Max_P

Max_P, 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Why do you keep comparing phones and PCs? They’re not comparable and never will. My PC can draw probably close to 1000W when running full bore. Mobile chips have a TDP of like 10-20W. My PC can throw 50-100x more power at the problem than your phone can. In the absolute worst case, it would have a dozen or two of those power efficient ARM chips because it can. And PC games would make use of all of them and you circle back to PC superiority. My netbook is within the same range and crappier than my phone in many aspects, around 5-10W. My new Framework 16 has a TDP of 45W, already like 2-4x more than a high end phone has.

Even looking at Apple, the M2 has a TDP of 20W because it was spun off their iPad chips, and primarily targets mobile devices like MacBooks. So while the performance is impressive in the efficiency department, I could build an ARM server with 10x the core count and have a 10x more powerful computer than the top of the line M3 iMac.

PCs running ARM would have no effect on the mobile ecosystem whatsoever. Android runs Linux, and Linux runs on a lot of CPU architectures. You can run Android on RISC-V today if you want to spend the time building it. Or MIPS. Or PowerPC. There’s literally nothing stopping you from doing that.

The gaming experience on mobile sucks because gaming on mobile sucks. If you ran your phone at full power to game and have the best graphics it would probably be dead in 1-2 hours. Nobody would play games that murders their battery. And most people that do play games on mobile want like 10 minute games to play while sitting on the toilet, or on a bus or train or whatever. Thus, battery life is an important factor in making a game: you don’t want your game to chew through battery because then people start rationing their gameplay to make it to the end of the day or the next charger.

PCs are better not because of IBM, or even the x86 architecture, not even because of Windows. They’re better because PCs can be built with any part you want, and you can throw as many CPUs and GPUs and NPUs and FPGAs at the problem as you want. Heck there’s even SBC PCs on PCI/PCIe cards so you can have multiple PCs in your PC.

Whatever you can come up with that fits in a mobile device, I can make a 10-20x more powerful PC if anything by throwing 10-20 phones in it and split the load across all of them.

PC games are ambitious and make use of as much hardware as it can deal with. If you want to show off your 3D tech you don’t limit yourself to mobile, you target dual RTX 4090 Ti graphics cards. There are great games made for lower end hardware, and consoles like the switch runs ARM, like the Zelda games. The switch is vastly inferior to modern phones, and Yuzu can run those games better than the switch can. My PC will happily run BotW and TotK at 4K 240Hz HDR if I ask it to. But it was designed for the Switch and it’s pretty darn good games. So the limitation clearly isn’t that PCs exist, it’s what developers write their games for. CPU architecture isn’t a problem, we have emulators, we have Rosetta, we have Box64, we have FEX.

If PCs didn’t exist, something else would have taken its place a long time ago, and we’d circle back to the exact same problem/question. Heck there’s routers and firewalls that run games better than your phone.

Max_P, 12 days ago

There are better “gaming” distros, but unless someone uses their PC exclusively for gaming, when it comes time to install other kinds of software for school or work or whatever, they’re going to get thrown in the deep ends of Linux.

But guess what does have two decades of software and tutorials to set up just about everything in existence? Ubuntu, and by extension Mint.

Sure you can squeeze more out of your games with something like Bazzite, but the general platform that anything Linux-native targets is usually Ubuntu. Sure there’s distrobox and stuff that’s like telling the average gamer to go set up WSL. It’s not hard per-se but the amount of things to learn increases very quickly.

Thus, even though Ubuntu is very average these days, it’s still a safe bet for new users.

Max_P, 12 days ago

The quality of what the community is doing vs what they shipped with NSO especially on launch is laughable.

Native OoT and MM on the switch would have been really sick. Instead they went with 90s level of emulator quality.

Max_P, 12 days ago

“Trust me bro” from the developer pretty much.

I think it makes sense, they’re a small developer and it’s all stuff I’d expect from the ad networks so if you get premium you also kill the ads and therefore the data collection.

Max_P, 12 days ago

Have they tried building average, affordable condos instead of luxury condos?

All the new condo developments I’ve been seeing everywhere are more expensive than a townhouse nearby, and half the size of nearby apartments that are also half what the mortgage would be on a 1-2M fucking condo.

Pretty sure they can do away without the penthouse pool and hot tub and bring the price down, but it wouldn’t be nearly as profitable for them so they won’t.

Nobody is actually trying to help lower home prices because everyone’s retirement plan depends on houses being unaffordable.

Max_P, 12 days ago

That, and they also either renovate in pseudo-luxery or build fairly luxurious condos in a world of HOAs going absolutely out of control and making sure you can’t actually live in there even if you could afford it because your next door karen will file a noise complaint every time you flush the toilet.

