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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

    I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.


  • How’s the lag on one of those things? Doesn’t matter for an RPG, but playing some of the old platformers on a modern TV is an exercise in misery, and I just couldn’t get past the first couple of levels in Um Jammer Lammy without connecting up a PC monitor instead.

    Places where I’ve seen that live of projector are for eg. showing the football in a pub, and the sound and screen are noticeably out-of-sync.


  • A binary tree is one way of preparing data, usually for sorting. Each node can have a left, right, or both, children.

      A
     / \
    B   C
       / \
      D   E
    

    “Inverting the tree” means swapping the children for each node, so that the order that the nodes are visited is reversed. Depending on whether you want to copy the tree or swap it in place then the algorithm is different. C++ provides iterators too, so providing a “order reversed” iterator can be done efficiently as well.

    You’re going to have to visit every node and do at least one swap for every node, and an efficient algorithm won’t do much more than that. Bring unable to do it suggests that the student programmer doesn’t understand stacks or recursion yet, so they’ve more to learn.


  • addie@feddit.uktolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldPanik
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    16 days ago

    After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as “won’t fix” for years and years. No reason to ever go back.


  • Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

    For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

    I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses






  • Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

    Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.


  • addie@feddit.uktoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldIt'll happen to you!
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    2 months ago

    Your classic VGA setup will probably be connected to a CRT monitor, which among other things has zero lag, and therefore running your sound separately to your audio setup, which also has zero lag, will be fine. Audio and video are in sync.

    HDMI cables will almost certainly be connected to a flatscreen of some kind. Monitors tend to have fairly low lag, but flatscreen TVs can be crazy. Some of them have “game” mode (or similar) but as for the rest, they might have half-a-second or more of image processing before actually displaying anything. Running sound separately will have a noticeable disconnect between audio and video; drives me crazy although some people don’t notice it. You would connect your audio setup to the TV rather than directly to source to correct this.

    Now, the fact that a lot of cheap TVs only have a 3.5mm headphone jack to “send on the sound” is annoying to me, too. A lot of people just don’t care about how things sound and therefore it’s not a commercial priority. Optical digital audio output would be ideal, in that cheap audio circuitry inside the television won’t degrade the sound being passed over HDMI and you can use your own choice of DAC, but they can be both expensive and add a bit of lag as well.




  • Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn’t protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn’t protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn’t protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn’t protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.

    “Infrastructure”, to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I’m thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/hardware/allen-bradley/programmable-controllers.html.

    Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven’t been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it’s up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.

    PLCs tend to be coded up in “ladder logic” and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn’t a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there’s a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and “supported by manufacturer” is critical for these industries.



  • addie@feddit.uktoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldThe deed is done.
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    2 months ago

    Well, there’s your problem. You’ve plugged a Romantic Robot into the place where your Kempston joystick should be. Never going to win at Daley Thompson’s without perfecting your waggle. Also, the Speccy will probably crash from hammering the keyboard if you try.

    Midnight Resistance is one of those weird games where the first level is the hardest; it’s not too bad to finish it if you do the first bit. Fair play on Robocop, though - that’s a hard game.


  • AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.

    I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.

    “Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.




  • Bless her. If someone that really ‘loves and appreciates wine’ but ‘hates eggs’ finds that a complete nightmare, then I (who am the opposite) should leave it alone.

    She’d absolutely cooked the shit out of those eggs, though. I’d probably hate them too if I only got ‘yellow cooked until it’s a powdery dust’ as my options.