skullgiver

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl

This is a remote user, information on this page may be incomplete. View at Source ↗

Giver of skulls

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone redesigned the Steam UI, and I need it.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Official support may be gone, but there seem to be tools out there that will let you modify your Steam install.

Of course, you need to be careful. Don’t do this if you have payment information saved to your Steam account and don’t purchase games through a modded client or you will get your credit card details stolen.

Someone could take this redesign and apply it to modern Steam, though I don’t think it’s much better.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck keeps forgetting my SD card is already formatted and has games⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
This happens when the SD card gets unmounted for some reason. If the same SD card keeps unmounting, that could either be a catastrophic file system error that makes the OS throw its hands up and say “fuck it, I’m out”, or it could be a damaged SD card.

Try going into desktop mode and running a file system check on the card.

If you can catch it happening, you can go to desktop mode and collect logs (I think there’s a GUI tool for that, but if not: sudo dmesg -T > logs.txt will dump the logs in a text file). Most of those logs will be useless to you, but if you can find the moment it disconnected, you may be able to find error messages that can point you in the right directions.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doesn't each community being local to each instance split the audience?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
You can follow and interact with communities on other instances. The split doesn’t have to happen.

On Reddit you have the same phenomenon, but it’s less obvious because there’s no server name. When r/ceilingfans has drama, someone creates r/fansonceilings, and then someone creates r/ceilingfanpics for both communities to share pictures in, but the split group doesn’t like interacting with the old group so creates r/picsofceilingfans.

Eventually the fringe subreddits bleed dry and the old subreddits get left behind.

On Lemmy the communities don’t die as quickly, because different serves have different rules. You can say things on sh.itjust.works that will get you banned on beehaw, and the moment any kind of communism/socialism comes up, there’s a big difference between the moderation on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

In my experience, most Lemmy communities are concentrated on communities on bigger servers.

I don’t think Lemmy will scale well, but that’s probably more because of the UI, servers breaking apps whenever they update, and the lack of moderators.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Isn’t the use of strict behaviorism to explain animals kind of obnoxious?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
This comes down to a difference of approaches. People naturally anthropomorphise pets and dogs have abused this by evolving expressive eyebrows so that humans bonded with them easier. The grills of cars are designed like a smiley because people recognise the headlights as eyes and attribute emotions to unfeeling metal objects based on the shape of the air intakes and panels.

If all the chemistry and physics that make up an animal are all there is to life, then it’s not hard to reason about animal intelligence. There are things we consider to be very basic (pointing at something and expecting someone else to look at what we’re pointing to) that very few animals can grasp. There are special tests to determine self awareness, like if an animal can recognise a spot drawn on its body in the mirror.

Humans lack knowledge of animal interactions (and sometimes senses) to clearly determine what animals are communicating to us. We like to attribute intelligence to dogs and other common pets that look like us mammals, but squid and birds can beat intelligence tests that human toddlers struggle with.

There is also the philosophical approach. Do animals feel? Do they posses a soul? We have no way to exchange words with animals, so we’ll likely never find out. There has not been any proof of a soul in humans, but if you believe humans do have some kind of ethereal component that’s not visible to the naked eye, it’s not hard to imagine animals may have something similar.

Some people like to pretend we as humans are super special and above animals. I don’t buy that, I think we’re just smart monkeys, nothing more, and our emotions are just more complicated forms of “behaviourisms” we see in other animals. We do possess some insight that many animals clearly lack, but cats certainly do feel joy or loss. Cats are known to grieve, as are many other animals. Of course, they don’t have the spiritual concepts we do, and once they’ve processed the loss of their friend, they’ll probably eat the body if there are no other easy ways to find food, but to consider any mammal an emotionless creature that’s more akin to a robot than a living thing is nothing but a superiority complex.

Mollusks are some of the basic forms of animal we know of. They respond to chemical cues, just like us, but there’s no proof whatsoever that they possess any kind of mental faculties beyond basic responses. Maybe they do have a soul and maybe they have intricate love lives, but we haven’t found any evidence for that yet.

