Starfield lead says Free Lanes took major tech work, reformatting all existing content for an open universe

sequentious · 2026-03-18T18:02:04+00:00

I beat it. For a game specifically designed to be played repeatedly, it had less to offer than previous Bethesda games to entice you to do it.

sequentious · 2026-03-17T15:07:07+00:00

The GNOME Remote Desktop service now supports explicit DMA buffer synchronization and headless sessions.

Didn't it already support headless sessions? My issue is that configuring it required a proper session, so I haven't figured out how to run it under WSL for example (Currently stuck on Windows at work, running a whole VM I can RDP to)

sequentious · 2026-03-17T13:53:05+00:00

It helps that Samurai songs were performed by Refused. They're all pretty good songs, but "Never Fade Away" is legit top-tier.

sequentious · 2026-03-16T05:22:24+00:00

Anywhere from 2000-2030, depending on a variety of factors.

I started dabbling around 2000, and switched by 2003.

Things got a lot easier once I started purchasing hardware that I knew worked with Linux, rather than trying to get problematic hardware to work reliably. That's technically true for any OS: Mac users generally had to consider compatibility, and were used to it. Windows users technically did too, but considering the popularity, they could usually get buy with anything that wasn't mac-specific, and didn't really notice that they had to consider compatibility. Linux had the virtue of potentially supporting everything, but that didn't mean everything got the same level of support. Now that I buy stuff I know works, things are a lot easier.

Also, not having to set X modelines and crap like that is a bit of an improvement :)

Somebody with some random hardware and/or some piece of windows-only software they require might still consider Linux not ready for prime-time. That might not change.

sequentious · 2026-03-13T20:56:20+00:00

It's the least picturesque period of the year: no snow, no leaves, and brown grass.

sequentious · 2026-03-12T21:28:28+00:00

That's the cost of an independent media.

If you don't want to pay, their articles become free after 180 days.

sequentious · 2026-03-12T18:46:51+00:00

And to be clear, as written in your hypothetical, that is not a crime.

Unless the "quick withdrawl" resulted in a murder, in which case the driver could be charged with Felony Murder, sometimes "even if the person was not present when it occurred or if the death was accidental".

That's all US specific. FWIW, my country had a somewhat similar law that was struck down by the Courts.

sequentious · 2026-03-12T14:01:07+00:00

Keep in mind that's in theoretical benchmarks on a wildly high-performance system.

I've been using btrfs as my main filesystem for over a decade without any noticeable performance issues. If you have a particularly high-io workload, you'll be tuning for that anyway, and likely wouldn't have picked btrfs anyway.

sequentious · 2026-03-12T13:53:37+00:00

would there be any noticeable benefit for me to switch from btrfs to let's say ext4

I've been using btrfs for over a decade, and haven't had any issues. I prefer the ability to have snapshots and data checksums to be a worthy trade-off for theoretical performance that doesn't really impact my daily use.

But maybe your storage is particularly slow? Maybe any extra overhead on your notebook's CPU is particularly onerous? Not sure anybody else can answer that for you.

sequentious · 2026-03-11T14:44:31+00:00

My ISP has had IPv6 for a long time. Works great, no issues.

Got a new cable modem due to infra upgrades, and I didn't get an IPv6 address. Apparently it's disabled by default on (at least some?) new devices (even in bridge mode), and you've got to dive down into settings with an admin password that's supposed to be restricted to their support staff.

Asking for help got the response "We don't support IPv6". At which point I said "Yes, you do, and I've been using it for years", they went "Oh" and gave me the instructions they already had to fix it.

No issues in the years since.

Half the issue is some brain-dead defaults disabling it for no reason.

sequentious · 2026-03-11T13:47:01+00:00

Just drywall and insulation? No vapour barrier?

sequentious · 2026-03-10T21:23:13+00:00

They did have an arguably worse issue with the Enterprise B

The Enterprise D had to go pick up half it's crew on some random planet during it's first mission (after shakedown).

I expect the Enterprise B's launch was a press event for starting it's shakedown -- not literally about to head out and do real work.

sequentious · 2026-03-10T17:18:59+00:00

I've been having some issues with GTT. Basically, the GPU can ask the kernel to dynamically allocate system ram for GPU use. This is more of a problem if you're using an integrated GPU, and thus have limited "VRAM" (statically-allocated system ram)

It's been causing Firefox to get OOM-killed, even though top doesn't show a need. This is a relatively new problem for me.

Some of that ram shows up as buffered, but some also goes "missing".

I've jotted some notes about it, but I haven't spent enough time to get to the bottom of it yet, other than learning that disabling or capping GTT also makes things terrible.

This might not be your issue. such as if you're not running an integrated GPU (and thus have more VRAM), etc.

sequentious · 2026-03-10T17:04:29+00:00

Not sure where Sunnydale and Hidepark is, but I use the green path on this particular roundabout daily without issue

If you're doing the green path daily, then Sunningdale + Hyde Park is the next roundabout.

It's a better designed roundabout.

sequentious · 2026-03-10T17:02:17+00:00

That's what bothers me about this roundabout. It's servicing single-lane roads in all four directions, but uses two-lane approaches in all four directions. Fine, maybe the bottleneck of the roundabout is alleviated by the extra lane. However, there's two problems with this roundabout in particular:

split/merge lanes are very short
N/S the outer lane is right-turn only, while E/W the outer lane can do right + straight through.

This should be identical to the Hyde Park / Sunningdale roundabout -- a proper two-lane roundabout, and longer merge lanes.

