CMahaff

@CMahaff@lemmy.world
9 Post – 89 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I made LASIM! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

I currently have 3 accounts (big shock):

/u/CMahaff@lemmy.world

/u/CMahaff@lemmy.ml

/u/CMahaff@lemm.ee

Just gonna name-drop the tool I made to do this :) https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

It's only been out a few days, let me know if you have any issues!

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I'll also throw out: aging infrastructure, build systems, coding practices, etc.

I looked into contributing to the kernel - it's already an uphill battle to understand such a large, complex piece of software written almost entirely in C - but then you also need to subscribe to busy mailing lists and contribute code via email, something I've never done at 30 and I'm betting most of the younger generation doesn't even know is possible. I know it "works" but I'm really doubting it's the most efficient way to be doing things in 2024 - there's a reason so many infrastructure tools have been developed over the years.

The barriers to entry for a lot of projects is way too high, and IMO a lot of existing "grey" maintainers, somewhat understandably, have no interest in changing their processes after so much time. But if you make it too hard to contribute, no one will bother.

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Look, I'd love for that to be true, but it just isn't. Biden will win by being a boring centrist, because that's who he is and that's who will win a general election (generally speaking).

With the GOP going completely off the rails the easiest path to victory is to simply go middle of the road and pick up all those independents/centrists and conservatives with brains. Progressives will vote Biden regardless because Trump (or any Trump wannabe) is too terrifying of a reality.

This country has never shown it has some giant progressive silent majority - Bernie would know, he bet and lost on that materializing in his own presidential runs.

I don't see Democrats running hard on progressive policies until either the GOP starts running moderates again (forcing Democrats to pickup votes elsewhere) or young people prove they can be a force at the ballot box.

All this is not to shit on what Biden has achieved, because he has done things for progressives, but I don't see him suddenly switching to anything resembling a "strong progressive agenda" because it will just give his GOP opponent ammo to claim "see he's radical too". Biden will be the most boring, normal politician he can, while highlighting how bad things will get if his extreme opponent gets into office, and that's probably the smartest thing to do.

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Hey, author of LASIM here if people have any questions!

Just so people know it does save everything to a JSON file when you click "download" so you can absolutely upload to multiple accounts or keep it as a backup.

You offered a lot of suggestions, and I'm sure people will disagree over the specifics, but I think your overall point is excellent and not talked about enough. I wonder if anyone has ever even attempted a survey on the ages of maintainers/contributors? I bet it's skewing older fast.

Nothing wrong with that of course, especially given the project's age, complexity, and being written in C - but you're right, at some point you have to attract new talent - people can't maintain forever.

I'm a 29 year old developer - I didn't even know you could do git patches via email until recently. And while it's super cool, it also sounds kinda terrible, especially at the volume they must be receiving? Their own docs are saying the mailing lists receive some 500 emails per day and I can't imagine the merge process is fun.

So many doc pages are dedicated to how to submit a patch - which is great that it's documented, and I'm sure it will always be somewhat complicated for a large project - but it also feels like things that are all automatically handled by newer tools / bots which can automatically enforce style checks, etc.

I guess they could argue that the complicated process acts as a filter to people submitting PRs who don't know what they are doing, but I'd argue it also shuts out talented engineers who don't have 40 hours to learn how to submit a patch to a project on top of also learning the kernel and also fixing the bug in question.

From what little I read of their git process, does anyone know if there's anything preventing the maintainer of a subsystem from setting up a more modern method for receiving patches? As long as the upstream artifact to the kernel has the expected format?

I feel like BestOfModLog could be a very funny community.

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

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FYI I have made a tool that can backup / copy your account settings, subscriptions, and blocks to a new account: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

There are others out there as well if you look.

Obviously the loss of .ml communities would still be catastrophic to Lemmy, but at least your new account won't start from ground-zero, and you can be less effected by downtime by having 2 accounts with the same subscriptions.

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In fairness, LASIM has only been out for 5 days :)

I saw this complaint in another post online (paraphrased):

The screen and use of a Pi seem at odds with each other. The screen is ultra-low power, but there are of course huge drawbacks for usability. Meanwhile the CPU is very powerful, but chews through, comparatively, a lot of power quickly.

They argued that it would be better to either pair the Pi with a better screen for a more powerful/usable handheld, or go all in on longevity and use some kind of low-power chip to pair with the screen for a terminal that could last for days.

... I've got to say, it's a fair point. A low power hand-held that could run Linux and run for days would be pretty cool, even if it was underpowered compared to a Pi. No idea what you could use for such a thing though.

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So maybe you've heard something I haven't, according to this timeline, there was only 2-3 minutes between when the ship issued a mayday and the bridge collapsed: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-timeline-911-call-dali-cargo-ship-mayday-maps-construction-worker-recovery/

It sounded like there was 1 police officer already stationed on either end of the bridge, so thats the only reason they were even able to close the bridge before the collapse.

In the time it took them to do that, I can't see how there would have been time to warn them physically (it's like a 2 mile bridge). From the article, it sounded like there was confusion about if a crew was even on the bridge. I also don't know how often / what mechanism police can use to directly contact crews, if there even is one.

Found a blog post that gives a quick overview of how to do git via email in general: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/05/09/how-to-submit-a-patch-by-email-2023-edition

So at least from my understanding you'd make your changes, email the contents of the patch to the maintainer, and then they'd apply it on their side, do code review, email you comments, etc. until it was in an acceptable state.

