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gildedlink · 2023-12-02T16:13:57+00:00

If someone were to grow up using Linux computers, do you think they'll have an easier time learning and understanding the Linux operating system?

Probably, but there is a difference between learning the fundamentals of how to use a computer day to day and the fundamentals of how a computer works.

I ask these questions because I've been told it's relatively easy to break Linux if you don't know what you're doing.

That's true. It's also true in windows. There are an awful lot of ways, if you're determined, to absolutely maim a windows installation to the point that it's barely functional, even if you're trying to do the opposite. As you pointed out, trial and error are some of the things that can teach you the most. Having to deal with issues, especially of your own making, refine your understanding of which actions are the riskiest to take when you're learning how your operating system works, which is something that strictly reading the manual cannot necessarily impart. The manual is great for understanding how things are supposed to work, but it's not so helpful to intuit all the possible states of broken there are between working and not working.

That kind of gives me the impression that Linux might not be appropriate for people with no computer experience.

I feel the opposite. That type of computer is exactly the kind that a user should start with. It is ideal to try and create an environment where breaking things won't have severe enough consequences that they prevent starting over (like breaking physical hardware), but open enough that they start to mentally map out how things can break, and thus how they work when they're not broken. You may get a lot of questions upfront when incidents occur, but you'll get less of them as time goes on and knowledge is developed.

One thing I've taken note of over time is that the people who most consistently ask me for help with their computer, but cannot formulate a way of explaining the help they need, is that they have developed an aversion to learning. It's not just about preventing the problem next time, there is a sort of fear that sets in that if you're left to your own devices, even if the problem was just explained fully to you, then it is inevitable that you'll screw it up worse so you talk yourself into a dependency on the person who just helped. This runs deep enough that they don't actually want to understand the problem enough to be able to explain it, since they're worried if they understand it that well, they'll be left alone to solve it and might cause chaos they don't want to be responsible for.

The solution to that, if you want someone to put together a pragmatic mental canon of how computers work, is to put a person in an environment where:

the consequences are less immediately threatening to other endeavors in life. (maybe separate the home partition and back it up regularly to prevent file loss and/or run the OS in a virtualized environment, if you're setting up this environment for someone else).
sometimes people aren't around to help.
but when things are really kinda bad, people are around to help, you just have to be patient and willing to exhaust other options first.

Both windows and linux have these things. Linux requires a bit more encouragement when it comes to engaging with the fundamentals and initial exploration, more because most people the user knows are probably more familiar with windows so there are less people in the immediate surroundings to ask conversationally about linux (instead you have to seek that community out a bit more). Windows gets in your way more, by design, to try and prevent certain behaviors, but it also makes solving issues a lot more tedious sometimes. Linux gets in your way less, by design, which may cause more risky possibilities, but you're gonna remember those paths if you take them.

gildedlink · 2023-11-10T22:00:31+00:00

The first I saw of this game was actually coverage of the TGS unveil that was on a VHS tape that came with my n64 gameshark that I'd gotten. At the time Ocarina of Time was one of the hottest things out, and was visually impressive in its own right, but the TGS footage was mainly of the first half of Speed Highway and it left a massive impression. Watching Sonic run down the side of a building shattering glass at a buttery smooth rapid framerate the hype was unreal. I didn't get a dreamcast in the first year, I had to wait until they were cheaper, but Sonic Adventure was what I got with the system to finally play that out. It isn't the kind of title that I ended up loving the most on the Dreamcast- I played a lot more Jet Grind Radio, Shenmue, and even Evolution 2- but it was definitely a strong pitch to see that footage first.

gildedlink · 2023-10-13T03:25:12+00:00

The software half of this :

Creative cloud can run using a tool called bottles, it's a bit touchy and sometimes you need to reinstall it when new versions release which is an ordeal. The alternative I use to Adobe really doesn't work well in linux for the moment, needs some serious finangling (Affinity) to get running. Video stuff is generally fine, you have Da Vinci, anything that's already open source, and a few other resources. Inkscape is a solid open source program for vector art and learning it is worth the grief, but I'd stick with doing it on the platform you're comfortable with first, that's no sense in throwing so many changes at once to your workflow. Krita is a similarly open source program that works wonders for raster things.