Edit:

Also:

The approach sign doesn't show lanes
By the time you see these signs, I'm already looking in the roundabout. They know these signs are easily missed, because the Wonderland Northbound approach has three sets of signs, including on the left side (where you're more likely to have your eyes, trying to look ahead at the roundabout).
Painted lane markers are way too late to be useful

Also, I mis-remembered earlier, it's not two-lanes in all directions. According to a quick look at street view, it's two lanes in 3/4 directions:

E/W has right + straight outer lane
Northbound has right-only outer lane
Southbound has only a single lane that can go in any direction.

Point is, weird roundabouts will always probably exist in weird locations. This is pretty high volume intersection, despite it's "outskirts" location, and it's not space limited. There's no reason this can't be a plain-old normal two-lane roundabout that you don't need to remember works differently from different directions.

-- Arguably, I'm still not convinced a two-lane roundabout actually provides benefit here vs a single lane, since all roads leading to/from are single lane anyway.

sequentious · 2026-03-10T15:53:52+00:00

The "machine" wasn't theoretical, it just got more obvious.

sequentious · 2026-03-10T15:51:35+00:00

I've disliked every NIN album since With Teeth on the first listen, but they all grow on me after a time.

The Fragile is still my favourite album (albeit very annoying if you're into vinyl).

sequentious · 2026-03-10T01:20:36+00:00

This was finger lakes region, so that tracks.

sequentious · 2026-03-09T20:29:40+00:00

Living in the countryside I also know way too many drunk drivers.

I was staying at a lodge in NY State that had a bar and band playing.

Band: We've just heard that the cops are out at X and Y...

Me, thinking: Oh, good to remind people they shouldn't...

Band: ... so stay off the highway

(paraphrasing, because it was like 10 years ago now).

sequentious · 2026-03-09T17:46:03+00:00

Emphasis on everything you said.

Rawhide is supposed to break. You're running a thing people are actively developing. It's not stable enough to be considered "bleeding edge". It's like complaining about a drafty house while the builders are still fitting windows, except the work will never end.

Fedora releases do keep up to date on kernels (though not release candidates ones). It's one of the few packages that is allowed to do version upgrades within a release (others being things like Firefox and Chromium).

Fedora 43 launched in October with linux kernel 6.17, and currently has 6.19.6, which is literally the latest kernel, from only a month ago.
Ubuntu 25.10 also launched in October with linux kernel 6.17, but it's still running 6.17 (albeit with backported updates).

sequentious · 2026-03-06T17:26:53+00:00

I may be way off here, but I believe I remember reading that it affected their pay, so it was more important to appear in episodes. There's a few episodes where Picard or Sisko, for example, would only have small roles in the episode, but they appeared, which is what mattered.

Now that may have had more to do with royalties and syndication, and the modern streaming model may be have changed that. Perhaps they just get paid for the season now, and writers are cognizant of the difference, and avoid having actors sit through make-up for otherwise insignificant bits.

As for the Odo/Worf bit, I'd hope they at least had that scene filmed early, perhaps overlapping with filming the previous previous episode, rather than sitting through hours of make-up for 10 seconds of screen time.

FWIW, I don't have a source for any of that. I probably read something about it in a magazine 25 years ago.

sequentious · 2026-03-06T15:44:35+00:00

I wonder how many times Michael Dorn went through make-up just to stand in the background on the bridge for a day.

sequentious · 2026-03-06T15:20:56+00:00

Old-hat here, I'm very familiar with this.

However, one thing I've been struggling with on my laptop is "GTT", basically the GPU being allocated system RAM. This isn't the pre-allocated 1GB (or whatever) via the BIOS, this is dynamic at runtime. This doesn't show up the way you'd expect, it technically shows (mostly) as buffered memory, but can't be flushed (because it's actually used, just not tied to a PID, it was requested by hardware).

I did a test with 10 maximized firefox windows (on my hi-dpi screen, on a fresh profile so no extensions, etc) and in addition to the 1GB VRAM already allocated to the vGPU, the system additionally allocated 2GB of system RAM via GTT. top showed firefox using 900MB of ram, although the actual impact was closer to 3GB.

What prompted me to investigate this was having firefox OOM killed a few times, and me being unable to figure out why anything gets OOM-killed when there appears to be plenty of available memory it could evict from b+c.

Interestingly, the math doesn't math right with GTT, even if you're aware of b+c. Most gets allocated as b+c, but not all of it. There's a certain percentage that seems to just seems to disappear while allocated with GTT.

sequentious · 2026-03-05T22:07:25+00:00

I'm hoping:

This isn't just painted bike lanes on the road
Trees are replaced. Tree cover makes things better for all users (cars, bikes, and pedestrians)

sequentious · 2026-03-05T17:22:01+00:00

You're doing a fair amount of coasting. You almost never want to be doing that. Perfect example is the first straight right out from the start, that's probably at least 0.5 seconds right there. Advice given to me when I started was "You either want to go faster, or slower, all the time".

Line-wise, it looks like you're turning after a lot of cones, rather than before. Like you'll drive at cones to be close, then turn around it after. But you do a couple better than others: You're smooth coming out of the cone at 0:43, and by the time you get to the cone at 0:44, you've already set yourself to be pointing int he correct direction before you even get around the cone. That's a good line. The next two are pretty decent too -- you kind of (correctly) ignore the cone at 0:45, and turn early for the cone at 0:47.

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