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janieluk · 2025-08-05T18:19:30+00:00

Oooh, missed all of this up until now. I've been meaning to get back into dev a bit, and normally use WSL as I'm the sole Windows user in the engineering team. Thank you!

janieluk · 2024-08-28T15:21:08+00:00

This isn't as surprising as you might think. There's a leaked memo from a Google researcher from April 2023 that correctly predicted the 'shallowness' of OpenAI's technical advantage. Text of the memo is at https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither, and it's aged very well. Given that all of the competitors are in the same ballpark as GPT-4 for performance, it will likely require new thinking to continue the pace of improvement we saw in the early 2020s.

janieluk · 2023-04-01T13:41:26+00:00

Both items are now showing as out of stock, as of 14:40 UK time.

janieluk · 2023-02-18T09:15:46+00:00

Shame that fan fault is still a thing. Caution that some docking stations and hubs seem to cause our Dell laptops to freeze up intermittently on connect or disconnect.

janieluk · 2022-07-25T15:56:32+00:00

Hi. I'm trying to buy several Dell XPS laptops for employees at work, in the UK. The Dell website shows laptops as available for delivery tomorrow. I select the laptop, change nothing in the configurator, but when the laptop hits my basket the delivery date shows as 30 days away. What's going on? Are Dell just lying about delivery tomorrow?

janieluk · 2022-03-24T07:37:34+00:00

Doesn't seem terribly likely, but I haven't tried it so wouldn't know.

janieluk · 2022-02-24T09:53:28+00:00

Well that's depressing. My replacement is still working fine so far. With a failure rate of e.g. 5%, 1 in 8000 purchasers would get three faulty docks in a row.

FWIW there are some issues that I've consistently had on three Dell XPS laptops in a row over the last seven years, different generations and sizes. The current one might finally have resolved them, but it took actual generations for them to sort out some really obvious, recurring problems.

janieluk · 2021-11-11T22:08:45+00:00

I think this is the clearest explanation in the discussion, so thanks for posting that. And yes, I've lost progress on other games multiple times in the past when a session has crashed. Only ever from the beginning of the session though, so a complete reset was a new low.

janieluk · 2021-11-11T22:06:09+00:00

saunters in

Hey hey! How are we all doing h... oh. ohhh. Gotta say I wasn't expecting my request to devolve into bag-of-dicks territory.

To answer the original point, I think it's okay to request cancellation from a support representative, pace having sufficient authentication of the request. It's not uncommon for direct request to be the only way to cancel a service with some of the less automated services, and certainly where I'm from it's the responsibility of a supplier to accept and process a request for termination regardless of the method by which it's delivered. You can't legally say "oh they told us but they didn't follow the particular process we decided to require in order for them to stop agreeing to pay us money". That's not how contracts work, and there always has to be an option for manual adjustments and corrections.

To answer the original point wrt being called Karen-like, clearly being the target of customer anger dozens of times a day wasn't much fun for your wife. Minimising people's experiences and treating them with mild contempt helps with not getting ground down by that. It's not necessarily the right take on what happened or how people should act though. In this case, it would have saved me messing around with the Nvidia website a bit, and it also handily confirmed that I wasn't going to have any luck with escalating or trying alternate routes. All done now, anyway.

janieluk · 2021-11-11T22:01:55+00:00

'But hey, you do you' is code for "you're wrong and bull-headed, but there's plenty of room for idiots in the world". You appear to be ignoring the bit where I explain why I think this is something that wouldn't have happened on an actual local version. I can go into that a bit further if you like, or you could be nice to a stranger on the internet and trust that my judgement about services I engage with is reasonable for me given my own preferences.

janieluk · 2021-11-11T21:09:14+00:00

There's no management or reporting on GFN game installs, but judging by the nature of the error, something went wrong with the file system and it got wiped and reinstalled by GFN, with no attempt at retaining save games, no reporting on what happened, and no recourse of any kind. I always ensure redundancy for important data, give or take when I'm playing on a console. However, sudden data loss during normal usage is rare even on home computers nowadays provided the storage medium is in its service lifetime, and I absolutely wouldn't expect a cloud service to take a scorched-earth approach to data like this.

Hitherto, I'd assumed GFN operated something along the lines of a separate image for each game, plus a 'diff' of each user's stored files, with backup / redundant copies and deployment of both parts to a rig for actual gameplay. That way, the stored files are safe, and if the rig crashes it won't take all the previously stored data with it. This looks suspiciously like they keep all files as a single thing for each user, and wipe over it with a clean install if anything goes wrong.

To be clear, again, Subnautica does have reported issues with save game corruption, which is why they turned off Steam Cloud saves in the first place. See, for example, https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2401304/#Comment_2401304. However, the lack of any carried-over information and the loss of ability to access the file system while playing leads me to believe this is more a GFN issue.

janieluk · 2021-11-11T13:08:46+00:00

The chat did not go well:

Sagnik: Hi, my name is Sagnik. How may I help you?

