QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks

How would you buy it in the US? I can see any uk retailers stocking it

When AMD launched Ryzen they deliberately offered way more I/O bandwidth than Intel.

The first generation Ryzen CPU’s used RAM frequency that could cause performance issues if you used low frequency RAM. That got fixed in the 3000 series.

There are a small number of Ryzen CPU’s which end with “3D,” it means they had 3D Cache memory and its supposed to add rediculous performance in certain situations. Phoronix runs tons of benchmarks on CPU and GPU.

The only Intel instructions AMD haven’t implemented is AVX-512 and AVX-10. No one uses AVX-512 as Intel CPU’s get so hot they performance throttle so much its faster to not use the extension. AVX-10 is something new Intel released this year to get around that.

AMD does support AVX2 which a lot of Audio/Video products do use.

Every big UK company I have worked for doesn’t own its building. They will typically agree to rent a building for 5-20 years at a fixed rate (longer times if its being purpose built for them) .

So I would expect this is paying out the rest of the rental agreements for a building to escape the building lease.

It is to do with financial reporting and the way asset and operational costs are reported.

Immutable distributions won’t solve the problem.

You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

Debian’s change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely ‘free play’ testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven’t stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you’ve just given yourself a means to back out of it. It’s a band aid to the actual problem.

The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel’s on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn’t the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

Similarly website’s are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc… for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc… for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

All this is kinda boring while ‘containers!’ is exciting new technology

Uhh how?

The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn’t. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn’t want to encourage contributions that is his decision but…

KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

deleted by creator

Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory…

Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious…

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc… Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

It does but for the 90’s/00’s a computer typically meant Windows.

The ops staff would all be ‘Microsoft Certified Engineers’, the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.

Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an ‘embedded’ platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.

Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.

The only accredited OS’s were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.

deleted by creator

There will always be someone who is beating you in a metric (buying houses, having kids, promotions, pay, relationships, etc…) fixating on it will drive you mad.

Instead you should compare your current status against where you were and appreciate how you are moving forward

As for age

During university my best mate was 27 who dropped out of his final year, grabbed a random job, then went to college to get a BTEC so they could start the degree.

It was similar in my graduate intake, we had a 26 year old who had been a brickie for 5 years before getting a comp sci degree.

The first person I line managed was a junior 15 years older than me, who had a completely different career stream. They had the house, kids, had managed big teams, etc… honestly I learnt tons from them.

So I know thats a joke but…

With Java 11’s inclusion of ‘var’ I have successfully copied JavaScript code into Java without needing to change anything.

I judge the direction Java is going in

The splash screen (boot screen instead of text)used to get me. It provided by an application called ‘Plymouth’.

You used to need to install it and configure grub, however I think if you go into ‘System Settings’ and type ‘Splash’ KDE has an option to install and choose the screen

I thought server side anti cheat was the most effective. Since it can’t be modified by clients and tracks clients for impossible behaviour.

Pirate Trainer & Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

I remember trying Pirate Trainer in a Nvidia game booth when VR was new. It was incredible, years later I get a VR headset and its the free game. I don’t understand how no one has improved upon it.

Uru was the first puzzle game I thought struck a good balance between physical and mental puzzles. They were set at a level that felt challenging but not impossible and laid out so you alternated really nicely. Myst Online actually went backwards in this

You could probably stay on the magic roundabout until you ran out of fuel.

But I doubt you could go all the way around a mini roundabout .

The UK Highway Code is focussed on good behaviour when using one. There doesn’t seem to be a rule.

I wish a company would build 4.5"-5.5" and 5.5"-6.5" flagship phones, put as many features that make sense in each.

Then when you release a new flagship the last flagship devices become your ‘mid range’ and you drop the price accordingly, with your mid range dropping to budget the year after.

When Nokia had 15 different phones out at a time it made sense because they would be wildly different (size, shape, button layout, etc…).

These days everyone wants as large a screen as possible on a device that is comfortable to hold, we really don’t need 15 different models with slightly different screen ratios.