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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I use interactive rebases to clean up the history of messy branches so they can be reviewed commit by commit, with each commit representing one logical unit or type of change.

    Mind you, getting those wrong is a quick way to making commits disappear into nothingness. Still useful if you’re careful. (Or you can just create a second temporary branch you can fall back onto of you need up your first once.)


  • And also ells, rods, cubits, paces, furlongs, oxgangs, lots, batmans… all with subtly different regional definitions (with regions sometimes as small as one village).

    People used loosely defined measurements based on things like their own body parts or how much land they guessed their ox could plow on an average day. Things like mathematical convenience or precision were not all that important; being able to measure (or estimate) without tools was.



  • I actually went back to a light gray theme for my new Linux machine after I’ve been stuck with Windows’s options of “flat pure black with hairlines” and “flat bright white with hairlines” for too long.

    I don’t actually need dark mode that much (except for coding) if a bright mode theme is easy enough on the eyes. Windows 10 is just so ugly that only the dark mode is halfway palatable.

    If only the old themexp.dll hacks still worked I could have a decent looking desktop on all of my machines…



  • I’m the spirit of fairness I will nitpick you.

    Firstly, porting apps over between Android devices works seamlessly only if those apps come from the Play Store. Android has no provisions for auto-transferring e.g. F-Droid and its apps. So it’s no wonder you can’t transfer your iOS apps (which might not even have Android versions). But it is true that auto-transfers of Play Store apps between different Android spins is seamless.

    Secondly, whether and how easily you can modify or replace your Android is dependent on the phone’s manufacturer. A Pixel is a very different beast from an Xperia in that regard. Still, Google do provide AOSP and are very mod-friendly on their own devices. Apple very much aren’t.



  • CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU (“general purpose GPU” aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.

    Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn’t competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.

    Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don’t want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.

    That’s anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it’s anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.










  • Last winter, in order to protect the dwindling completely full strategic gas reserves, the government issued an order for all govenment-owned office buildings to limit the central heating to no more than 19° C because that seemed to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic solution at the time.

    This included buildings that don’t even use gas for heating. Remote heat? Geothermal heat? Free waste heat that you have to actively vent to the atmosphere in order to lower the room temperature? Yep, all required to not exceed 19° C. The building I worked in at the time (for a company that rented some excess floor space) actually wasted energy adhering to this well thought-out rule.

     

    So yeah, I’d say that in order to change a lightbulb you need at least 1000 Germans. You need both chambers of parliament to create and pass a new ordinance that applies specifically to this lightbulb (and several other contexts it has no business applying to but does because it’s too vaguely worded). Then you need at least three different expert panels to advise the government, regulatory agencies to make sure the ordinance is adhered to, licensed trainers to make sure the people executing the job are formally certified to do so… Actually, we might have to get the European Parliament involved; the new ordinance might benefit from being propoted to a European standard.

    I’ll get back to you about this in about three to five years; we need to get this figured out.