So there was this running gag among the Star Trek TNG production designers about there being a location on the ship named "Cetacean Ops", showing up in signage that wasn't legible pre-HD and background chatter that wasn't meant to be heard. Lower Decks then formalized this as an actual seawater tank in the middle of the ship with 2 intelligent Beluga whales "working" there. And this is fanservice and it's not TOTALLY clear Lower Decks is canon, but thing is, after Star Trek IV, it makes sense,
Like, institutions and especially militaries accumulate procedure like scar tissue around past misfortunes, this is why NASA developed the world's most advanced toilet while ROSCOSMOS had simpler toilets but always stashed a gun in the escape capsules*, and so after all the FRICKING NONSENSE that has almost caused disaster Starfleet must have bizarre mandatory procedures, for testing against 4 types of shapeshifter/clone, for time slippage, you gotta have a whale on board,
Reverse GitHub Copilot, it doesn't write any code for you, instead it asks you to explain your code with non-specific questions and through the rubber duck effect this causes you to notice bugs and/or realize yourself how to proceed with coding. On the inside it is literally just Eliza (1964)
I have an "AMD Ryzen™ 5 PRO 6650U with Radeon™ Graphics × 12".
Handbrake says AMD has a hardware encoder named "VCE" and says "AMD Radeon Software for Linux version 19.20 or later is required to use the VCE encoder"
I'm running a VERY new Ubuntu (23.10) and Ubuntu is the recommended distro by this laptop's vendor (Lenovo), and many sources assert AMD has the best open source video card drivers, so I would have expected I'd have the most complete possible open source drivers even without installing anything extra.
The AMD page / full specifications for my CPU/GPU do not mention anything about "VCE" or hardware video encoding. They do say OpenCL is supported. (They also don't mention Vulkan, although running vulkaninfo indicates Vulkan 1.3.250 is available and detecting Radeon graphics)
OBS was displaying FFMPEG VAAPI in the menu for video encoders under "advanced", but NOT "simple", and my eye just slid right over the menu sitting right there in "advanced". I could have solved this hours ago and had a much higher quality stream today.
Note: I also tried this plugin https://github.com/fzwoch/obs-vaapi and it also offers vaapi, but under the name (legacy). I wonder what (legacy) means.
Thanks all. I now know about vainfo which is nice.
Continuing into a second week of sporadic but gradually increasing use of my new Linux laptop and I am just continually shocked by how staggeringly bad the experience is at every level. The new indignity is that the version of Audacity I installed from the snap store cannot play audio. This is not as bad as it could be because oddly in this case I didn't install Audacity to play audio, I installed it to visually inspect audio waveforms, but this is still pretty bad.
It would be easy enough to explain this by a simple rule I broke, such as (many, many people have told me this) "don't use Ubuntu" or (this is a rule I mostly followed up until now) "only use LTS" or (I hope not) "don't use Linux on a laptop". But this does not explain why my desktop installation of Ubuntu 23.04, not LTS, works so well. (Or why Ubuntu 22.04 seemed basically okay on the same laptop until I boosted to 23.10.)
Ubuntu 23.10, specifically, somehow, is Cursed to a possibly unprecedented degree
Linux (Ubuntu?) is currently in a state where it seems okay on a cursory inspection of a test install (just long enough to go "aha! Linux on the desktop is pretty good now!" before switching back to your real operating system) but falls apart utterly if you subject it to regular daily use
One thing that's for certain is that I made things very hard for myself by using a hidpi monitor, but it's actually very difficult now to buy a laptop that isn't hidpi!
Some people have claimed the problem is not hidpi per se but the fact that 150% DPI, "fractional" DPI, is a big problem on Linux, but this too confuses me because 150% DPI has been bog standard on Lenovo laptops since 2015 (and, on Windows, entirely Not A Problem) and CW says Lenovos are good for Linux. So WTF.