We may never find out. If mollusks do experience emotions, there’s a chance their emotions are nothing like ours. We explain emotional responses through happiness, fear, anger and all that stuff, but who says other animals feel the same? Perhaps sea creatures have an emotional spectrum comprised of degrencre, humber, nage, and dorcelessness, but we’ll never be able to understand those, let alone recognise them when animals express them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Isn’t the use of strict behaviorism to explain animals kind of obnoxious?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I think this isn’t too difficult to prove for animals that dream. Emotions aren’t something only humans experience. There are limits to how intelligent certain animals can be (ants and spiders are a whole different class compared to squids and dolphins) but there’s also far more to animals than the simple behaviourisms they exhibit. Even basic animals can have a personality, no matter how crude that may be compared to the personality of a human.

It’s as hard to prove that a mollusk has a rich inner life as it is to prove you have. For all I know, you’re an LLM, and for all you know, I am. Even if we are both people, who says you’re not an “NPC” merely pretending to be an intelligent person?

Proving consciousness all comes down to “I think therefore I am”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨on youtube how do I downvote an ad? or how do i tell youtube that "hey this ad is not something I want to see?" I know ad blockers don't work on youtube anymore but how do I tweek what ads i do see?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Interesting, last time I reported an ad, it just disappeared.

In that case, adblockers or paying for Premium are the only solutions I can think of.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨on youtube how do I downvote an ad? or how do i tell youtube that "hey this ad is not something I want to see?" I know ad blockers don't work on youtube anymore but how do I tweek what ads i do see?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Because everybody else is rather unhelpful (JusT USe AdBlOck, DOn’t USE yoUToUBe), try this it you can’t get adblockers to work:

For specific ads, look at the ad information below the video. There should be three vertical dots you can click, which will open a menu. From there you can report inappropriate ads or tell Youtube you’re not interested in those.

Customising ad topics and brands on your Google account can help get broader strokes of ad topics out of your ads. You can customise (up to a certain extent) what kind of ads Google will show you. You’ll still get ads based on the video subject, but it can help to remove specific entries.

If you’re on Chrome, you can try going to the new ad settings in your browser and see if there are specific topics you can disable from there. Google’s latest change to the ad ecosystem was making the interest tracking happen locally. There’s a good chance you have it disabled, though.

Adblock does still work for Youtube, as long as you don’t stack ad blockers like they’re layers on a sandwich. Blocking ads has become more involved, though, now only a few ad blockers will work and they won’t work in Chrome in a few months. Don’t do the crap reddit tells you (adding custom rules, changing settings willy-nilly), just run uBlock Origin at default settings.

On mobile, Revanced works pretty well. It takes some effort to set up right, but once you’ve got it running you won’t need to bother looking after it for a few months. I’m not sure if there’s an iOS alternative.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microchips⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I can’t say I’m very convinced by these articles. They say a lot of things, but very little of it actually seems to come back to Gates himself.

Two links deep, I found:

But despite Gates’ stated commitment to an equitable distribution of the Covid vaccine, he is refusing to back South Africa and India’s calls for a waiver on patents.

which should be obvious (good luck getting your malaria vaccine produced if you back patent waivers lol).

Another link talks about Microsoft wanting to keep patents around in 2007. Wow, a company making money solely by producing easily copyable software wanting to keep the profits on its R&D? Colour me surprised!

Other links talk about the power billionaires have amassed and how much a problem that is and they may not be wrong about that, but people’s around the world are free to refuse Gates’ money and do things on their own if the don’t want Gates influencing them.

The claim that Gates told Oxford not to open the vaccine seems to have come from this quote:

“We went to Oxford and said, Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,” Bill Gates told reporters on June 3, a transcript shows. “But … you really need to team up.” The comments were first reported by Bloomberg.

AstraZeneca, one of the U.K.’s two major pharma companies, may have demanded an exclusive license in return for doing a deal, said Ken Shadlen, a professor at the London School of Economics and an authority on pharma patents—a theory supported by comments from CEO Soriot.

