The kernel option is mitigations=off, if you want to try adding it to your Grub command line? From the testing I’ve done, provides no benefits whatsoever - no more frames in games, compilation runs no quicker, battery life on a laptop is no better.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#Turn_off_CPU_exploit_mitigations

If you made memory access lines twice as wide, they’d take up more space. More space means (a) chips run slower, because it takes time for the electricity to get there (b) they’d be bigger and more expensive.

The main problem with 32-bit, as others have noticed, is that that’s not really so much RAM. CPUs do addition and subtraction the way we were taught at school - ‘carry the one’, they’ve an overflow bit that’s set when your sum doesn’t fit in the columns. On 8-bit CPUs, we were always checking back when adding up large numbers. On 64-bit CPUs, we can deal with truly massive numbers anyway, it’s not such a hassle. And they’re so fast at doing sums anyway and usually waiting for memory, it’s barely a hassle.

Moving to 128-bit would give us a truly minuscule, probably unmeasurable, benefit in exchange for significant downsides. We could make them, but it would be pointless.

Agreed. JSON solves:

• the ‘versioning’ problem, where the data fields change after an update. That’s a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
• makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
• very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
• actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you’ve done the fast serialisation, anyway.

For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.

I thought that it was encrypted if your home directory was encrypted? The impression that I got was that it was just a SQLite database stored in the clear. The user must certainly be able to make queries of that database in order for it to work, so even if it’s hosted by a non-user service, malware running locally will still be able to exfiltrate the data.

Nice insight, thank you.

I can see that there will be a range of markets for these. Installing them in the desert (efficiency not as important as pure cost-per-watt, long-term stability very important) is not the same as installing them on your roof (limited space but fairly easy access, payback time dominated by efficiency) and so the ‘customer’ sweet point for these will not be the same as the ‘industrial’ one.

Sorry if I was ambiguous - it was me that received a spectacular number of downvotes for a comment that I’d not think controversial in any way, and then realised that I might as well ignore all that because it doesn’t matter here.

There’s a few arseholes running bots that seem to downvote every post on a topic sometimes. Don’t let that get you down - no point putting more thought into it than they did. Your opinion matters, dude (-ette), don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Once you’ve posted a comment that implies that China is imperfect in some way and received a truly spectacular number of downvotes, and then realised that it makes no difference whatsoever because Lemmy votes only affect your ego and nothing else, then you can move on. We aren’t “the other website”.

That’s Amaranthe you’re thinking of. If you’re a fan of the Swedish metal ‘soprano and gravel’ sound they’re well worth a listen.

I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?

Not that I’m the biggest fan of CMake’s syntax, but they are fairly concise and standardised. The XZ backdoor hid in amongst thousands of lines of autotools jank that very few people would be able to audit. A short CMakeList that generates a Makefile is a much harder place to hide something nefarious.

I prefer the must of white grapes for wine making than the must of red grapes.

The sound will eventually dissipate in the air as heat. The light will be absorbed into surfaces, like any other radiation, as heat. Still 100%, but with a couple extra stops along the way.

Between ‘caps lock’ -> ‘actual control key’, ‘alt gr’ -> ‘compose’, and ‘right ctrl’ -> ‘virtualbox functions’, I’m running out of things that I actually need to remap, or have enough fingers to press without stopping touch-typing. But hey, might come in handy for something…

Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they’ve just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There’s a couple of games that qualify as ‘direct sequels’ (Ocarina -> Majora’s, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn’t benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as ‘fanon’ anyway.

Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn’t stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it’s more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you’d believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.

The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.

Seems likely. It only stutters on Windows - run it through Proton on Linux, where it’s translating it all to Vulkan, and it’s silky smooth. Maybe off by a frame or two as well of course, but it’s pretty much locked to 60 fps in either case on my machine and can’t really check. DirectX seems quite bad for hitching when a new shader is loaded - they’d all be pre-compiled on a console since the devs know exactly what the target hardware is, so if you don’t rewrite your engine on Windows to accommodate it, then you’ll have problems.

Fine advice generally, but I don’t know that many Panams or Reginas…

Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It’s after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn’t got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.

The end of the game doesn’t look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.

It’s not really the same Chinese Room any more - they basically closed the studio after Little Orpheus, and have restarted it with a new team.

Now, whether you think a bunch of randoms might make a better or worse job of it than Hardsuit Labs, who for reasons still unclear were dropped by the original publisher, is a reasonable question. I don’t see why they shouldn’t make a better job of it. If they do turn out something with great promise but a slew of game-breaking bugs, it’ll be exactly in the spirit of Troika’s original, for sure, and we can have another twenty years of fan patches trying to put it right.

But I hear that Everard’s Black Tentacles are free to be much naughtier?