for the party putting money down, then they should be happy to do that.

One notices that there are no residential solar installer companies who are engaging in that sort of arrangement. Cell tower companies do that with cell infrastructure, but not residential solar installers. Hmmm.

I love how you address only 1/3 of the items I brought up!

You brought up losses and environmental impact. I addressed only losses.

Okay. “Environmental impact” is hard to quantify, but you could try and put a dollar figure on the cost of putting a solar panel in the desert. You should already be internalizing any costs, though, and that’s not where companies are choosing to stick solar farms.

But there is value to putting production as close to load as possible.

Sure. It’s just that having solar panels on balconies relative to solar farms in a desert is outweighed by the drawbacks, if your goal is cost-efficient generation (which as I pointed out in my original post, isn’t always the primary concern).

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.

As per the globalsolaratlas map I linked above, you have on the order of 50% more solar potential in Spain than Germany. And that’s before one considers alignment, shade from surrounding structures and vegetation, and similar factors that affect sticking panels on a house, which favor solar farms.

In countries like Germany, balcony-mounted solar panels are all the rage.

First image is of an overcast sky with a guy with two nearly-vertical solar panels

Third image is of a small solar panel under a roof receiving a little bit of light at an extreme angle through an opening in a covered attic balcony

Here’s a solar farm in the US:

https://www.energy-storage.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/de-shaw-1024x731.jpg

It’s pulling a lot more power per panel.

Another:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/images/project_profiles/img_az_navajo_nation_kayenta_solar_program.jpg

Another:

https://cdn.orsted.com/-/media/feature/vocastimport/orsted_permianenergycenter_cod_0398_698890436958977.png?mh=1440

Does it make sense to stick solar panels on a house relative to drawing power from a solar farm? Sure, it can, if your house is remote and it’s costly to connect it to the grid, or if what you’re after is a secondary, backup source of power if you lose grid connectivity.

But if what you want is cost-effective generation, it’s preferable to stick a panel on a solar farm somewhere where one can leverage economies of scale, maintenance is easy and done by someone who maintains a ton of these on a regular basis, and where you’re optimizing location and panel orientation for solar potential.

Like, if you want more solar power on the European grid, you probably want more solar farms in Spain, which has substantially more solar potential than Germany:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

Not someone sticking them on their balcony in Germany.

What Germany could do to help solar and wind, if it wants to do so, is drop complaints about building (inexpensive) above-ground transmission pylons, which would help smooth out different generation at different locations on the European grid.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/farmers-and-grid-operators-demand-end-rules-prioritising-underground-power-lines-germany

Farmers and grid operators demand end to rules prioritising underground power lines in Germany

The Federal Requirement Plan Act (Bundesbedarfsplangesetzes), which provides a legal framework for the construction of the high-voltage transmission lines needed to reshape the power grid as ever-more of Germany’s power supply comes from renewables, prioritises underground cables over the construction of visible pylons, which have been met with public resistance.

“So far, we are assuming that all projects will be realised as underground cables,” a BNetzA spokesperson told the paper.

EDIT: If you want to criticize the US for something as solar goes, it’d probably be Trump throwing tariffs on everything, which makes it more costly to deploy solar panels and other electrical hardware manufactured abroad.

One thing I might consider is whether you want a tandem OLED monitor. They’re out now, but not widespread, and that monitor is not one, and it’s one area where OLED monitors are improving significantly. My guess — not following closely — is that they will be more-widespread before long.

The main drawback of OLED monitors on desktops today from my standpoint is that there is some burn-in potential, and the longer one plans to keep the monitor — and you’ve kept your last for some time — the more potential. Running the LEDs at a lower brightness level reduces the impact.

Tandem OLED monitors use multiple LED layers, which combine their brightness. The rationale is more that it lets one have brighter output — OLED displays aren’t presently as bright as LCD displays, and more brightness is nice, especially for TVs. However, it also means that each layer can be driven at less power, helping mitigate burn-in. They’re also somewhat more power-efficient, since efficiency falls off at brighter levels.

For me, brightness isn’t a big deal on desktops, since I’m not needing to use them outdoors, and they don’t need to outshine the sun. And I don’t much care about power efficiency on a desktop monitor. But putting off burn-in would be nice.

I haven’t seen burn-in on my OLED phone after years of use, but I also don’t use my phone as much as a computer can be, and I understand that the longer daily use of computers is expected to be a more-significant factor.

