It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.

I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.

Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.

“Between now and Jan 31, 2027” for me. Still a pretty broad window. I’m going to assume the latter date is what’s expected if nobody in front of me cancels, so I probably won’t be getting it this year.

Correct about Meshcore being 64 hops, but in practice when the network starts to build out that drops to 32 because you use 2-byte path hashes. With a one byte hash you run into a ton of hash collisions. But 32 hops is still plenty enough to traverse huge geographical areas if the repeaters have been placed sensibly.

That 27W is only transient though. I think the fastest battery drain I’ve seen from any online source would put sustained consumption at about 24W average. That doesn’t seem to be the norm in most cases though, typical usage seems to be more like 18-20W on average. So cases where a 30W charger can’t keep up should be few and far between.

The discussions around the Steam Frame’s battery/charging have really highlighted how little people know about power delivery, even in tech enthusiast spaces.

Like, of course you don’t need 45W. The Frame draws 27W at its peak. However 45W is capable of charging it even as you play, which may or may not be important to you.

Saw some guy on YouTube claim the Frame draws 90W too based on it draining the battery in an hour, so it was obviously DOA because no battery bank could keep up and you’d never get good playtimes. Been a while since I’ve encountered someone so confident and yet so wrong over basic technical details.

I hate how tech companies are now applying their fetish for a constructed unreality as “features” in photos we take ourselves.

The citizen science website iNaturalist has to remind people to turn off features like this, because it will clobber the details that identify a species to make things look more photogenic.

Not going to doxx myself, but I’ve been updating local businesses and their opening hours. I’ve also been adding things like wilderness huts and campgrounds that weren’t yet documented.

The big draw is probably that it’s declarative, so you can define installations as code much the same way as you would do with Terraform. Instead of needing a pile of messy Ansible playbooks running custom scripts to change anything (and which can break if the target machine has an unexpected config), you’d just have one that pushes a new version of the config and runs nixos-rebuild. Rollbacks are just as easy if anything breaks. What’s not to like?

Don’t fret too much, I made the cut but still haven’t received the order email. At this point I think the difference between reservation and waitlist is pretty arbitrary.

It used to be you needed to swap the default mesa drivers for the freeworld ones, but it seems that’s changed with Fedora 44. Now you should run:

sudo dnf install libva-utils
vainfo

That will show you the VAAPI profiles currently enabled. If your setup matches mine that will be profiles for JPEG, VP9 and AV1 but not H264 or HEVC. If that’s the case install the codec-enabled driver:

sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld

Running vainfo again should then show a bunch of new profiles for H264 and HEVC.

If you have the H264 and HEVC profiles available but are still experiencing the issue then we probably need to wait for Valve to do their thing.

Edit: also you should probably reboot before trying to stream a game after installing the driver.

I’m on the reservation list but haven’t got my order email yet. I’m also on Fedora so this is relevant to my interests. Were you using SteamVR beta as is mentioned on the support page? And have you swapped your mesa driver for the rpmfusion one that enables proprietary hardware encoders?

Fedora has a philosophy of not shipping with non-free software, it leads to stuff like the GPU’s encoders not working out of the box and is a bit of a pain point if you don’t know about it.

Why route it through the shirt if the sensation upsets you? A short cable shouldn’t be able to get in your way on the outside (the USB port is at the back). With a power bank in your back pocket it won’t be like tethered VR where you can turn around and touch the cable.

If you have a 3D printer you could also do what I’ve done and print a holster for a power bank. It gives me rear options for pants without back pockets.

I just tried a test search with Qwant and Startpage. On mobile they returned the exact same results (which were good), which suggests that Startpage is using Qwant there. On desktop though, Startpage was hot garbage. Not a single relevant result on page one, with nearly half being links to Facebook and Instagram. Hard pass on that.

I tested this on mobile too. Opened a Firefox private browsing window, switched to desktop mode and tried the search term on Startpage again. Same trash results as desktop. It’s like they’re actively telling desktop users to piss off.

I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 at the moment. I was 30 hours in before I realised I could fast travel directly from the map screen instead of walking back to a sigil. In my defence the previous game I played worked that way, and I’m playing on a TV which is fairly far away so the text is hard to read.

Not wrong about OP, but also both major desktop environments on linux ship with “app stores” that are friendly to anyone familiar with a phone. So it’s still easier installing software on linux than searching for and downloading .msi and .exe files on the internet (and hoping the version of MSI afterburner you found is the real one).

That just sounds like your keyboard is broken. Your keyboard switching its own functions does not involve the OS

I wouldn’t bother with this person, they’ve got a huge bee in their bonnet about bodybuilding and muscle mass. They seem to have extrapolated the negative health effects of doing huge amounts of steroids and putting on inhuman muscle mass out to all bodybuilding period, and they refuse to have this misconception educated out of them.

Paper slicing is a reasonable test, but you still have to make sure you’re getting rid of the burr. A burr will cut paper just fine but in actual use will dull very quickly. Having at least one finer grit and a strop makes this fairly easy. Doing it on one grit can be quite tricky.

+1 to not stressing about it though, half my knives have a patchwork look of different bevel angles along them from learning to sharpen. So long as the current bevel is consistent all the way to the apex they work just fine. Presumably a knife that is being sharpened is meant to be used and not admired for its looks.

You should be glad it’s apologizing. On the occasions I’ve used it to try to actually write code for me it’s had a tendency to blame me for its mistakes.

It writes a function that gets stuck in an infinitely recursive loop that never exits, I point it out and it’s all “Aha! You’ve fallen for a classic recursion trap!” What do you mean I’ve fallen for it?

Between those experiences and seeing the hot garbage some of my coworkers vibe coded, it was enough for me to relegate LLMs purely to the “ask questions that you would have searched for on StackOverflow” role. And it frustrates me that search was made so impotent that it’s not a real option to avoid the LLM entirely. The multiple answers and perspectives on SO were often really valuable.

You go on believing that wild straw man version of me you’ve conjured up buddy.