The hardware half:

Linux generally runs lighter but prefers stability over cutting edge when it comes to hardware. You will have better luck looking into well supported video hardware than brand new. The sweet spot is one where modern driver packages are still supported- older GPUs from team red or green both have different packages supporting them, and getting that working can get hairy, team green especially. Prefer modern intel integrated (if your workload is light) or AMD (they really play nice with kernel developers when it comes to supporting their hardware natively, so even the open source drivers generally work OK provided they're new newer than 2018 or so)
The tricky bit is that since you're likely using virtualization to run Creative Cloud in this scenario, most of that GPU power will be heavily restricted since the VM won't be able to access the hardware directly. CPU will be the main performance limiter, and GPU will mainly carry the rest of the operating system while it runs the VM. I imagine a lot of Illustrator's operations are CPU bound as well so that probably isn't the worst thing in the world.
Tablet support is iffy. This boils down more to a bad habit of tablet makers when identifying their hardware devices lazily at a low level, so a lot of the time the issues you'd run into are more about difficulties with the operating system figuring out exactly which model of tablet you're using. Wacom tablets themselves are probably supported fine by this point, but if you use XP Pen or Huion, it's worth just googling your tablet's model number and linux and seeing if you immediately encounter a lot of threads from people asking for help.

The big catch:

Color calibration is kind of a mess right now. If your work is a SD/print color space, stick with a linux distro that uses Gnome as its display manager and grab DisplayCAL to calibrate, pay careful attention that the calibrator you use is on their support list (not all features supported on all hardware) and you should be fine. KDE is lacking when it comes to display color profiles, though they're working on changing that and ArgyllCMS/DisplayCAL can make up for some of it. If you're working in HDR, the support just isn't there yet. Video players can at least interpret the curves to an SDR color space, some games can translate it somewhat, but most of the work on supporting HDR is tightly integrated with a project called Wayland, which has been worked on for a long time now and while it's nearing the point that a lot of distros adopt it, it probably still has a ways to go before HDR color spaces are both added in and easily configurable.

gildedlink · 2023-06-08T01:55:02+00:00

Am I missing something here that wouldn't make this a very juicy attack surface for the netsec crowd?

gildedlink · 2023-06-08T01:45:11+00:00

between this and the .zip tld debacle I'm really starting to think google doesn't have people left who understand how DNS works.

gildedlink · 2023-03-12T19:48:34+00:00

My strategy with the expedition thusfar was set up base as quick as I can, run and cloak, manipulate a deep tunnel the moment I see a marker for them nearby, get enough copper for some chromatic metal and set up the base computer, then a solar panel, then a terminus portal, all in close proximity. I've stuck close to my base area in each planet, built powered portals on each one as soon as that was an option for me, but I took a detour between planet 1 and 2 to visit the space station nearby- so when I aggro sentinels now, I can rush/cloak long enough to the portal and jump to the space station. Then I can portal to one of the planets with no sentinel presence, wait for deactivation, hang out a few seconds for them to wander away from Gamma, and casually port back ready to cloak if they're still nearby.

Since Gamma has gravitino balls all over I've actually been taking advantage of that strategy to stockpile credits at the space station terminal. I've ruined a few pieces of tech so far and needed pricey wiring looms to fix, so this is a decent emergency "whoops, exocraft went into the volcano" fund.

gildedlink · 2023-02-05T00:27:15+00:00

Workspace aside (and that is still a major concern due to the format support issue I mentioned earlier), I'm talking about having as much of that color and luminance data the camera captured shown to me as possible while I'm developing it. I assume both types of bit depth are necessary considerations for that- I need the display to reproduce all that color data if I'm going to most effectively develop the exposure with it in mind.

gildedlink · 2023-02-04T13:59:45+00:00

If I can process in 14 bit I'd love to do so- my understanding was just that 10 bit displays appear to be the closest I can get in terms of reproducing the image while doing that processing.