A quirk I have is I don't like it when IDEs interface with my version control system. That is MY version control system. Don't touch my stuff, IDEs
But! I have another quirk, which is that I don't like git, and I use Mercurial for everything
And the quirks cancel each other out! I check my projects out in Mercurial, which is obscure, so IDEs don't support it, so their VCS integration fails and I am happy
@tthbaltazar because the interface for git is a medieval torture device and git's command line interface is so deeply intertwined with its file format that all attempts to make an alternate or wrapper interface just wind up being the command line interface with fewer handles on critical components
git is constantly printing the most bizarre error messages in the least helpful way
@inthehands Hasn't really changed much in years. Depends on when you stopped using it I guess? They replaced the janky "branch" feature with something called "bookmarks" which is much better, and then they tried to introduce something called "phases" that doesn't really add anything and I've never heard of anyone using.
@inthehands Someday I will write a tutorial. I believe for it to be really good you have to turn on three or four plugins which are shipped by default but off by default.
@inthehands to me hg is basically just "svn with push and pull" and i love svn
pull and update are separate verbs and this is so important to me. mercurial seems to give you verbs for actually interacting with & reshaping the tree whereas all git wants to do is interact with your current source checkout and lots of tree operations seem to require making the branch you want to operate on your current source checkout. It feels unnecessary. (also: git often requires you to make a named branch)
@byobattleship so here is the thing there are no longer any convenient places to host mercurial repos. so using mercurial pretty much means pushing and pulling to github and everyone you interact with will just be using git
The speaker circus is over and the Republicans' selection is, as documented by TPM here, a thought leader in 2020 election denial/conspiracy theories. We're used to extremist Republicans but the third person in Presidential succession has openly opposed electing the President democratically, which is a new line crossed.
Once again, what gets reported as "Republicans embarrassing themselves!" is the Republican far right being very very effective at achieving goals
Consider: People often remark that cats often suddenly stop and stare in strange directions, seemingly looking at nothing at all. What humans don't understand is that the cat is in fact not looking, but listening; the cat has heard something, and is turning its head so its ears are cupped in the direction of the sound.
Implication: If elves were real, they would often as a group swiftly turn their heads to apparently stare at nothing at all, swiveling their ears slightly as they do so
Do people over 40 keep telling you you should use IRC and IRC is better than Discord and Slack?
Did you try IRC and it wasn't better at all?
Do you need to use an IRC channel but IRC is a pain?
Use irccloud.com
It's free, it has a website interface that's like Discord, it has a phone app, it even lets you paste images into IRC
Downside: If you connect only from phone, they DC you after a bit unless you're on the paid plan. Get around this by leaving a web tab open on a desktop
I wish I had a single unix command-line tool that presented a single command-line interface but can work with all the various compression formats I use (tgz, 7zip, zip, etc).
Currently zip, 7z, tar, zstd etc all use different tools with totally different interfaces. I find myself needing to consult one or another --help far more than I should. zstd just startled me greatly when I discovered that zstd -d by default writes the output file in the same directory as the input file rather than pwd
If you are going to be a programmer the most important advice I can give you is that you are going to have to pretend to know what "dependency injection" is
Hey has YouTube always cut round corners out of the videos when you play them in normal mode? Now that I'm noticing them they're just… they're really big.
It frustrates me so much that the companies that control everything think we want to see less of every piece of content. Daydreaming about simply removing the "rounded corners" feature from CSS in my web browser*
Anyway the single moment of greatest joy I have experienced this summer was when I discovered the Atari 2600 core for the Analogue Pocket will happily open any file, such as ROMs for other systems, and attempt to execute it on the assumption it is an Atari 2600 ROM, invariably leading to a 200-ms-to-3-second loop of bizarre blocky pixel noise and glitch sounds
My constant experience with Python over the last ~16 years is I start writing it and it's like, wow, this is so easy, this is great! And then I run my program, and invariably it fails with an inscrutable error/exception 4 layers deep in someone else's library, code I know nothing about— in this case, a wav file library claiming that the number 960 is "not a valid shape"— and I realize that maybe I actually hate Python
@kryptskiddy@zrail maybe one way of looking at it is microeconomics and macroeconomics both work on simplified mathematical modules and microeconomics deals with simple enough things that occasionally you can find a real world example that actually coincides with the model but with the situations macroeconomics models this does not actually happen
