Espi

People keep buying the things, so there is no incentive go small.

Wow, I really like WD SSDs, I got an SN850X and it’s blazing fast. I really like that you can change the sector size as well, most SSDs don’t bother with 4k sectors and just leave you with 512b ones.

If you use modern hardware it doesn’t behave quite well and gets worse battery life. If you use any tools from Microsoft (WSL, Office, Windows Terminal, etc) most of those are incompatible or a pain to install. If you use anything from the Microsoft Store, including Game Pass, since it just doesn’t include the Microsoft Store.

I really like the razors, here Hanlon’s razor is relevant:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

I’m sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.

I like this way better than Microsoft just showing popups trying you to stick to their browser.

All these kind of CPU level vulnerabilities are the same, they are only really “risky” if there is malicious software running in the computer in the first place.

The real problem is that these CPU-level vulnerabilities all break one of the core concepts of computers, which is process separation and virtual memory. If process separation is broken then all other levels of security become pointless.

While for desktops this isn’t a huge problem (except when sometimes vulnerabilities might even be able to be exploited though browsers), this is a huge problem for servers, where the modern cloud usually has multiple users in virtual machines in a single server and a malicious user could steal information across virtual machines.

I can’t believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let’s not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.

Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.

In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.

The perfect plan

step 1: spend billions buying an extremely recognizable brand
step 2: rebrand it

I actually can’t believe he is going forward with this. Twitter achieved the goal of becoming a verb, “tweeting”. Companies kill for that, and he’s just throwing it away? all the mindshare and recognition? for what?

Functional fractional scaling on GNOME.

I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.

Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don’t care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.

Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I’m really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a “tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don’t do anything” option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.

I’m also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn’t really get tearing ever.

I love it. I have used it for very long time with and without extensions. I love the overview in particular, pressing meta and having everything presented to you is fantastic. I used it by mostly running maximized windows, then each time I wanted to switch to another program I pressed meta and clicked on the app I wanted. I used workspaces to keep separate groups of programs for each workflow separate too.

If I used extensions it was small things like Appindicators and small cosmetics like blur my shell.

Now, I don’t think GNOME scales very well if you use tens of windows at once, you would need to use too many workspaces, which are slow to navigate, and/or have tiny windows in the overview, which are hard to click because their position is unpredictable unlike traditional taskbars, where the programs are always visible and never move on their own.

My workflow never involved too many windows, so I never had problems with it.

Something else I wish would change is that the top bar should go away or actually do something other than show the time. I would say either just take it away entirely and only show it in the overview. Or turn the clock into a notch. Or just make it a half-traditional taskbar, with the clock and options moved to the right and the left side showing as many programs as they fit in thin bars.

If they wanted to get rid of gifting premium why wouldn’t they just do that? “Awards no longer give premium for free” and that’s it, or maybe just massively reduce the amount of premium, maybe it doesn’t accumulate if you get more than one award, etc.

Ever since Pascal, Gaming laptops have been acceptable. Before that mobile GPUs were abominations that performed horribly and got insanely hot. It’s still a bummer that the CPU/GPU are soldered down.

This is why subreddits shouldn’t close permanently. I wonder if its possible to leave subreddits in read-only mode? to allow anyone to find all the incredibly valuable information.