It is possible to get visible burn-in on existing OLED monitors after a lot less than a decade of use:

https://hothardware.com/news/qd-oled-burn-in-testing-one-year-results

There are currently tandem OLED monitors out with five layers.

On a phone, I myself wouldn’t worry about it, but I also tend to keep desktop monitors for a lot longer than phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle

39.37 in (1,000 mm) (M16A4)

I didn’t know until today that it was exactly one meter long, though.

VR will never become mass market until it no longer means wearing a big silly looking thing on your head.

There are various types of HMDs that look more or less like glasses, though those aren’t really VR-oriented.

For myself, I don’t care what it looks like to other people.

But what I want is a monitor replacement. Something that is at least as good as a monitor. Comfort, resolution, clarity, ability to be worn all day, etc. Give me a better monitor, and I will buy that.

Existing headsets aren’t there.

They can provide a wider field of view than a monitor, which is good for filling peripheral view in some games. But they aren’t something that people would use as a general monitor replacement. You don’t want to code or web-browse all day on them.

If it’s not a monitor replacement, then it’s a toy, a specialized accessory for a small number of games. I’m not saying that that isn’t worthwhile to some people. If I were a hardcore flight-simmer, a genre that is a good match for the technology, that might be worth it to me. But it’s definitely not a no-brainer, and it’s something that I’d just pull out on specific occasions to enhance a game.

I have a flightstick, throttle, and pedals, and those are, frankly, probably larger wins for flight-simming, and I rarely wind up pulling those out. They mostly gather dust.

Yeah, some burger places will do a sunny-side up egg, and the yolk running over things is messy…but I really like it, and will always order it if I’m at a burger place that has a sunny-side-up egg option.

I’m hoping that someone can figure out a less-messy way to provide a similar experience. Maybe have some kind of spread that incorporates yolk, or powdered egg yolk that’s mixed in at the last minute or something.

If an instance isn’t defederated with another instance, it can talk to it.

You can see which instances an instance defederates with yourself. For lemmy instances, it’s at /instances. Just check each end.

So, for example, I’m on lemmy.today. http://lemmy.today/instances doesn’t have lemmygrad.ml in its Blocked Instances list (it doesn’t defederate from anything, as a matter of policy, in fact).

https://lemmygrad.ml/instances doesn’t have lemmy.today in its Blocked Instance, so it isn’t defederated on their end either.

Ergo, they can communicate.

Pretty easy to check a pair of Lemmy instances for that.

All that being said, though, if you want to create a series of throwaway accounts to argue with them without them banning you, I think that both you and they are going to be happier if you two stay away from each other. It’s just not worth your time, and I think that the chances of there being a productive outcome for you or them isn’t very high.

Hmm.

There are some software packages that will permit one to create virtual controllers under /dev/event/event* and use physical controllers as inputs to the virtual controller’s inputs, while hiding the original controller. That may be more-involved then you want, but it should permit for that; wouldn’t need to have a trackpad on the virtual controller, or could not pass through events. Haven’t done this recently.

If you’re just talking about in Steam, Steam Input apparently sounds like it has an option to disable controller trackpads at the Steam Input layer, from a quick search.

I mean, it’s the hiring company’s job to vet you, not yours. The requirements are to provide you with some guidelines to avoid having you waste time. If you think you can do the job, I’d go ahead and apply. They’re gonna try and get the best fit candidate from those that apply, regardless. If they had more-specific requirements, like knowledge of some specific software package, they could have included it in the job requirements. I wouldn’t over-analyze it.

If you’re concerned about it, every place I’ve ever interviewed at has had someone who is supposed to take questions from the candidate at the end of the interview. You can probably ask them there if there’s a specific set of things on Linux that it’d be useful to know.

EDIT: And as someone who has done plenty of software development work, if someone just put down “Linux proficiency” and expected it to be interpreted without additional context as having some specific background in software development, I’d be surprised. But my larger point is that I don’t think that I’d fret about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_based_on_Dune

There are a number of Dune games.

Yeah, it’ll be faster if you need to restart partway through, since rsync won’t overwrite already-copied data. But outside of that, cp should be fine.

If retaining original file modification times is desired, then the -a flag, to either cp or rsync, is valuable, since otherwise, you’ll update the file modification times to the time of the copy.

No.

Most games out there are normally played fullscreen, and they are going to be indistinguishable on Linux and Windows.

I could maybe understand a YouTube channel focusing on game troubleshooting or something like that, where the platforms would differ. Maybe for tweaking an environment for performance or something. But for gameplay itself…I mean, there’s just no difference.