“I think IP [intellectual property, or exclusive patents] is a fundamental part of our industry and if you don’t protect IP, then essentially there is no incentive for anybody to innovate,” Soriot told the newspaper The Telegraph in May.

I think it’s quite realistic to say “you can’t do this on your own” to a small medical research lab. Not like Oxford was going to produce any real vaccine supply by themselves.

I have yet to see any actual quotes from Bill himself about this topic. The closest thing to a real connection that I can find are post hoc ergo proper hoc arguments written by people with unrealistic expectations about the healthcare industry.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Question] Anyone know if those Miscro sd cards work well on the Steam Deck?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
20GB of OS is quite normal for a modern desktop. Steam Deck actually has two copies of the core OS installed, to ensure there’s always a bootable version and to make upgrades painless. A basic Ubuntu install requires 8.5GB of storage and that doesn’t include Steam or Proton.

Compare this to Xbox, where the 512GB drive has 148GB of system files and reserved space. The 32GB Switch reserves about 6GB and the Switch OS is purpose-built rather than a Linux distro with Steam bolted onto it.

It sucks that consoles are advertised with their storage size rather than their usable storage size. They should really put the usable storage on the box rather than the theoretical size, especially when they sell different storage tiers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Deck, nay Linux, is crying out for an official GeForce Now app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
The weird Chromebook situation is clearly a result of them shutting down Stadia when other teams were still intending to integrate with it.

Perhaps the Chromebook executables can be made to work on Linux?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Deck, nay Linux, is crying out for an official GeForce Now app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Nvidia have truly outdone themselves in their effort to make the most confusing marketing decisions. They looked at Nintendo’s success at misinforming consumers to think the Wii U was just an addon to the Wii and thought “we can do this better, we have the power of the cloud”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Help] Is there a way to stop the "BIP" sound when speaker are plugged ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Does this only happen if you use your speakers, or does it also happen when you use headphones?

There are ways for speakers to get annoying interference, like a 60Hz buzz in case if a ground loop. It’s also possible that long wires will start acting like antennae, to the point where a wire of the right length can actually become a shitty AM radio receiver by accident. Any wireless electronics in the area, or other insufficiently isolated electronics, can end up sending radio waves that an antenna like a wire may pick up. Better speaker wire (with more insulation) should help prevent that issue. Adjusting the wire’s position may also help.

If you use short headphones and the sound issue remains, there’s a chance the problem lies within your Deck. There could be a design flaw or a defect making the Deck interfere with itself. There isn’t much you can do in that case. I suppose you could get a USB dock with a digital audio interface on it to move the audio circuitry outside the Deck, that may help.

Also worth checking is if the problem disappears when you disconnect the charger/dock. If you’re dealing with a ground loop issue, the interference should disappear or at least get a lot better as soon as you disconnect the Deck. For ground loops you can try making sure you plug all devices into the same circuit/socket, or adding a ground loop isolator between the Deck and the speakers. Getting better audio cables will also reduce the problem, but it won’t disappear completely. If you’re not using a good charger (i.e. a shitty charger that came with a cheap USB dock), you can also run into problems like these.

I’ve also heard a similar problem on an old device of mine that had to do with the sound output being switched off entirely if it hadn’t been playing sound for a while. The workaround was to prevent the system from turning off the audio hardware, but I have no idea if that’s even something the Deck does at all. You could try playing an endless loop of empty audio in the background to keep the sound system active if that’s the problem you’re facing, but I kind of doubt it.

Because you describe the problem as something that only happens during certain computationally intense activities (staring a game, changing settings) I think interference from inside the Deck is the most likely problem. However, a ground loop issue can also be made worse by changes in power consumption of the device, so that’s also a possibility at the very least.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[PSA] Swapping your Deck's filesystem to Btrfs is easy to do, and can give you more space for free⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I used duperemove which uses the FIDEDUPERANGE ioctl.

