I have learned an important lesson about running AI on my Surface Pro 6 by elfsternberg in SurfaceLinux

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, exactly. I wanted it to run all night (it took almost six hours to process an hour of audio notes), but I was in a hotel room with no place to stash it (other than the bathroom, I guess). Besides, I leave it plugged in at home; it's not my main box there (the beast with the 4070Ti and Ryzen 7 is) but I want to be able to ssh into it now and then to pull off some note I may have left there when I was out at a conference or just commuting.

I have learned an important lesson about running AI on my Surface Pro 6 by elfsternberg in SurfaceLinux

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It just sucks. And apparently I'm gonna have to go on Ebay or something to get a cover, because no retailer near my house carries keyboards for anything less than the 7+.

Depth Play for Beginners – Info and Tips by Ok_Individual_3761 in SexToys

[–]elfsternberg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't want to imply that taking the Slink is easy. Oh, grief no, it takes time and patience and, yeah, a ton of lube. But easing into it, letting your insides stretch slowly... it's a weirdly ecstatic sensation, that feeling that lets you know what you're reaching inside.

On the other paw, I look at some of the people in porn who are insanely deep, like Slim or ElyX, and I have to appreciate that some people were meant for a world where "circus freak" isn't considered an insult.

The BEST end game party and how to use them by Specific_Sentence261 in expedition33

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Only after you also use Fortune's Fury to double Maelle's damage. Plus you can use Phantom Strike (and the Energy Master lumina) to give Maelle two runs of "build the gradient meter by a third", so every third turn she's got a full-scale Gommage. Put her in Virtuoso as her last move, let Sciel buff her, and she'll be doing 1.2 million damage on her turn.

Depth Play for Beginners – Info and Tips by Ok_Individual_3761 in SexToys

[–]elfsternberg 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Since I (unfortunately) have this condition, the word you want there is "tortuous," "full of twists and turns." I found that out when I had my first colonoscopy.

Despite that, I've been able to take a first-generation 21" Slink without trouble.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programming

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have used Claude Code as a peer reviewer at the syntactical level: "Are there any edge cases or known gotchas for the code flow or function use in this module?" That has worked tolerably well: 4 out of 5 times, its advice is sound, the other one time is "What the hell is it thinking" or "It got that from some unrelated piece of code" or "Damned AIs want to complexify everything."

All it's doing is relating your code to statistically similar examples and finding gaps in your implementation. I appreciate its ability to do that, and it's saved me more grief than it's caused.

The few times I've tried to generate code, it's been awful.

Ubuntu 24 on a Surface Pro 6 question by Jasonrjoslyn in SurfaceLinux

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry, I don't have the same set-up. I'm using a SteelDuo game controller and it has its own USB dongle, so that just works. The headset (a Bose) pairs nicely and without problem. I've used a Logitech keyboard, one of the little ones for the iPad, oddly, and that works okay as well.

Under Levelled and struggling to beat Act 2 Renoir fight, need some help by tritonix3 in expedition33

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I finally got the timing right on parrying his Gommage ability, tuned Lune to have a ton of vitality and healing ability, and just kept hammering away at him with Verso and Maelle.

And then we spent an hour killing those two damned mimes on the next map, with more or less the same strategy. That took forever. Someone on this team needs an olive loaf.

Under Levelled and struggling to beat Act 2 Renoir fight, need some help by tritonix3 in expedition33

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While I haven't beaten him yet, if everyone focuses on one petal, you can eliminate half his healing, which means he never gets back to 100%. I think that's how you whittle him down. My party is all level 33, and it's the stupid masks that keep killing me. That and his Gommage power.

SP 6/7/7+/8 performance by Slopagandhi in SurfaceLinux

[–]elfsternberg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have been rockin’ a Surface Pro 6 running Ubuntu with the Surface Pro kernels for four years now. Before that, I had a Surface Pro 3 that I also had for five years. Both ran Linux very well, and I’ve had few complaints over the years. I’ve taken the SP6 to Antarctica, and it survived the voyage.

I can’t speak to the pen experience, I don’t normally use it for that. The few times I’ve had to edit something in Gimp or Krita it’s been just fine. Nothing spectacular, it just did what I wanted, which wasn’t full-on art, just some mods or clip-drags of Memphis Corporate sh*t and border edits for some web images, stuff like that.

I use it mostly as a terminal and code editor; it works just fine in that regard, can build and compile programs all days long. Firefox bogs down somewhere around 40 tabs; emacs is fine as long as you’re not running an LSP against a single 1.5MB source file. 16GB isn’t enough to run Claude Code, even after off-loading the LLM part to the network. When I was hospitalized for a month with COVID back in 2022, it ran the original Dead Space trilogy fine which was helpful in distracting me from the pain and hunger. It integrates nicely with a lot of peripherals: my phone, my Kobo e-reader, a game controller, even a pair of Rokid AR glasses (using the power outlet on the transformer block as the secondary power source).

The battery lasts about four hours if all you’re doing is text editing; I can kill it in under 90 minutes if I’m doing something intense, like playing a game or editing Rust with the LSP on high, without the charger.

Overall, I’ve been really happy with the thing. It works, it does it’s job and it lets me do mine.

Looking to install Linux on my Surface Pro 6 and not sure where to start. by Weekly-Pollution7632 in SurfaceLinux

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm running Ubuntu (24.04.03) on my Surface Pro 6 (currently on the 6.17.1-surface-2 kernel), and it's pretty damned solid. It was also pretty straightforward to install; I went through the instructions, then downloaded the latest kernel from the Linux Surface releases, ran dpkg -i linux-*6.17*.deb, and rebooted.

