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Brendan Carr being in charge of the FCC. What does that mean to pirates and going forward?
  • Frankly, it probably means absolutely nothing.

    Even when captain coffee cup was the FCC chairman, did you lose the ability to torrent linux isos? Did usenet stop working?

    I wouldn't expect anything different this time, either.

  • PS5 Pro owners complain that some Pro-enhanced games look worse [VGC]
  • Yeah, it doesn't appear that PSSR (which I cannot help but pronounce with an added i) is the highest quality upscaling out there, combined with console gamers not having experienced FSR/FSR2/FSR3's uh, specialness is leading to people being confused why their faster console looks worse.

    Hopefully Sony does something about the less than stellar quality in a PSSR2 or something relatively quickly, or they're going to burn a lot of goodwill around the whole concept, much like how FSR is pretty much considered pretty trash by PC gamers.

  • Is there a distro that has the performance characteristics of CachyOS, but based on Debian/Ubuntu instead of Arch?
  • really effects performance that much

    Depending on the exact flags, some workloads will be faster, some will be identical, and some will be slower. Compilier optimization is some dark magic that relies on a ton of factors, but you can't just assume that going from like -O2 to -O3 will provide better performance, since the optimizations also rely on the underlying code as to what they'll actually make happen... and is why, for the most part, everyone suggests you stop at -O2 since you can start getting unexpected behavior the further up the curve you go.

    And we're talking low single digit performance improvements at best, not anything that anyone who is doing anything that's not running benchmarks 24/7 would ever even notice in real world performance.

    Disclaimer: there are workloads that are going to show different performance uplifts, but we're talking Firefox and KDE and games here, per the OP's comments.

    Also they do default to a different scheduler, which is almost certainly why anyone using it will notice it feels "faster", but it's mainlined in the kernel so it's not like you can't use that anywhere else.

  • Is there any truth to this?
  • Two thoughts come to mind:

    1. If it's there and you aren't having it shoved down your throat, then that's still a VAST improvement over Twitter, which has gone from shitty social media to blatant hate indoctrination platform.

    and

    1. Did you just now discover that most people are shitty? I always assumed most people figured that out at 13 or 14.
  • Big, beige ’80s PC case started out as a joke, but it’s becoming real in Japan
  • I mean even if you could remove them, the problem is that beige is not always the same beige: same problem you had 30 years ago.

    The colors would never, at any point, remotely match the rest of the beige, and it'd be nice if a premium product that exists only for the aesthetics, would have just you know, done that last itty bitty little thing so it'd look right (from at least a distance) and be color matched.

  • Xbox Fans Left Surprised By 'Insane' Download Size For Genshin Impact
  • Not that shocking? It's pushing 45gb or so on mobile, and my PC install is like 85gb.

    I can see how you might end up slightly bigger on a version that might have more than a single version of each resource for the good console and the potato one, since I'm assuming that they're doing universal downloads and not packaging two versions?

  • After Starfield: Shattered Space's mixed reviews, Todd Howard wondered if Bethesda should "have waited to put buggies out"
  • Absolutely.

    2.0 was 100% not the same game, but it was vastly improved and perfectly playable well before then.

    I played at launch, but on PC, and it was... fine. In that, unlike Starfield, it was a game with characters and a story that was interesting enough to carry the buggy world and somewhat less than fleshed out side-quest mechanics.

    But, like, there were enough buildings and set pieces and people and stories to actually sit down and spend 200 hours exploring the world without seeing the same stupid PoIs over and over and over again, while trying to care about the least interesting NPC companions I've probably ever dealt with.

    And Phantom Liberty is fucking fantastic, so they took a bit of a turd at launch and turned it into an amazing game.

  • Local domains constantly time out according to Uptime-Kuma
  • Are uptimekuma and whatever you're trying to monitor on the same physical hardware, or is it all different kit?

    My first feeling is that you've got some DNS/routing configuration that's causing issues if you're leaving your local network and then going through two layers before coming back in, especially if you have split horizon DNS.

  • Is a Quest 3 really worth it?
  • makes you dizzy

    Fun story about VR and being dizzy.

    I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.

    Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you're there, since boy, it's shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.

  • Is a Quest 3 really worth it?
  • Fallout and Skyrim VR

    takes a lot of modding

    To be fair, so do the 2D versions. VR Skyrim, at least, is super fun once you get the modding done.

    As for general value: it depends.

    I mostly play various "exercise" games like Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pistol Whip and Thrill of the Fight. The Quest is fantastic for those, because you can untether and go stand outside in a nice open surface and whilst you look like an absolute idiot, it can be a hell of a workout if you put in the effort.

    As for like, traditional games, it's less rosy: there's very little market, thus very little software support, thus very little market, which means there's very little software, which means....

    There's a ton of gems all over the place if you're after slightly more social activities, but I'd say for single-player game experiences you're going to be limited for good options that run exclusively on the headset.

    That said, there's a LOT of options in PC-tethered VR that are fantastic, assuming you can/want to tether to a PC. If you don't, that's fair, but all the really really in-depth experiences require a pretty beefy gaming pc. Stuff like HL: Alyx, because it's (still) probably the best VR-native game that's been released so far.

    There's also the VR-versions-of-PC-games like Flight Simulator and various racing and space games that are worth checking out if you're interested in them, and VR adds a lot to those experiences, if you can run the VR versions with sufficient performance which eh, is a whole different ball of problem.

  • Oops
  • richest companies on the planet

    What kills me is how fucking awful their choice of slop is, since you'd assume their marketing budget is larger than the GDP of several small countries combined.

    Like if you want to peddle slop, at least peddle good slop, and not something that would have been laughably bad years ago.

