black0ut
@black0ut@pawb.social
- Comment on What the Hell is this Bull shit ? 1 week ago:
GiB weren’t invented by drive manufacturers (although they definitely benefit from it, and are incredibly scummy about it). It was invented by the SI people. GiB make sense, because the prefix “Giga” means 10⁶, while in binary it meant 2²⁰. It was a mess before, and GiB just standardized it in a way that is easy to understand and consistent with other units.
I do think we should force drive manufacturers to express their drive capacity in binary format, tho.
- Comment on What the Hell is this Bull shit ? 1 week ago:
All software has always interpreted it in binary as far as I know. There never was a good standard, and the most common way to differentiate in my experience was using KB as metric (decimal, SI) and K as binary. It’s easy to confuse with the already convoluted standard of KB being a kilobyte and Kb being a kilobit.
The reason for the added “i” is that in every other system, kilo means 1000. Someone at the SI realized that it didn’t make any sense to have it mean something different in software so they invented the Ki prefix (instead of K) to mean 1024. That is now the standard, and it’s part of the SI (coloquially metric). As a consequence of this, you can technically use the Ki prefix with any other SI unit, so you can also use the KiM (kibimeter), which is 1024 meters. Idk why you’d use it, but it’s funny that the option exists.
- Comment on What the Hell is this Bull shit ? 1 week ago:
There are (mainly) 3 reasons for that:
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TB vs TiB: Computers don’t count drive space in metric units, they count it in powers of 2. This means that, for you, 1 TB is 1000 GB, while for a computer, 1 TiB is 1024 GiB. Drive manufactirers take advantage of this, and only count space in metric (TB). So when you plug the drive into your computer, and it converts to GiB, you end up with 1 TB = 931.3 GiB. Windows hasn’t helped this confusion, I remember it doing something weird like counting in GiB and displaying it as GB.
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Reserved space: Many OSes reserve some space on their drives for special stuff. This is especially the case with Linux and ext4, where it by default reserves a percentage of the drive to root. This is to optimize distribution of files around the disk, which limits fragmentation. The system slowly frees more of this space as you fill up the disk, and at the end it should leave you with 100% of the space.
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Formatting: Empty drive space isn’t the same as usable drive space. In order to use a drive you need to format it, which doesn’t just blank it. Formatting a drive adds a filesystem to it, which is what allows you to write files and folders to it. This filesystem takes up some space, and reserves more space for inodes and, in some cases, a filesystem journal. Some filesystems have even more features that also take up some space.
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- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
High Dairy Milk Ingestion
- Comment on What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff? 3 weeks ago:
He quit because of optics (understandably, Linux people didn’t like a Microsoft employee making software that was in almost every distro), but he still works with Microsoft and other Microsoft employees
- Comment on What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff? 3 weeks ago:
The issue is that some idiot suddenly appeared on the systemd repo to immediately push a change that adds the posibility of logging the user’s age into systemd. The community complained and explained that nobody wanted that change, and yet this idiot pushed through, ignored the feedback, and ended up getting the pull request merged. Not only that, but the discussion thread was locked to prevent criticism, and the merge was done by Microsoft employees. After the merge, someone tried to undo the change, and the effort was blocked by a Microsoft employee.
Despite the excuses, Systemd is not an OS, and it doesn’t even need to comply with any age verification laws. The fact that someone went and implemented a deeply unpopular change into a system that shouldn’t even deal with that info and that is used by most Linux distros, just to aid a surveillance government in implementing better surveillance on the entire world’s users is what lead to the pushback.
Additionally, Lennart Poettering used Claude to review the pull request, and has been using it for developing SystemD. I’m not gonna go too deep into that, but trust me, it’s really bad.
Double additionally, Lennart Poettering also defended not properly securing this sensitive data, because that would be too bothersome for him.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 4 weeks ago:
Oh, have I got news for you
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
I know we have !boneappletea@lemmy.world
- Comment on They removed the like button. What next, they gonna remove videos? It’s just gonna be ads??? 2 months ago:
Nuclear is not economically feasible and still does have its fair share of problems. It also generates waste, even if at far less scale than fossil fuels. Wind and solar are cheap and very scalable in most countries, which makes them economically feasible (and can also accelerate a move from fossil). Don’t be so quick to discard them.
As a matter of fact, last month, in Spain, we generated more energy just from wind than from nuclear. (31.7% vs 21.4%) source
- Comment on Linus Torvalds on a ridiculous job performance metric at tech companies and the prominent figure responsible for it 4 months ago:
Relying on a chance machine to thoroughly test your code sounds like a recipe for disaster
- Comment on Oh no! 4 months ago:
I use Unexpected Keyboard.
It’s mainly made for programming or using Termux, and it makes some special characters more accessible than the classic keyboards. It also has a mechanic for typing special characters that makes it faster to type. And you can enable a compose key, which is something I love to see on a phone keyboard.
Unexpected doesn’t have voice recognition though, but it can be enabled by installing a voice recognition app alongside the keyboard.
- Comment on The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Winners 6 months ago:
There are many free and libre OCR programs, that have way more accuracy than an “AI”
- Comment on Begun the kernel wars have 8 months ago:
Client side anti-cheat (the one installed on your PC) will never work, it’s just fundamentally impossible. They can restrict user freedom as much as they want, but the hardware still isn’t under their control.
The only reason they push for those kinds of anti-cheats is because they don’t have to pay for the extra processing of server side anti-cheat, and they also get the benefit of a backdoor into your computer that you may never fully uninstall without buying a new computer.
- Comment on Statement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE 9 months ago:
Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it’s hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can’t run game servers with a straight face.
- Comment on Stop Killing Games Initiative passes 700K milestone 9 months ago:
Publish schematics with every piece of hardware you make. Paradise for repair technicians and retro tech enthusiasts in a few decades.
- Comment on TIL my decision to drive a 22' full cab pickup truck and vehemently oppose urban zoning reform makes me a defender of social justice, a warrior for the downtrodden, and more progressive than 99% [cont 10 months ago:
I think it is, yeah. It has a metro station relatively close by, which food delivery people often use to get around the city center. The streets around it are also very walkable, and you can go by bike. I don’t think it is a problem for food delivery at all.
