In my apartment I’m running 2 AirGradients. One in the bedroom and one in the main room.
Awesome little devices, btw. They monitor temp, humidity, CO2, TVOC, and various particulate matter metrics. They expose prometheus metrics for scraping, and can be configured through a REST API to never phone home. I’ve got grafana alerts set up to push notifications to my phone when things get to “bad” ranges.
Anyway, the big issue is that the only way I’ve found to clear CO2 and TVOC is to open windows. However, windows open means increased humidity and particulate matter, even with air purifiers running aggressively. Also, opening windows at night kind of sucks for obvious reasons. In the summer it also sucks to lose that cool air.
I found these devices you put in your window, sort of like window fans, that can open/close airflow completely, but they don’t fit in my side-opening windows.
The only other thing I can think of is some kind of home automation with a little gadget that cracks the window until the metrics are back in an acceptable range. My AC unit unfortunately does not have a mode where it takes air from outside. I know some things like this exist for opening blinds, etc, but haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.
Challenging in an apartment setting, but the state of the art here is an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) installed in your home to continuously refresh the air.
Honestly this seems like a super long-shot but at least semi-plausible avenue for putting DAC on the sort of learning curve that took lithium batteries from "high-end camcorder" to utility-scale storage.
What does DAC stand for in this context? My brain is stuck on Digital-Analog Converter and I'm pretty sure we aren't talking about using those, but if so I'm even more fascinated by this discussion
That said, it seems intrinsically wrong-headed to me, a kind of trojan-horse technology for getting everyone else to spend money cleaning up the mess the polluter keeps spilling out into the commons.
Every dollar spent trying to extract low-concentration CO2 from ambient atmosphere is probably better-spent trying to grab it from a high-concentration source (e.g. exhaust, smokestacks) before it gets diluted.
I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back.
Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions.
I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity.
I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there.
Now the author's got me thinking about gaming-optimized kernels, which I did not realize was a thing.
I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.
With the exception of XWayland, all of the tests had input latencies within a very small range. No human could tell them apart by those latency differences alone. I would be amazed if someone could notice the 3ms difference jump to XWayland.
The difference could be much larger on a slower monitor. However the differences between Wayland and X11 as protocols is negligible. XWayland as an implementation looks to have a limitation.
The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.
ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation.
And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other.
---
Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.
In the context of competitive online games, ping is going to be ~10-60ms, depending on your connection to the particular server you're playing on, and not particularly noisy (and that's a roundtrip time. Client-Server latency would be 5-30ms). In order for one value to "dominate over" another in an adversarial context, the variance of the former must be much greater than the base rate of the latter.
Imagine a game that's just a pistol duel. When the kerchief hits the ground, players press a button, first person to press the button wins.
In an ideal world, with no delay whatsover, the probability P(A) of player A shooting no later than player B is 100 (because both players shoot at exactly the same time). If we add 5 ms of delay to player A, then P(A) = 0 (he will always lose). If then we add 50 ms of network latency to both players, P(A) = 0 still, because 55 > 50. If we instead make that 50ms delay 50ms +- 10ms (ignoring normal distribution for the moment, pretending every value in that range is equally likely), there's a 25% chance of player A experiencing an unwinnable delay (any network delay value > 55ms results in a value greater than player B's max of 60ms), resulting in a probability of P(A) = 75% * 50* = 38%.
If we make the network delay 50ms +- 5ms, then P(A) drops to 25%.
You can genuinely feel just a few milliseconds of input latency with a mouse, it disconnects looking around with your physical actions. It's the same way you can feel the difference between low and high refresh rate monitors, even though you can't really count the frames themselves
It doesn't matter. Whether you have a ping of 40 or a ping of 300, 3ms is 3ms and will mean you win a little less often.
The saying we have in bike racing marginal gains is "leave no stone unturned, but turn over the big ones first"
So sure, first make sure your internet connection is solid. Then make sure your hardware and game settings are optimizing FPS to a reasonable point of diminishing returns.
Lag compensation means ping is an entirely different phenomena with different effects from input latency. While details vary between games for the most part pieces of the game like hitting enemies (but not being hit yourself) and moving your own character are operating on a local simulation with zero latency from ping.
There are weird consequences of this, someone can shoot you after you duck behind a wall because you hadn't yet in their version of the game. An enemy moving left right repeatedly is likely vibrating in your version of the game faster than the rules of the game would otherwise allow. Etc. Ping matters, but it's not comparable to input latency. Input latency really does mean that you can click at the right time and miss your enemy. It really does delay how fast your camera spins when you move your mouse. Etc.
