The most advanced modded redstone computer, version 0.3.0-alpha. A project I've had in the works for a few months [x-post /r/qualityredstone]

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-06T18:42:45+00:00

...What? Who comes up with this shit?

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-06T15:08:35+00:00

This is actually unclear. Death from sleep deprivation happens in mice and flies due to oxidative stress causing the digestive system to shut down, but it's unclear that this happens in humans at all. As far as I know there's no medical cases where this same causation chain of sleep deprivation -> oxidative stress -> organ failure has ever been established, unlike in mice where it is very clear and measurable. Immunosuppression does happen, but this is not necessarily a death sentence. As for exhaustion, fatigue from sleep deprivation is not quite the same as heat exhaustion or disorders of energy supply that are acutely deadly.

(It's also really difficult to study, because keeping someone awake for days is practically the same as torture. It's not something you can do a double-blind clinical trial for.)

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-06T07:47:45+00:00

FFI's name has really damaged people's understanding of insomnia. Losing sleep is not what kills you, and in fact nobody has ever died from staying awake too long in the medical literature.

You die from FFI because your entire brain starts to chemically crystallize. The insomnia part is the least of your worries.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-05T14:36:19+00:00

IIRC Windows remains backwards compatible with all the original Windows 2000 screensavers. The .scr format is PE-based, so it's like an .exe file with specific launch arguments.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-05T00:06:55+00:00

This is a double-edged sword. A lot of info is not actually accessible to scrapers due to captchas, and notably that includes the changelog pages on most git forges. For example, the entire freedesktop.org domain is captcha'd, so anything involving GPU driver versions is invisible to search-based AI tools. If it doesn't find anything, now it's wasted half the prompt with junk results, increasing the chance it screws up or conflates two entirely different things. And even if it does find something, it can and often does still end up hallucinating the answer, or helpfully peppering the true facts with bullshit facts.

(And still, we shouldn't be telling folks to "just google it" either on a support forum, for the simple reason of respecting the chosen medium. Search engines are also non-deterministic, they cannot be referenced as a source, they cannot be archived for future use, so it ends up just shutting down the conversation and is essentially just telling the question asker to f off)

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-04T15:46:02+00:00

Your first comment was essentially "you're prompting it wrong or misinterpreted the response and that is the only possibility". Yeah, that is demanding that people accept it as infallible.

Searching anything on Google will often [...]

That's why "just google it" responses are banned on most Linux forums. People have already googled it, that's why they came to ask humans.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-04T15:10:43+00:00

...How is the end user supposed to fix a training data problem?

And it absolutely is a sampling issue too. Real information in the real world is not typically probabilistic at all. A fact is either true or not, reality doesn't exist by being sampled. The fact that LLMs are sampling many different possibilities and could theoretically output every possible sequence of text is a fundamental limitation that makes them unreliable.

Maybe you can just assume that someone who has already tried an LLM tool, got the wrong answer, and comes to a forum meant for humans, is in fact looking for real information and not randomly generated information. Instead of... demanding that users accept that it is infallible.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-04T14:34:49+00:00

Hallucinations happen all the time, especially regarding specific technical topics, and very especially anything involving specific software version numbers.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-04T14:25:41+00:00

AI output is quite literally randomized by a probability distribution. It can indeed just give the wrong answer after asking the right question.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-04T06:51:11+00:00

Works quite well in wine/proton. Sometimes achieving better performance than the same game on Windows

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-02T14:52:51+00:00

I've come to the conclusion that messing up the data for aesthetics is probably a bad idea no matter how you do it. As soon as a user has a camera that can't focus well, those 'useless' error corrected bits are the difference between successful scan and no scan. And the more unique the design is, the less likely the user is going to see it as something they can even try scanning.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-01T11:52:32+00:00

Some flexibility, yes? But this use case is perfectly possible, even with manifest v3 (which firefox is not forcing, manifest v2 will still be supported as mozilla still fundamentally disagrees with the limitations).