Number of constructions I’ve seen actually designed to be affordable in the last couple years: zero. None. They all target rich people that could afford a normal house anyway.

Even new apartment buildings, the thing that people that can’t get a mortgage get, is now also all designed for 3000+ monthly rents.

Property developers are greedy pigs.

Max_P, 13 days ago

Wordpress or some of its alternatives would probably work well for this. Another alternative would be static site generators, where you pretty much just write the content in Markdown.

It’s also a pretty simple project, it would be a great project to learn basic web development as well.

Max_P, 12 days ago

The 10 year old PC has a much much bigger power budget than a phone. It wasn’t until really recently that ARM got anywhere close to x86 performance.

While the phone technically possibly could be better, it would also drain in an hour or two if it was maxed out. And most people have crappy phones that can barely hold 60fps doing nothing so mobile games usually target the lower end devices to maximize the amount of potential players, while also remaining battery conscious.

There’s also just not that much demand. Nobody has space on their phones for a 120GB game, and nobody wants to play a AAA game on their phones because gaming on a phone sucks ass and if you’re going to dock the phone you might as well get a console.

Max_P, 13 days ago

To be fair you don’t really have to use filters for this. Cameras are much better at capturing the colors of the aurora while in person it looks like a faint white glow in the sky. Possibly some white-balance thing where it way overcompensate.

Cameras also need relatively long exposures to capture those so it’ll also appear much brighter and vivid than we see with our own eyes, possibly because of the low light conditions we use our cones more than the rods.

Max_P, 13 days ago

1 and 2, there’s also the option to still buy it but then download a pirated copy that actually works. In a professional setting at least, if you sell stuff made with the pirated software you have the license and rights to do so. Personally I would rather skip the plugin entirely, but if you must, and you must legally-ish, that’s an option.

Max_P, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

That’s the eternal cycle of social media. It starts nice and then it get flooded by MAGA extremists until it becomes a cesspool of hate and disinformation.

See: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, TikTok is well on that path as well.

Max_P, 14 days ago

Fairly new to ham, what’s nice to listen to during an aurora? Just funny noise bursts? Any antenna precautions so I don’t fry my SDR?

Max_P, 14 days ago

Nothing hotter than a giant electric fleshlight whirring away as you get off.

I saw one in a sex shop, it looks like such a chore to get going and clean up afterwards. It’s fucking huge too. Hands are so much easier to clean, and readily available anywhere anytime.

Max_P, 15 days ago

I route through my server or my home router when using public WiFi and stuff. I don’t care too much about the privacy aspect, my real identity is attached to my server and domain anyway. I even have rDNS configured, there’s no hiding who the IP belongs to.

That said, server providers are much less likely to analyze your traffic because that’d be a big no-no for a lot of companies using those servers. And of course any given request may actually be from any of Lemmy, Mastodon, IRC bots or Matrix, so pings to weird sites can result entirely from someone posting that link somewhere.

And it does have the advantage that if you try to DDoS that IP you’ll be very unsuccessful.

Max_P, 15 days ago

I can definitely see the improvement, even just between my desktop monitor (27in 1440p) and the same resolution at 16 inch on my laptop. Text is very nice and sharp. I’m definitely looking at 4K or even 5K next monitor upgrade cycke.

But the improvement is far from how much of an upgrade 480p to 1080p and moving away from CRTs to flat screens. 1080p was a huge thing when I was in highschool as CRT TVs were being phased out in favor of those new TVs.

For media I think 1080p is good enough. I’ve never gone “shit, I only downloaded the 1080p version”. I like 4K when I can have it like on YouTube and Netflix, but 1080p is still a quite respectable resolution otherwise. The main reason to go higher resolutions for me is text. I’m happy with FSR to upscale the games from 1080p to 1440p for slightly better FPS.

HDR is interesting and might be what convinces people to upgrade from 1080p. On a good TV it feels like more of an upgrade than 4K does.

Max_P, 15 days ago

Crashes on LineageOS 21 as well.

Max_P, 15 days ago

I’ve actually ran into some of those problems. If you run sudo su --login someuser, it’s still part of your user’s process group and session. With run0 that would actually give you a shell equivalent to as if you logged in locally, and manage user units, all the PAM modules.

systemd-run can do a lot of stuff, basically anything you can possibly do in a systemd unit, which is basically every property you can set on a process. Processor affinity, memory limits, cgroups, capabilities, NUMA node binding, namespaces, everything.

I’m not sure I would adopt run0 as my goto since if D-Bus is hosed you’re really locked out and stuck. But it’s got its uses, and it’s just a symlink, it’s basically free so its existence is kBs of bloat at most. There’s always good ol su when you’re really stuck.