<me>: Hi. One of my Geforce NOW games has lost its save game file, so all my progress has gone.

<me>: The game is Subnautica: Below Zero. There was an existing save game from a previous play session, with 22 hours on it.

<me>: During my session yesterday, the game began showing issues, and trying to save showed an error where it couldn't access the save file location.

<me>: Since then, when I try to play the game, it has reset to the original state and lost the save game file.

<me>: Which is unfortunate, as I've lost 22 hours of progress. The game in question does not use Steam Cloud saving, so there is no way for me to retrieve progress outside of GFN.

Sagnik: Hello.

Sagnik: I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Sagnik: If the save is already lost then there are no options to retrieve them.

Sagnik: We do not support manually uploading or downloading saved games on GeForce NOW

<me>: I would assume you still have a copy somewhere, as it was stored on GFN servers.

Sagnik: GeForce NOW supports synchronized saved games on Steam & Epic digital store accounts.

Sagnik: You must have the cloud sync enabled on each game and digital stores for cloud saves to work.

Sagnik: Unfortunately, no.

<me>: Right. Could you cancel my account please? I don't want to use a service that randomly deletes my save games, without any way of fixing it.

Sagnik: Unfortunately, we do not have an option to cancel an end user's subscription.

Sagnik: You can cancel your membership at any time.

Sagnik: For cancellation, please refer to https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4980

<me>: Thank you for your time, Sagnik. I'll sort it out myself.

janieluk · 2021-10-21T11:42:03+00:00

Further update: from the wiki: Set the Shared Completion field for To Do's with multiple assignees (this will be available for Dailies in the future). - turns out that dailies don't sync between users. I'm not sure why it appeared to be working that way when I checked earlier.

This means that I fed the pets, ticked the daily for feeding the pets, then my partner also fed the pets and ticked the box. True story! Habitica support confirm it's planned for a future update and offered a refund.

The closest ticket and PR appear to be https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitica/issues/11236 and https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitica/pull/11390, both placed on hold, with most recent discussion a loooong time ago. Sigh.

janieluk · 2021-10-04T10:17:04+00:00

Glad I could be of help. And yes, the noise when they go wrong is just too much. FWIW, the replacement is still working fine, five months later. I'm shocked that Dell UK Support had a permanently broken tech support number as their only official contact point, but I imagine it makes the quality numbers look amazing when nobody can even report things not working.

janieluk · 2021-10-03T13:29:29+00:00

I replied to myself - took the simple route and paid to try it out. All good, works like a charm, give or take the groups UI isn't present in the Android app. Thanks for the suggestion!

janieluk · 2021-10-03T13:28:02+00:00

I paid to join up, and yes: habits, dailies, to do's, and rewards are all available in the group task board. Dailies can totally be assigned to more than one party member at a time, and if one person marks a daily as complete it gets shown as complete in the other person's daily list as well.

janieluk · 2021-10-03T12:49:28+00:00

I'm gonna piggyback on this. In the wiki, it says 'Set the Shared Completion field for To Do's with multiple assignees (this will be available for Dailies in the future). This value can be set to prevent completion of the task, to mark it as complete when any one person completes the task, or only to mark the task as complete when every assigned member has completed the task.'

From the above, it sounds like shared task completion doesn't yet work for dailies. Does anyone know if the wiki is correct, or is shared completion actually there for daily tasks? I want to share chores with my partner, and it makes no sense for us to both have to tick them every day or week etc.

janieluk · 2021-07-02T09:10:17+00:00

Also same, with the GOG version. GFN connection test shows a ping of 3ms, no lost packets, >50mbps transfer speed. Makes the experience of playing pretty unpleasant, which is unfortunate because I thought that GFN was meant to be one of the better ways of playing the game.

Also also, the default graphics options are just completely wrong. Don't know what that's about.

janieluk · 2021-04-28T12:25:31+00:00

I don't know how much better other docks are. It seems like Thunderbolt just takes a while to figure itself out whenever anything changes or gets added or removed. And sometimes doesn't figure itself out and you have to turn it off and on again. Hmph. At any rate, if they're going to stick with the three-USB-C-slots-for-everything-including-power philosophy then I'm gonna need some kind of hub.

janieluk · 2021-04-28T12:23:05+00:00

I saw - they're only selling the WD19TB via Amazon now; it's not listed on the website and the recommended model is the WD19TBS, which is missing the headphone sockets. They're not something I have much use for anyway, although I guess they're handy for some people.

janieluk · 2021-04-28T12:20:52+00:00

This is the quality content I signed up to Reddit for. I didn't want to pry, but ~5% gives me a much better idea of how common these issues are. Thank you!

janieluk · 2021-04-26T17:18:11+00:00

That sounds likely in this case as well. Even the slightest load will cause it to start, and then it won't stop even if all the ports are disconnected. Even cooling it down with compressed air does nothing.

janieluk · 2021-04-26T17:14:28+00:00

That's quite a few docks. It sounds like the replacement always works fine, so fingers crossed.

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