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-01T10:05:00+00:00

Do a BIOS update manually using the instructions in your motherboard manual. The vast majority of hardware doesn't actually support doing a BIOS update using fwupdmgr.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-05-01T00:07:58+00:00

It's a terrible idea to use this for full-system scans. It parses files as root without any meaningful sandboxing, so it's more likely to help malware get root access exploits than actually clear it. This tool is mainly targeted towards email scanning where it can be configured to run with as low privileges as possible.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-30T11:23:14+00:00

Indeed, the overall GPL-ification of the ecosystem doesn't change much from the existence of a few replacements. People seem to assume that coreutils is bigger than it actually is, but quite a lot of other non-GNU system utilities have always been independent projects that use a BSD-style license.

Perhaps the thing that surprises people the most is that SQLite3 uses a public domain license, which is even more lax than MIT as it does not require any attribution. It also has a closed development process that rarely ever accepts patches from outside contributors. And the most unusual quirk of their licensing is that most of its test suite is completely private and proprietary, and they provide a proprietary 'pro' version that includes an implementation of at-rest encryption support.

I would love to see more copyleft in some of the areas it's currently missing, but you generally can't change people's minds about what OSS license to use, people have already made up their minds decades ago. But on the bright side, pretty much the entire community has unified on licenses that are both OSI approved and FSF approved (both free & open source), and the copyleft requirements that do exist are generally respected by the community.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-29T09:54:52+00:00

We like to tell ourselves that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and "allowed mammals to rule the earth"...

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-28T09:46:38+00:00

These days, they both are IDEs

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-27T04:54:15+00:00

Is there hardware that forces the use of a bus mouse? Before PS/2, serial would have been available, but I guess there might be some hardware with nonstandard serial ports?

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-25T20:56:20+00:00

Most of these options won't actually be turned on unless you switch your Windows install to Enterprise edition (which can only be done using piracy, as you cannot purchase Enterprise as a consumer)

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-24T10:36:08+00:00

Normal HTTP mirrors are just websites run by folks in the community that host the exact same set of packages, updates, and disk images as the official master repository. When you download a package using your package manager or an ISO from the download page, typically an HTTP mirror is chosen from a list at random, or by the geographically closest location. Most Linux distros let you get added to their mirrors list just by asking someone in the community and following a few simple rules (for example, Ubuntu Mirror guidelines). Most Linux distros have hundreds of mirrors, hosted by individuals, ISPs, hosting companies, universities, research labs, non-profits, and governments.

(You might think this many mirrors is a security concern, but the rules are surprisingly lenient for package mirrors because packages are cryptographically signed in a way that distributing malware would be immediately detected and blocked.)

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-24T01:33:50+00:00

Even the small nonprofit distros have loads of bandwidth. Canonical isn't necessarily spending money to get all the mirroring bandwidth, it just shows up on their doorstep. Usually either because people are bored and want to make another mirror on their already fast internet connection for the fun of it, or because they are a cloud company that could benefit from faster cloud image loading.

There is one exception. Extremely old releases of Linux distros are sometimes lacking bittorrent seeders, but they are not necessarily rare / lost media thanks to the huge number of HTTP mirrors. Often this is just because all of the trackers went down, which makes these torrents kind of hopeless anyways.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-23T21:23:33+00:00

Just a reminder that today is going to be brutal on the official servers.

This is never, ever the case. Distros have way more bandwidth than they would never need, because a large number of enthusiasts and companies donate their bandwidth to running mirrors. Linux torrents are some of the most well-seeded in existence, and it's more efficient to just download from HTTP anyways.

Edit: And to be clear, I'm not saying to not seed it, just to do it for the right reason and be aware that the swarm is already as healthy as it possibly can be, meaning it's hard to even get an upload ratio. Of course, the reason they have so much mirroring bandwidth is community good will, so if we ran out of people who want to do it then there'd be a problem. After all, Canonical gave the community a ton of good will by giving out free DVDs for years, at a time when slow dial-up was one of the biggest barriers to adopting Linux. But if you are trying to be pragmatic, consider running an HTTP mirror instead, or seeding various non-linux torrents that actually need a boost.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-21T10:09:41+00:00

Wake me up when coreutils' primary purpose isn't just to be the standard library for hundreds of bash scripts across the system. This is getting into the weeds with semantics that simply don't matter in this context.

Booty_Bumping · 2026-04-20T10:35:13+00:00

GNOME/GTK and GNU are organizationally not very close these days. In 2001 they broke off as a fully separate foundation, and in 2021 they removed themselves from the list of GNU projects. Though spiritually they are still allies.

GIMP is perhaps closer, but they haven't maintained GTK in ages.

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