Since 4ms is already about at the limit of my input latency tolerance for snappiness, I came to a different conclusion: "Wayland VRR" is the only tolerable Wayland option.
I have no idea about gaming but in the music world you start noticing latency when it is above 5ms and the difference between 5 and 8ms is tangible. For the most part anything under 10ms is workable and you will quickly adapt as long as the latency is constant. Under 10ms of latency is a level of latency we are used to dealing with, if you are playing guitar and your amp is 10 feet from you, you have ~9ms of latency. Our brains are pretty good at adapting to these short latencies as long as they are predictable.
The visual latency on gaming could be different but I suspect not, I think it is more an issue that some people fixate on the latency, others just accept and adapt to it. Games do have more possible sources of latency, visual, audio and io, and if these can all be different that can be difficult; years ago I had an issue with this and midi, that one really threw me off. Games may also not model the physics of sound? does sound travel slower than light in games? That could worsen the problem since sound does travel slower in real life and we are used to that, we expect it.
It's very valuable data that everything is so close. It means that most folks can simply ignore it. On the other hand the inferior nature of xwayland well explains the bad rep for wayland latency.
Consider also that people neither run the latest thing nor the fastest software and remember potholes long after they are filled. EG it wasn't that long ago that wine was running on xwayland almost exclusively for instance and the majority of popular titles run via wine.
While reaction response is around 100ms, for predictive movements, ie press a button exactly when a bouncing ball hits the ground, average people can get down into 5-7ms of timing accuracy[1]. Trained people can get below 4ms in certain cases.
Of course, the brain adapts. I played an online shooter at >100 FPS using my 144 Hz monitor (when that was the best). I visited a buddy who's PC could only muster 30-40 FPS, and he asked me to show me how I played, since he struggled.
I sucked so bad due to the extra input lag. Felt like my character was running in a pool of molasses. But after about 15-20 minutes my body adapted, and my performance started increasing and my hits started connecting more reliably. I got to about 90% of my regular performance after 30 or so minutes.
So while one could tell back to back, one could also compensate. But at some point the extra input lag will matter, and will get you killed or make you miss that shot. Hence why I could only get up to ~90% of my normal performance on my buddy's PC.
As noted in the paper I linked to, display framerate did not affect the timing precision of their participants, from 120Hz down to 24Hz. So it's more about feeling it rather than seeing it.
If you can be accurate to below 5ms, an additional millisecond of input lag makes a big difference.
That paper measures our margin of error when syncing to a perfectly predictable rhythm, not our ability to detect system latency. Applying that to an FPS doesn't really work for two reasons. First, enemies are erratic, meaning you are mostly relying on your reactive visual-motor pipeline, which is bottlenecked by ~150ms anyway. Second, even for purely predictive shots, your brain subconsciously calibrates out fixed hardware lag.
I'll concede that pure prediction absolutely exists in FPS games-like tracking a falling player with the LG in Quake 3 or landing a predictive mid-air rocket. In such cases smoothness of high FPS helps, but adding a 1ms drawing delay to those 500FPS (what the article is about) won't be noticeable at all because your brain naturally calibrates out constant hardware delay.
It directly impacts performance when playing twitch fps games, any input lag causes measurable difference in score. This is before people even notice it happening.
I would love to see some research confirming that 1ms of addition latency that OP claims to be able to perceive impact performance of twitchy FPS players.
As far as I'm aware, you get marginal FPS gains switching kernels. It helps some. It's just a matter of whether the effort is worth it to you. The main change is the scheduler: rather than trying to evenly distribute CPU time to processes, it will prioritize bursty processes.
I've been a fan of Hyprland for gaming so far. Much more configurable for things like VRR/tearing and other precise tweaks via Gamescope than when I was on AwesomeWM with X11. Been especially nice having Lua for configuration, which finally feels very familiar with my AwesomeWM roots.
I moved to OpenSuse and have the same experience/opinion. The only caveat I had in Wayland is Game Streaming. Sunshine/Moonlight work but the input lag is noticeable and there are artifacts in the game. I go back and forth between X11 and Wayland just because X11 better for game streaming but in time I'm sure I'll go full-time into Wayland.
I've set up sunshine + moonlight on Fedora KDE Wayland, and I've played remotely from a different country with unnoticeable input lag (using a gamepad, playing Cyberpunk). The whole thing is even behind WireGuard.
I have very fast internet on both sides, both fiber to the home, with only the tablet running moonlight being on WiFi.