There's also the full kernel development wiki that goes into all the specifics: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/process/howto.html

(I never got through the whole thing)

Under this broad of a ruleset, all software would have to be open source.

I posted this on another thread about this, but I'll repost it here:

I have made a tool that can backup / copy your account settings, subscriptions, and blocks to a new account: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

There are others out there as well if you look.

Obviously the loss of .ml communities would still be catastrophic to Lemmy, but at least your new account won’t start from ground-zero, and you can be less effected by downtime by having 2 accounts with the same subscriptions.

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If vlemmy comes back up you can use this tool I made to pull down a list of subscriptions, blocks, etc. and if you want, copy all those to a new account:

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Obviously your comments, etc. are gone, but at least you can keep browsing uninterrupted from another instance.

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The linked GitHub has a "releases" section. Download for your platform. Double click executable.

I made one such tool!

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

I know there's also a python script out there and a new Android app that has active syncing. I don't have links handy to those on mobile.

LASIM author here - you are correct. I explicitly made it "additive" to avoid accidents where you could end up erasing a bunch of subscriptions. Right now LASIM only calls the subscribe API interface so it's actually impossible for it to unsubscribe you from anything.

I am considering adding a "destructive" sync in the future which, if toggled on, would unsubscribe you from anything not in the JSON file. But it's not implemented yet!

Wouldn't this be the equivalent of the mob mailing their own finger?

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Oh man, I actually like the language, but you made me think of my own hot take:

Python has inexcusably poor docs.

Just a smattering of examples, which aren't even that good, while failing to report key information like all the parameters a function can take, or all the exceptions it can throw. Any other popular language I can think of has this locked down and it makes things so much easier.

The CEO said they were going to add pay-walled subreddits at an earnings call.

So... Yep.

Out of curiosity, what content are you looking for? Discovery on Lemmy can be a problem, but sometimes the communities are there and even active, just buried.

But may I also suggest searching by Top Day/12-hour/6-hour to see the most active posts. Lemmy's scaled algorithm still doesn't get it quite right IMO.

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I'll throw my tool out there as well: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Unfortunately, you need access to the old server to download the list of communities and blocks - but that's true of all tools that do this.

Source for the image? I'd love a higher resolution version.

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I made a tool that downloads and/or migrates your account settings: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Not as good as something built into Lemmy, but it's a good stop-gap in the meantime.

This was my experience as well, though I did notice that many games did not properly isolate game saves from separate steam accounts.

Tip to any devs that might read this: organize saves based on the steam account logged in, not the user of the PC (always "deck" for the steam deck) and definitely not just a single location among the game's data.

I somehow read this as 128GB and was ready to share your shock.

I dunno man, I think that the fact she teaches high school kids specifically, who by now all know about it, means that she has no hope of being an effective teacher at this point. It's a massive distraction, as unfair as that is.

She had to have known this was a possibility when she decided to start an onlyfans - there's almost nowhere in the country where you won't get fired as a teacher for that, progressive or conservative states alike. Society just isn't there yet.

FYI I made a little tool for migrating / backing up your Lemmy subscriptions, blocks, profile settings, etc.

Nothing to be done for fmhy now that it's gone, but for the future, it might help to have a backup.

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

I'm surprised by Helldiver's. Has there been some performance patches? I tried playing that on my deck near launch and it really struggled even at minimum settings - I can't imagine how it would run at higher difficulties.

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The devs have definitely said there will be an official way to backup your account and import into another at some point, but I don't think they've decided what exactly what would be like. Lots of possibilities with varying degrees of difficulty.

Not to my knowledge, but I also haven't checked (or looked at how kbin's API works)

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I'll just add that another, albeit smaller, category of games that don't work are really new, demanding titles. There's not a lot of them for now, but naturally the deck wasn't the most powerful device to begin with and over time less titles will work well.

Starfield was pointed out to me as an example of one that can't run on the deck for performance reasons (not that Bethesda is known for their optimization) and BG3 was only barely playable at the lowest settings in the more demanding areas of the game (i.e. Act 3).

That said, for its price point, and considering most games are using the proton compatibility later, I was actually very impressed with its performance.

Roku TV owner here: Yes, mostly.

The main screen does show one "banner ad" (which you can briefly see in the LTT video), usually for some show that is streaming on some platform.

But that's the only one, and I appreciate that it's microphone is built into the remote and only activated when pressing a button on said remote.

Otherwise it stays out of your way, and the app selection is quite good, if you need them - otherwise just a really solid, budget friendly TV.

Not an expert myself, but I think chips that truly sip power not only have a much lower floor but take even more aggressive actions to reduce power when idle.

Certainly with the right software tuning you could aggressively throttle the CPU to save power - I'm just not sure how much power it would actually save.

I did find this really good article on reducing the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W power consumption: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/12/09/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-power-consumption/

I wrote a tool that will help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Let's you copy your subs, blocks, and profile settings between Lemmy accounts.

You can run it as many times as you like and will keep adding new things.

At the minute it never removes things though, so you'd have to unsubscribe multiple places.

I made a tool that does this until we can get something baked into Lemmy itself: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

There are a handful of other options out there too if ya search for em. Mine backs up / copies subscriptions, blocks, and a handful of profile settings.

Sneak peek :)

LASIM 0.1.3

My understanding is that all free .ml instances got removed as well - could be a sizeable chunk.