My biggest issues with BTRFS is that the tooling isn’t complete yet. On ext4 a wide range of issues can be fixed with fsck (including fixing broken metadata) while the btrfs check documentation basically tells you:
```
       Warning
      Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a
      developer or an experienced user, and then only after having
      accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types of
      filesystem corruption. Eg. some other software or hardware
      bugs can fatally damage a volume.
```
It’s a bit like Windows: it works while it works, it can do some great tricks, but when it breaks and the automagic recovery doesn’t help, you’re kind of screwed.

I feel you, most people with BTRFS issues have hardware issues and are hit by Intel/AMD making ECC memory an expensive feature. But in my specific case, the files actually got messed up because of a dedup gone wrong.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[PSA] Swapping your Deck's filesystem to Btrfs is easy to do, and can give you more space for free⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
It should be, but neither files were damaged before the dedup attempt. I went balance-check-dedup-check-balance on purpose to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally deduplicate with a damaged extent. I don’t know if the metadata was damaged or the extent itself, but there were checksum failures on two specific extents in two sets of files that got deduplicated (4 files in total, both sets of temporary files in the Lutris cache).

I’m not mad or anything, and I accept a few kilobytes of lost data every now and then. There’s a reason I have (signed, encrypted, diffed) backups in the first place! That doesn’t change the fact that there still are a few edge cases where BTRFS suffers corruption under heavy load with a wide range of features in use (many of which don’t even exist in other file systems, I myself am quite fond of CoW+deduplication of existing files+compression on selected paths+snapshots every time I run apt upgrade). If we all pretend these edge cases never happen, they’ll never get fixed.

If this happened enough for me to be able to replicate the problem, I would’ve filed a bug report. I’m happily using btrfs on my desktop drives drives and I’m planning on converting my laptop as soon as I can get enough space for a full backup just in case. There’s no doubt BTRFS is superior to ext4, and even ZFS has issues BTRFS doesn’t have (no dumb Oracle licensing issues, for one).

For something like a Steam Deck SD card, BTRFS is a no-brainer. I’m a little annoyed that I need to mount the SD card manually if it’s not ext4, but the space savings and improved loading times are worth it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[PSA] Swapping your Deck's filesystem to Btrfs is easy to do, and can give you more space for free⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
It should perhaps be noted that whole btrfs is pretty stable overall, I’ve run into two cases where deduplication corrupted the file system. I couldn’t get the files repaired either, they were just screwed up.

This could’ve been because of a simply bit flip, and the files were just temp files anyway, but it’s probably good to know about the risk before turning it on.

For something like a games console where you can just download the games again it’s probably fine regardless, but if you care you could use this knowledge to only use such features on SD cards to make sure the system is still bootable.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If iFixit starts selling steam motherboards, can you buy just a motherboard and make a console-only steamdeck?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think the Deck’s performance is that great for console use. Without the restrictions of a portable machine, desktop components would be much cheaper to put into a machine.

An RX 6600 paired with a Ryzen 5600 would blow the Deck out of the water (3-4x depending on the measurement) for a very similar cost to a mid-range Deck.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If iFixit starts selling steam motherboards, can you buy just a motherboard and make a console-only steamdeck?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Steam Machines already existed a while back, but compatibility was bad and hardware was expensive.

I would like Steam Machines to come back again, but they’d really just be computers with AMD graphics cards you can just buy or build yourself.

Put a Ryzen/Radeon computer in a console-like case and put HoloISO on it, that’s all you really need. The only thing Valve could really add is better pricing and a Valve Controller v2 that’s based on the excellent Deck design
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
If the dock or the Deck detects your cable being bad, charging will slow down automatically. Lying, fake cables can cause this problem; alternatively, lying, fake cables can also cause electrical fires when the plastic melts or damage to your equipment.

If you have another device available, try plugging in something like a phone or a tablet or a laptop that also supports USB-C charging to see if it’s just the Deck or if something else is wrong. If everything but the Deck fast charges, it’s possible that there’s something wrong with the Deck (filth in the port?), the charger, or the dock (lying spec sheet? knockoff? scam?).

The deck charges with about 45W max, if your outlet isn’t producing that I doubt you’ll be able to do anything with them. That’s less than an incandescent light bulb!