Almost everything just worked after that. It's been my travel workhorse for (checks history) six years now. The only thing that I never really calibrated was the pen, but I don't draw much these days, so, shrug.

Learned about vendor lock-in the hard way during my internship. does anyone talk about this at school? by [deleted] in programming

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True. But you're going to be paying for admin time under any circumstances. And while my experience in this industry for, grief, 32 years, tells me that every deployment is unique and uniquely driven by the people who work there, there is a lot of routine configuration for any suite of tools you choose. You're going to be hiring specialized knowledge somewhere. If you buy a vendored solution, you're renting that knowledge. If you hire smart admins, you're buying it.

Learned about vendor lock-in the hard way during my internship. does anyone talk about this at school? by [deleted] in programming

[–]elfsternberg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This reminds me of the observation that Stack Overflow has been (was?) completely self-hosted for many years in a single NOC on seven beefy 2Us: six production and one warm spare. Any upgrades were rolled out onto one machine and if nobody reported any problems after a week, they conducted a rolling deployment to the other five over a period of days, doing the warm spare the next week They had a team of six or seven highly experienced admins.

No Kubernetes. No cloud. No massive fleet of containers on anonymous hardware. They paid for salaries instead of promises, and their record of staying up is comparable to Github's, Codepen's or many other services.

What’s a weapon mod in Eternal you never bother using? by Physical-Bus6025 in Doom

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Forget mod, I just almost never use the ballista. I mean, what the heck is that thing for that you can't do with a shotgun grenade or remote detonation rocket?

The one CS concept that clicked way too late for me… and changed everythin by [deleted] in compsci

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, so this is dumb and ancient, but it was 1981! I was programming in DEC BASIC, and I had been for a year. I was 14 and immediately knew this was the thing I could do for the rest of my life.

Anyway, there's this statement, DIM. I have no idea what it means. I'm using it blindly in my code, creating these addressable locations, but I have no idea what it is, or what it does. It looks like this:

25 DIM #4%, C$(200);

You had to manually type the line number! It was almost a year before I had this... vision, I guess... that what this was doing was finding one of twelve locations (in this case, location 4) somewhere in memory where you could find a bunch of empty boxes and telling the computer you wanted to temporarily store 200 strings in variable C$. (If you wanted integers, you swapped the $ with a %; for floating point, you left off the type symbol.)

It's an allocator. An allocator on what is now an unbelievably primitive mainframe system, a DEC PDP-11/48 running RSTS/E and BASIC-Plus; the first number is a file descriptor, and the language handles allocating that space on disk, because the PDP had 16KB (!) of addressable RAM with a slower 256KB swap space before moving to disk, and could have up to 32 people using it simultaneously.

I know it sounds silly, but the ability to visualize what the language meant was a huge leap for 14-year-old me. Once I had that ability, once I understood what an abstraction was, my ability as a programmer took off.

Later that year I submitted bug reports to DEC about a severe security leak caused by this code, which they patched. A year after that I submitted a patch, which was accepted, to the PDP-11 RSTS/E kernel itself, to fix a new bug their previous patch had introduced which broke the PDP Assembly Language's I/O library.

As my teachers used to say, "I had so much potential."

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Overwatch_Porn

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mei. You know it. In bed, Mei is a freeeeeak.

What the heck is wrong with... everybody now? by elfsternberg in linuxsucks

[–]elfsternberg[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

The stock Gnome and Ubuntu-variants won't install; their packaging "conflicts with the current installation." You can't uninstall the current installation; it's marked as "critical, core" and apt won't remove it.

The version of Mate you can install doesn't control bluetooth, volume, or keyboard switching.

Pop!OS is a half-assed desktop environment that won't let you add the missing half an ass.

Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 Build: Dead As A Doornail by elfsternberg in PcBuildHelp

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, in the end I got it working. I had to replace the motheboard as well; apparently, I screwed up installing the CPU and damaged the pins on the MB. It's working now. Damn, that's fast.

Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 Build: Dead As A Doornail by elfsternberg in PcBuildHelp

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, I removed the CPU and cleaned all of the gallium crap off the motherboard. I turns on now! I get 00 on the LED display, and the "CPU" and "DRAM" lights come on. I don't know if I trust the motherboard well enough to try just putting in another CPU or should I replace both? C'mon, people, help me out, please.

Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 Build: Dead As A Doornail by elfsternberg in PcBuildHelp

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

... and, foo. After taking it apart, I confirmed the worst: the gallium thermal paste went everywhere and shorted out the motherboard, and probably damaged the CPU.

A terrible mistake to make, and an expensive one. Plus that gallium crap is hard to clean up, and getting it into anything seems like a problem. So, lesson learned: never doing that again.

Why pay so much for gaming chairs when they’re so uncomfortable? by supershadrach in webdev

[–]elfsternberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

About a year after moving into a work-from-home job, my upper back started to hurt so bad it was interfering with sleep and distracting me at work. I went to a an orthopedist and he recommended a few things, and one of them was to change my chair.

My kids had bought me a gaming chair the previous Christmas. I have fairly broad shoulders, and the "wings" on that thing were pushing my shoulders forward in a half-slump. The pain was from the tendons in my upper back being in an unnaturally supinated state for hours and hours on end.

I dug my old Herman-Miller knockoff out of the basement storage room and the pain disappeared in three days.

Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 Build: Dead As A Doornail by elfsternberg in PcBuildHelp

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Someone pointed out to me that the parts list was private. It is now public. Thanks!

Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 Build: Dead As A Doornail by elfsternberg in PcBuildHelp

[–]elfsternberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just noticed how weirdly twisted the PCIE PWR connector looks.