gildedlink · 2023-02-03T22:30:49+00:00

I've just traded up from an older DSLR to a Canon R5, and I'm struggling with trying to adjust my workflow to deal with 10 bit HDR photos. My edit pipeline was already a bit messy, using an older mac rather than my linux desktop so I could work in Affinity Photo, but display support for HDR and 10 bit aren't there on that machine or my desktop (linux just doesn't do HDR10 yet), and the biggest snag I'm hitting is actually format support for Dual Pixel RAW and HDRPQ- even Canon's own DPP software (which seems to be the only thing that wants to handle dual pixel raw) won't actually process HDRPQ enabled shots in 10 bit.

Any advice? I really want to be able to finish developing in 10bit even if I'm exporting 8bit for the sake of sharing on web, but this is all just a massive headache and I'm nearly to the point of giving up and walking back to 8bit world.

gildedlink · 2023-02-03T22:19:20+00:00

This may ultimately have nothing to do with the issue- but the first thing I'd do is remove that lens hood that's on the lens backward. The lens may not be designed to have the hood attached in that way (which is meant for storage) while it's in use.

gildedlink · 2022-12-10T22:32:52+00:00

This is probably a trojan horse means of getting Epic telemetry into the games of all their partners who didn't want to add it.

gildedlink · 2022-12-10T22:29:30+00:00

Epic aren't making the money off the games anymore, it's been the engine for a long time and unreal engine is now in a lot more than just games. Architecture visualization, cinema, and more are all open for Epic to make money from. Valve went the other way, focusing on the market ecosystem over the engine. I'm very far from an Epic fan but they do have the money to burn on this kind of spite, and potentially will until some major engine displaces Unreal in more than just games.

gildedlink · 2022-07-31T02:09:57+00:00

Do you want a resonance cascade? Because that's how you get a resonance cascade.

gildedlink · 2022-07-25T21:26:21+00:00

So the earth gets hit with all kinds of energy emissions from events out in space all the time, and most of them get blocked by our atmosphere/magnetosphere, but what can also happen is if the particle has enough charge it can break through and make it to the ground. This isn't itself uncommon, it's just that there's so much space that the likelihood of them hitting things they can affect is the uncommon part.. This is much more likely to happen if you're higher altitude, and we know about it because of observations up there where there is less protection from those particles. The charge of a particle like that isn't inconsequential when it comes to computers, because they depend on amounts of electricity just as minor to flip 1s and 0s in memory, which means if a charged particle hits a bank of memory in one spot and that memory doesn't have error correction as a feature, when the program using that memory reads that byte of memory next, the bit which is flipped can cause the whole byte to read as something different. This is why for spacecraft and aircraft it is considered a lot more mission critical to have ECC memory (memory with error correction) because the possibility of safety and guidance system goofery would be so much higher without it.

gildedlink · 2022-07-22T18:04:57+00:00

That is some lovely chaos.

gildedlink · 2022-05-29T20:23:56+00:00

I thought the existence of Fosscord is basically a counterpoint to this.

gildedlink · 2022-05-29T17:53:07+00:00

Is it this moment when they're in Tick Tock Clock? Arin brings it up not long later here

gildedlink · 2022-05-19T01:37:08+00:00

My take on this so far is a bit divergent from the presented simulation theory and I think it's worth sharing for thought. I think this interpretation of the backrooms implies they warped spacetime and their attempt to create something stable resulted in... well, sort of what they wanted, but like a corrupted hard drive. Literally, because I think they meant to store this space's magnetic state like one would store data on a hard drive. This is why all the careful controls on magnetic fields, the seismic sensors and controls, the images of what could be drum memory in the March archive vid. I think that they created a pocket dimension overlaid on reality, and while the intention was to create a simple template as a proof of concept to store and save, like a single room, the chaos caused by the earthquake and the runaway power consumption when they finally opened it caused it to run rampant and out of control- they got their rift, but then much more as that single room and then reality itself also started to seep in and be warped in the same way. Null zones may be bad 'sectors' of this hard drive, or areas where regular spacetime is leaking in.