Max_P, 15 days ago

Basically, the SUID bit makes a program get the permissions of the owner when executed. If you set /bin/bash as SUID, suddenly every bash shell would be a root shell, kind of. Processes on Linux have a real user ID, an effective user ID, and also a saved user ID that can be used to temporarily drop privileges and gain them back again later.

So tools like sudo and doas use this mechanism to temporarily become root, then run checks to make sure you’re allowed to use sudo, then run your command. But that process is still in your user’s session and process group, and you’re still its real user ID. If anything goes wrong between sudo being root and checking permissions, that can lead to a root shell when you weren’t supposed to, and you have a root exploit. Sudo is entirely responsible for cleaning the environment before launching the child process so that it’s safe.

Run0/systemd-run acts more like an API client. The client, running as your user, asks systemd to create a process and give you its inputs and outputs, which then creates it on your behalf on a clean process tree completely separate from your user session’s process tree and group. The client never ever gets permissions, never has to check for the permissions, it’s systemd that does over D-Bus through PolKit which are both isolated and unprivileged services. So there’s no dangerous code running anywhere to exploit to gain privileges. And it makes run0 very non-special and boring in the process, it really does practically nothing. Want to make your own in Python? You can, safely and quite easily. Any app can easily integrate sudo functionnality fairly safely, and it’ll even trigger the DE’s elevated permission prompt, which is a separate process so you can grant sudo access to an app without it being able to know about your password.

Run0 takes care of interpreting what you want to do, D-Bus passes the message around, PolKit adds its stamp of approval to it, systemd takes care of spawning of the process and only the spawning of the process. Every bit does its job in isolation from the others so it’s hard to exploit.

Max_P, 15 days ago

I haven’t had D-Bus problems in quite a while but actually run0 should help with some of those issues. Like, systemctl --user will actually work when used with run0, or at least systemd-run can.

Haven’t used it yet so it’s all theoretical, but it makes sense to me especially at work. I’ve used systemd-run to run processes in very precise contexts, it’s worth using even if just to smush together schedtool, numactl, nice, taskset and sudo in one command and one syntax. Anything a systemd unit can do, systemd-run and run0 can do as well.

I’m definitely going to keep su around just in case because I will break it the same I’ve broken sudo a few times, but I might give it a shot and see if it’s any good just for funsies.

Just trying to explain what it does and what it can do as accurately as possible, because out of context “systemd adds sudo clone” people immediately jump to conclusions. It might not be the best idea in the end but it’s also worth exploring.

Max_P, 15 days ago

Some executables are special. When you run them, they automagically run as root instead! But if sudo isn’t very, very careful, you can trick it into letting you run things as root that you shouldn’t be able to.

Run0 DM’s systemd asking it to go fork a process as root for you, and serves as the middleman between you and the other process.

Max_P, 15 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

If you dig deeper into systemd, it’s not all that far off the Unix philosophy either. Some people seem to think the entirety of systemd runs as PID1, but it really only spawns and tracks processes. Most systemd components are separate processes that focus on their own thing, like journald and log management. It’s kinda nice that they all work very similarly, it makes for a nice clean integrated experience.

Because it all lives in one repo doesn’t mean it makes one big fat binary that runs as PID1 and does everything.

Max_P, 16 days ago

The same is on the way in the US with how hard conservatives are fighting to keep graduates dumb and educated. Educated people don’t lean towards wars.

Max_P, 16 days ago

Yeah, even Asahi has better OpenGL support than real macOS. They make damn sure you have to use Metal to get the most out of it, just like eventually you get caught up in DirectX on Windows whether you want it or not. You can use Vulkan and OpenGL, but the OS really wants to work with Metal/DirectX buffers in the end.

I appreciate that the devs care enough to make it really good from the start, because that sets the benchmark. Now the Linux version has to have a similar enough polish to it.

In comparison, Atom and VSCode both worked fine on Linux just about day one thanks to Electron, but it was also widely disliked for the poor performance. It’s a part of what Zed competes on, performance compared to VSCode.

Max_P, 16 days ago

I just replied to that in a dedicated comment. But for your Pixel it’s even better because it’s something that Google even officially endorses, it doesn’t even void your warranty.

I’ve been modding phones since the Android 2.2 days, and I’ve never had any major issues or anything that would make me want to go back to stock, and never had issues going back to stock. Even my S7 with a modded bootloader splash screen, it was gone when I flashed stock back on it.

Max_P, 16 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Yeah if it was brand new, it might also have been defective, I’ve seen that happen. It’s just between jailbreak and manufacturing defect, which do we default to? Depends on the whole timeline really.

It’s not impossible it broke it, but anyway the Pixel is made for that so it’s a lot less sketchy to begin with. It’s the same risk as installing an OS on a PC really.

Google releases betas and developer previews for the Pixel, it’s made to survive buggy code.