  • Community for Free Games
    forum.uncomfortable.business Free Games - Forum.UCB

    Free games from all your favorite (or extremely hated) online stores.

    Free Games - Forum.UCB

    Made this mostly because I've found putting RSS feeds into Lemmy useful since my doom-scrolling has reduced to just Lemmy and figured I'm probably not the only person that'd find this useful.

    It's pulling 6 RSS feeds that provide free games for Steam, Gog, Epic, and Humble.

    Nothing shockingly world-changing, but hey, free games.

    !freegames@forum.uncomfortable.business

    11
    Laptop for Linux use

    So I'm looking for a laptop, but before you downvote and move on, I've got a twist: I'm looking for a laptop with Linux support that's going to intentionally be console-only and rely on TUIs to make a lower-distraction device.

    I was looking at older Thinkpads with 4:3 screens and the good keyboard before Lenovo went all chicklet with them, but I'm kinda concluding they're both way too expensive AND way too old to be a reasonable choice at this point.

    A X220 or T40-whatever would be great and be the perfect aesthetic, but they're expensive, hard to find parts for, and using enough crusty old shit that this becomes yet another delve into retro computing and not one into practical, useful computing which is the goal here.

    So, anyone have any recommendations of any devices in the last decade that have a reasonable keyboard, screen, use modern enough components that you can source new drives and RAM and batteries and such, and preferably aren't coated in a coating that's going to turn to sticky goo?

    Thin(ner) and light(er) would be nice, but probably not a dealbreaker if the rest of the pieces align. This will be almost entirely used at a table for writing and such.

    36
    Proper sound balancing

    So not entirely music related, but my don't-use-reddit policy and this looking like the closest not entirely dead community has led me to post sooo...

    I have an audio question about recording levels. I'm doing voice-over stuff for some really bad Youtube videos I'd like to make and it never sounds remotely good.

    I get that the recording volume should be just the green side of clipping, but how do you take a track, and then add it to other tracks and balance the whole thing to not sound like ass?

    It always seems that it's either too loud or too quiet and I'm baffled as to how to tweak the mix correctly so that things sound right.

    14
    Appeals court revives TikTok ‘blackout challenge’ death suit
    www.theregister.com Appeals court revives TikTok ‘blackout challenge’ death suit

    Want a bot to pick engaging content and immunity from liability? Sorry, no

    Appeals court revives TikTok ‘blackout challenge’ death suit

    Basically, the court said that algorithmically selected content doesn't qualify for Section 230 protections, which could be a massive impact to every social media platform out there that has any sort of algorithm selecting content, which, well, is all of them.

    Definitely something that's going to be interesting watching play out.

    3
    Endless Microsoft one-time-use code emails.

    I have a question for the hive mind: what is the point of this, exactly?

    I mean, I understand the attempt to gain access, and I understand why 2fa codes can be valuable to attempt to phish but that's like, not the thing here.

    They just spam dozens to hundreds of these (I'm showing over 400 in my inbox right now) but like, even if I WANTED to give these codes to the attacker, I have no damn clue who the dude in China that's doing this is.

    I'm confused as to what they hope to gain by trying over and over and over every couple of hours because it feels like there's no upside to whomever is running this bot, but I probably have missed a memo on some TTP around this, heh.

    11
    Service availability monitoring/flapping services

    So I've got a home server that's having issues with services flapping and I'm trying to figure out what toolchain would be actually useful for telling me why it's happening, and not just when it happened.

    Using UptimeKuma, and it's happy enough to tell me that it couldn't connect or a 503 happened or whatever, but that's kinda useless because the service is essentially immediately working by the time I get the notice.

    What tooling would be a little more detailed in to the why, so I can determine the fault and fix it?

    I'm not sure if it's the ISP, something in my networking configuration, something on the home server, a bad cable, or whatever because I see nothing in logs related to the application or the underlying host that would indicate anything even happened.

    It's also not EVERY service on the server at once, but rather just one or two while the other pile doesn't alert.

    In sort: it's annoying and I'm not really making headway for something that can do a better job at root-cause-ing what's going on.

    4
    Anyone else get an email from Portainer?

    Just got an email thanking me for being a 5-node/free user, but Portainer isn't free and I need to stop being a cheap-ass and pay them because blah blah economic times enshittification blah blah blah.

    I've moved off them a while ago, but figured I'd see if they emailed EVERYONE about this?

    A good time to ditch them if you haven't, I suppose.

    51
    Shelly relays for energy monitoring

    I'm wanting to add a bunch of energy monitoring stuff so I can both track costs, and maybe implement automation to turn stuff on and off based on power costs and timing.

    I'm using some TPlink based plugs right now which are like, fine, but I'm wanting to add something like 6 to 10 more monitoring devices/relays.

    Anyone have experience with a bunch of shelly devices and if there's any weird behavior I should be aware of?

    Assume I have good enough wifi to handle adding another 10 devices to it, but beyond that any gotchas?

    8
    ArcaOS + DOS BBS stuff
    insecuredisaster.com Arca OS, a MiniPC, and running a BBS

    I've been running a BBS off and on since the mid-90s, and have tried a variety of methods to do so: OS/2 on real hardware, DosBox on Linux, a VM running OS/2, and more modern software that runs fine on modern Windows without the need of dealing with

    Arca OS, a MiniPC, and running a BBS

    Saw an older post asking about ArcaOS and BBS stuff, and since I actually just did a rebuild of mine doing exactly that on newer hardware, figured I'd write about all the stupid shit I had to deal with and how to configure the OS in a blog and post it here if anyone is interested.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SC
    schizo @forum.uncomfortable.business
    Posts 9
    Comments 1.1K