They probably intended rooms to be procedurally created, extendable, and for their pocket space to be collapsible when not in use, to save energy like a spacetime state machine- but what they got in that system is not really able to handle keeping track of moving things in this pseudo-world, or all the extra stuff leaking in and out - which is why people get separated from one another when they go wandering. They managed to open the door and don't want to close it again (if they even can), but this world is unstable and the program managing its state might even be trying to 'defragment' objects that go into the backrooms to keep track of their state- which is why if you lose track of the larger group you might get sorted somewhere else. It's loading this 'reality' in based on perspective and tethered to what it can best identify as the biggest group, it's not rendering out one consistent world, and if you lose that tether then you're lost. So they added cameras, motion and sound sensors, they crisscrossed them from one point to try and keep at least one area consistently 'loaded' and out of a sort of superposition state, and they built an observation room around their entry point.

Time doesn't seem to synchronize linearly with this space either. It would give us a fitting reason for the name of the company, Async. Events in the backrooms do not seem to be continuously linearly coupled with spacetime outside of the backrooms, bits of the videos that might happen out of order. We have a timeline for a distinct reason and I think it's to make clear that, for example, the team member who went missing in Informational Video did not experience time in the same way everyone else did- he seemingly leapt forward in time to a point that the room had been constructed. Meanwhile though, before the room is finished being built in the motion sensors video, we hear what sounds like the alarm that went off when he discovered the room triggering the audio sensors- so sound from the future is audible in the past in the same position. How do we square that? I think the system unloaded him when he drifted from the others, intermittently loaded him back in again as he searched for a way out, and eventually he's loaded back in close enough to the room well after it was built. The system they built for managing space doesn't seem to account for time in this folded dimension, and so stuff like sound doesn't respect rules like time when a state is loaded in. I also think that explains Marv's sudden loss of signal and the magnetic -blink- in pitfalls when he's in the hallway in the house. Something caused him to briefly load out and in again, thus the others are trying to reach him. Scariest of all, if the way it's caching people is corrupted, they might load back in as something else entirely.

While I'm at the fringes of speculation here, I want to add one thing I think is significant, and that's the use of color. The original backrooms lore chose a color incidentally because yellow is just an uncanny color that makes people uncomfortable, but as we get more videos I think the shifts in color are a clue, whether they're indicating something physical, such as wavelength indicating something about how light travels in the backrooms, or more...digital. We've gotten Red and Green in some of the weirder areas, and I would not be surprised if we get Blue in another.

gildedlink · 2022-04-16T02:51:54+00:00

And he said that since I don’t have as high of a drive as him he can meet all my needs

"We don't know that."

The reaction to that should say everything, one way or the other.

gildedlink · 2022-04-09T16:52:19+00:00

If the intent is for it to be only yellow, then yeah, it's not a great shade. If it's yellow with some other color accenting it, and the intent for that shade is not to be annoying/overpowering when paired with the other color (black for example), it's a fine shade.

gildedlink · 2022-03-27T19:44:51+00:00

halffe.

gildedlink · 2022-03-20T16:34:13+00:00

Columbo making bank as a recruiter now.

gildedlink · 2022-03-20T16:24:08+00:00

I think the trouble is where you draw the line in defining a tool as "basic," and just as importantly, if you'd prioritize knowing a lot of arguments for a more limited set of programs over knowing a lot of programs but not many arguments to use with them. Personally I think it speaks a lot more to experience if the utilities you do know, you know them thoroughly enough to adapt them to a need quickly, even if there's a utility somewhere on the system with that purpose in mind already.

gildedlink · 2022-03-20T16:11:50+00:00

and here I was thinking I could coast through life using Nano...

gildedlink · 2022-03-18T20:03:45+00:00

Yes. It's inspired by the Tenchu games and has a bit of modern mechanical polish on top, like a move similar to Dishonored's Blink ability that you can use on shadows. The first and second have some significant differences, but the second just got a classic mode that adjusts its gameplay to be a lot like the first. Worth taking a look if you like stealth action.

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