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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.

    Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.

    Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.





  • I don’t think it got worse. At least in regards to webcams. It looks more like that for many years they essentially re-used the same sensors in different cams and didn’t really evolve. Which always seemed weird, given that smartphone with fantastic sensors have been around for ages now - with lenses which are likely even smaller than what a webcam would be able to allow. Only the relatively recent home office trend has brought some change. But so far it still doesn’t look too good.


  • It was a Logitech C922. It’s a piece of shit though. A bit less than other webcams I had, but I can’t even properly key out my greenscreen if the lighting in the room is not 100% perfect. With the smartphone cam it works even with completly shitty lighting.

    The only webcam I would have somewhat hope in would be the Obsbot Tiny 2, but €350 is too much for something I can solve with an old smartphone. (Also I don’t need 70% of the features of the obsbot tiny; I mainly want a good sensor and image processing.)



  • True, you will need 10 to 20 seconds setup each time. But the video quality is really impressive. And another upside: you can be damn sure that no one watches you without you knowing, because you have to setup the cam each time and it doesn’t just sit there. But I guess that’s only a minor advantage.

    I put up a specific mount to quickly put the smartphone in place and have a dedicated charger cable right beside it I just need to attach real quick. If I used my iPhone, I could probably make use of the MagSafe mechanism to mount and charge in one go. (I think there are also MagSafe compatible cases for other phones, so that might be something to think about in general.)




  • aksdb@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlYeah, well...
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    8 months ago

    That is - IMO - what critical thinking is meant to be … thinking about alternative explanations and evaluating their viability or probability.

    Unfortunately a lot of people use the term “critical thinking” as just another way to rationalize why they are against something, without actually weighing the options.



  • I want freedom. Offer both so everyone can pick the model that best matches their usage pattern. A GamePass+GeForceNow combo is nice if you want to play a diverse library of games without having to install terrabytes of game data. Also if you only want to play stuff a short while (hello ADHD), a subscription might be better than full price.

    But again: freedom. I don’t want to be forced into subscriptions but neither would I want someone to forbid me from subscribing.





  • As with every software/product: they have different features.

    ZFS is not really hip. It’s pretty old. But also pretty solid. Unfortunately it’s licensed in a way that is maybe incompatible with the GPL, so no one wants to take the risk of trying to get it into Linux. So in the Linux world it is always a third-party-addon. In the BSD or Solaris world though …

    btrfs has similar goals as ZFS (more to that soon) but has been developed right inside the kernel all along, so it typically works out of the box. It has a bit of a complicated history with it’s stability/reliability from which it still suffers (the history, not the stability). Many/most people run it with zero problems, some will still cite problems they had in the past, some apparently also still have problems.

    bcachefs is also looming around the corner and might tackle problems differently, bringing us all the nice features with less bugs (optimism, yay). But it’s an even younger FS than btrfs, so only time will tell.

    ext4 is an iteration on ext3 on ext2. So it’s pretty fucking stable and heavily battle tested.

    Now why even care? ZFS, btrfs and bcachefs are filesystems following the COW philisophy (copy on write), meaning you might lose a bit performance but win on reliability. It also allows easily enabling snapshots, which all three bring you out of the box. So you can basically say “mark the current state of the filesystem with tag/label/whatever ‘x’” and every subsequent changes (since they are copies) will not touch the old snapshots, allowing you to easily roll back a whole partition. (Of course that takes up space, but only incrementally.)

    They also bring native support for different RAID levels making additional layers like mdadm unnecessary. In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.

    For typical desktop use: ext4 is totally fine. Snapshots are extremely convenient if something breaks and you can basically revert the changes back in a single command. They don’t replace a backup strategy, so in the end you should have some data security measures in place anyway.

    *Edit: forgot a word.