I use gamescope on a separate TTY that directly launches either steam or heroic launcher. I find this works exceptionally well. No window manager needed as you are playing a game full screen anyway. It fixed some other things like HDR too but at a loss of the volume and brightness keys no longer working.
Don't know about gamescope, but the core of my own wine launch script is basically this:
if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ]; then
/usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/dbus-launch "$(readlink -f $0)" "$1" -- -layout singleLayout
fi
pw-cli i || (pipewire & sleep .5 ;\
pipewire-media-session &\
pipewire-pulse &)
cd "$DIR"
exec unshare -rcn $ENGINE "$IMAGE" $ARGS
and the rest of the script is about setting up the environment for the game: setting all the parameters used above, exporting the correct WINEPREFIX, mounting .iso's if required, etc.
I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
Sure, and this also solves those things while having better hardware. I have a shield pro, it hasn't seen a hardware update in a long time. I can game one it, but I need to use the steam link app, not run the games natively. These devices serve similar, but different markets.
I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.
I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.
If you make electronic music using only virtual instruments and effects, it's ok.
But if you play live, record live bands with lot's of mics and need to use physical hardware. Neither Mac nor Linux are an option.
That's great to read. I've used Windows for years for music production and recording, due to lot's of audio interfaces which performed best on Windows than on Mac and Linux.
In lot's of recording studio I went, they almost always have Windows with Cubase in a case of something wrong with Mac and Pro Tools.
I work in AAA; more people using Linux means we'll actually get buy-in for working with Linux as a platform.
Right now Producers and HQ don't want to support it because "theres no money there" and they're bolstered by a crew of developers who have only ever touched Windows who will reinforce the notion that Windows is all you need (because they've sunk their entire career into the platform).
I remember bringing this topic up a decade ago and basically being laughed out of the room, slowly those laughs will become uncomfortable silences, then token support from the passionate, then proper initiatives.
It takes time, yeah, but we're so much further today already than we were 10+years ago.
I don't think that will be the case sadly, just because the majority of gamers don't actually know or care about software having root or kernel level access. In a world where Linux becomes mainstream, AAA games will aim for those users, not hobbyists and enthusiasts like us.
What is the downside of this if I trust the software provider (eg Riot Games or presumably Valve if this ever comes to Linux)? I have recently come around in support of Riot's anticheat because multiplayer competitive games are so damaged without it, even though I use Linux 95% of the time.
It's hard to trust. I have a spare Windows PC where I install whatever on it, and the EA Javelin anticheat has screwed things up before. Wouldn't be doing that on a computer I care about.
Could the kernel have something built in to help with this? Like it can tell a program that nothing else is looking at its memory. And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.
> And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.
That's pretty much a dystopian scenario where you're unable to interact with any network services without using devices with software that's controlled and/or trusted by the service provider. Basically a grave threat to Free Software as a whole, the end of free reimplementations of things you rely on to connect with the society. We already have a glimpse of that on mobile phones controlled by Google and Apple, we don't need more.
There are kinds of games that actually rely on anticheats to be viable, but they're in the tiny minority and I don't think they're worth reorganizing the society over. Most just consider it a solution for problems caused by their incompetently designed netcode.
Linux and Windows both already support secure boot. Anyone is free to make a locked down version of Linux, and they have (game consoles, Android). Desktop Linux has way less market share than Windows. So what would you like SteamOS or the Linux kernel to do? I'm not fond of this stuff, but at least if people are using a partially locked down video game focused Linux, it's better than them going to Windows.
My comment is about remote attestation, which is incredibly user-hostile technology; not secure boot. Secure boot enables remote attestation, but by itself is mostly harmless.
Yes, I mentioned that (have you read my comment??). These are already nightmarish environments and we don't need to copy that nightmare onto other platforms.
Attestation-gated anti-cheat is invasive, and the direction it points is grim.
But "covers for incompetently designed netcode" doesn't hold at all.
Netcode and cheat-resistance are mostly orthogonal. Netcode is latency-hiding — prediction, reconciliation, interpolation. Cheating is the client being an endpoint you don't control. You can have flawless netcode and still get wallhacked, because a wallhack touches the renderer, not the wire. You have to ship that data for the client to draw the level.
Server-side validation kills the cheats that surface as state: speedhacks, teleports, impossible positions; but it's blind to the ones that don't touch state at all. A wallhack reads memory the client holds. A vision aimbot runs on a second machine reading the screen- nothing crosses the network for the server to reject.[0]
That's why the kernel and attestation stuff exists. Not lazy devs papering over a bug: a class of cheat that server authority structurally can't reach, because the cheat never lies to the server.
I understand the dystopia argument, and it's a decent one. "Just write better netcode" isn't.
