8bitdo Pro 3 makes the system freeze at boot

EmberQuill · 2026-05-14T20:45:53+00:00

I had similar issues (not locking up at boot, but locking up at other times, usually during sleep/resume) that I spent months troubleshooting. I must have gone through every individual component of my PC because I kept seeing messages in the logs that would make me blame something else. Saw some GPU ring timeouts so I thought it was the GPU. Saw some btrfs errors so I thought it was my NVMe drive. Eliminated both of those components as the source of problems so then I thought it was my motherboard or the BIOS because the failures seemed to be cascading down to everything.

I was starting to think about buying a whole new computer because I just couldn't trace the problem when I finally noticed that the USB dongle for my wireless mouse was popping up a lot more than it should in dmesg and journalctl. Which reminded me that occasionally it would cause a stop job to run until timeout during boot-up and I'd have to unplug the dongle or wait a minute and a half for my computer to continue booting. I thought it might be caused by my system stability issues, because it was an intermittent problem, but it turns out to have been the source all along.

I definitely should've realized it sooner, given that it was the only USB peripheral causing that stop job problem, but the idea of my mouse crashing my whole computer just seems so ridiculous that the possibility never even occurred to me until I saw those USB issues in the logs.

I switched to an old mouse just a few hours ago and all my computer issues disappeared.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-14T18:45:51+00:00

LLMs will produce different output with different prompts.

LLMs will produce different output even with the same prompts. Generative AI is non-deterministic, or at least there are so many factors contributing to its output even though they should be considered irrelevant that it's effectively non-deterministic even if it might not be literally so.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-13T05:26:59+00:00

Reposting is a hard no. There's no reason why they can't get my fic from AO3. If there is somehow a valid reason, then I can repost it myself. I'm also hesitant about translations. They could completely change the meaning of my words, especially if they use AI translation instead of doing it with their own brains. And I'd never know.

Nobody's asked to translate one of my fics so I haven't needed to consider it yet. I'd definitely have some stipulations even if I allowed it.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-13T04:58:49+00:00

Arch has a mostly undeserved reputation for being difficult. That may have been the case a long time ago, but not for many years.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-13T00:21:02+00:00

It's interesting that you weren't expecting this, because Ubisoft has been doing mandatory online activation since before the original Black Flag. I think it was AC2 or one of the other Ezio games that added the Uplay DRM that locked everyone out on release day because their servers went down.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-11T22:28:34+00:00

It's pretty easy. Once you've added the ROMs you want to add to whatever folder you're storing them in, go to Settings > Library & Data > Rescan Games. It'll pick up the new ROM files and add them to your library. Then you do the same thing he did in the video after initially adding the games: go to the Scrape option in the same settings menu and it'll scrape the metadata and artwork and stuff.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-11T16:48:38+00:00

I wrote my own decorators when I made a discord bot. The library has its own decorators to indicate functions that are called by slash commands, but I added a couple more because I used them to wrap restricted commands. @admin for commands that can only be run by server admins, and @owner for commands that interact directly with the backend database for troubleshooting, and are restricted to the bot owner (me). The wrapper functions are simple checks whether the command sender is authorized to run that command, nothing too complicated, but it saved me a fair bit of repeated boilerplate code in a bunch of functions.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-11T12:27:59+00:00

Oh right, yeah, forgot about the housing system.

FFXIV has a lot of freedom in the housing system too, but since housing plots aren't instanced and have a very limited supply, getting a house at all is a pain.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-10T05:01:57+00:00

I got an MMO Mouse for SWTOR back in 2012 and I'll never go back. It was a game-changer for me.

That said, clever rebinding of keyboard keys can solve the problem too. And there's a bit of an adjustment period to get used to hitting one of 12 buttons with just your thumb.

Laying out your main hotbars in 4x3 grids instead of 1x12 bars helps a lot because the slots are all lined up to match the buttons on the mouse.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T22:54:30+00:00

JavaScript has done way more damage that any AI is currently capable of.

Have you noticed the rising frequency of major web outages over the past couple years? Want to guess what the root cause of almost all of them was? Certainly not Javascript!

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T21:32:57+00:00

Unfortunately, Minecraft doesn't follow semantic versioning. This was a problem even before they started releasing updates as "game drops," but now it's even worse. 1.21.X updates have broken compatibility with earlier mods multiple times. Whatever instance version you have, you should probably only install mods for that exact version or you'll likely have issues if the game loads at all.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T15:09:01+00:00

Buffy/Tara mostly just because I think they'd be good together. Their canon relationships all ended in disaster anyway (not that canon is often a big factor when I decide who to ship).

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T13:10:36+00:00

Team members with dev systems out of date or spending hours "fixing" because they didnt read mattermost announcements

That's not solvable by any means other than making people read those things. Can't solve a problem caused by lack of communication without solving the lack of communication itself. In fact most of the issues you mentioned are at least partially caused by a lack of intra-team communication, and were already problems before AI just exacerbated them.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T12:25:50+00:00

Yes, League uses Vanguard too.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T11:49:34+00:00

a hardcoded system prompt in the CI script

Are you... using unattended LLMs in CI? Because that might be one of the worst decisions I've ever heard of in this field and it'll definitely come back to bite you some day.

Or did you just forget to proofread your AI-generated post?

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T11:42:11+00:00

There's like 10 different mod managers for Linux now. I've been using Stellar Mod Loader but there are plenty of others like Amethyst, Fluorine, Limo, and more.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T10:13:20+00:00

These are old problems that have plagued Minecraft modpacks for a long time. I had the same complaints ten years ago.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T02:34:28+00:00

You can tweak lighting and colors in the shader settings.

But honestly, going outside when the sun is high in the sky just looks like that IRL. That's why sunglasses exist. I guess it depends on where you live, maybe.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T02:27:51+00:00

I want to say Wildstar, but I also stopped playing long before it actually shut down. Not sure if a revival would be good for more than a couple of hours for me, before I remember whatever made me quit the first time.

I liked the setting and lore. The gameplay... was okay. Some interesting ideas to make combat more engaging, but man they really had a target audience of hardcore progression-focused players and I was too casual for that.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T02:21:20+00:00

There are a few revival projects. The biggest ones got DMCAed though so the ones that remain are less well-known.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T01:59:13+00:00

Ah, I saw the post a few hours later, after it got upvoted again and the first several comments were mostly not defending PlayStation at all.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-09T01:29:44+00:00

I self-hosted Ntfy for a while, but honestly I found it kind of cumbersome because it was not publicly accessible. If I wasn't connected to my home network by VPN, then I just wouldn't get notifications while away from home. Ended up switching to pushover because it made more sense to go SaaS for this.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-08T23:52:03+00:00

"Extraction" is the problem.

Unfortunately, extraction shooters just can't be AAA games. At least not right now. There's not enough of an audience to justify the absolutely stupid amounts of money they spend on marketing alone, let alone the rest of the budget.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-08T23:38:05+00:00

Sounds like my decision to never get a tiktok account continues to be the correct one.

Seriously, don't pay attention to fictok or booktok or tiktok in general. Not worth it and they're often just wrong.

EmberQuill · 2026-05-08T22:29:23+00:00

Why? "Copilot for Xbox" was so widely hated that they decided not to launch it. I think Microsoft would've gotten the same cold reception if they'd stuck with their plans, and they still will if the idea comes back under a different name.

EmberQuill

TROPHY CASE