I'd humbly request that you spend time trying to actually grapple with the problem, there are some exceptionally well paid and talented programmers who are working on this non-stop in the large publishing houses (EA, Ubisoft, Tencent, Activision) who would do anything to avoid paying royalties to shitty software that breaks the performance and reliability of their games: yet for some reason year over year they can't seem to manage it.
Worth understanding why that is, instead of assuming incompetence or malice; perhaps its a harder problem than you think.
> Cheating is the client being an endpoint you don't control.
No, cheating is enabled by the client being trusted despite of inherently not being trustable. The solution is to design the architecture of the game server in a way that makes it not rely on untrusted inputs and doesn't distribute knowledge the player isn't supposed to possess, rather than try to force the clients to be trustable by eliminating general purpose computing from the society. It's not always possible, but IME these cases where it's not are exceptions rather than rule.
Instead, more and more games just reuse some general purpose netcode for $engine to synchronize state between clients and eventually attempt to paper over the issues with that approach using anticheats. I've recently played a multiplayer game where I (accidentally, while messing around for benign reasons) noticed that I could control the global state of the entire map just by sending commands to the server that referred to various objects and they were accepted and broadcast regardless of whether my character had actually possessed them. That's the kind of code that, once the game gets popular enough to attract enough cheaters to cause actual pain, gets an anticheat slapped onto it the most eagerly, as nobody's going to rearchitect their game's entire netcode from scratch if they can just not do that.
Remember Fall Guys? A relatively big budget game with absolutely no reason to trust the client over anything other than the player's own key presses, where you could teleport over the map to instantly win the match? Solved with, of course, EAC.
I know it's frustrating, I really don't care. They can play or do something else. GTA Online from those comments actually does look like a case of bad netcode btw, and it does have kernel anticheat already.
As a reminder, GTA Online is the kind of product that made news here because players had to reverse engineer it to fix basic performance issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339
My thinking would be that because the anticheat is closed source, it makes it a trust exercise in the developer where you've allowed them root access to your machine.
I'd also think outside of the developer's motives, and into any potential vulnerabilities that could use the anticheat as a privilege escalation point or the anticheat itself being given a bad / malicious update.
Thankfully that has been improving [1] and non-kernel is 100% possible today [2] with valve has so much on documentation and support for game and anti cheat developers to accomplish this.
Unfortunately many of these developers believe that kernel-level is mandatory (by virtue of believing that it actually works to prevent _all_ cheating, which we know it doesn't).
An open source kernel doesn't prevent attestation mechanisms. Anticheats on Windows increasingly require Secure Boot, and all others drivers to be signed/whitelisted; they could try to put similar restrictions on supported distros.
Yeah, I imagine Linux support would be more like a supported Linux distro rather than generic Linux support. Something like SteamOS but with kernel anti-cheat and secure boot from the start.
Big question is whether they can make craching the anti-cheat it hard/unpredictable enough that the publishers will trust it. If the publishers release such a platform and someone releases a live distro that can crack it with 3 mouse clicks, that's a lot of wasted effort.
I have no idea how effective the Windows anti-cheat is, but I imagine that Linux tooling in general is going to make it harder to lock a user out of controlling their own machine.
I strongly disagree. There have only ever been a handful of data exploits attributable to kernel-level anti-cheats. On the other hand, developers report that they significantly reduce cheating. As someone who plays online games, this is a tradeoff I gladly make.
I often feel these comments are made by people whose preferred games are not ruined by cheaters. This is happening right now in Arc Raiders, and it's really sad to watch. The developer, Embark, is now investigating using KLAC to reduce the number of cheaters.
As someone who doesn't play online games this is not a trade off I gladly make. Fortunately, however, KLAC will never become part of the Linux kernel, because adding it to an open-source system simply doesn't make sense.
If it doesn't, Linux will always be a second-class platform for gaming. Valve is currently working on solutions beyond user-space, and I hope they succeed. I would like to move to Linux but I'm not willing to give up online games, and I hate playing with cheater.
As I've already said, I don't play online games, and I'm not particularly concerned about all the fuss surrounding anti-cheat measures, so I don't think that suddenly makes Linux a "second-class gaming platform." For the games I do play, it's a first-class platform.
Sure, but maybe this is a different battle? First party Linux support is orthogonal to games not using kernel level anti-cheat solutions.
Tangentially, I wouldn't use kernel level anti-cheats, but if Valve's solution is indicative of the SotA in userspace anti-cheat solutions, there's a lot of room for improvement.
I'm somewhat lucky in that I didn't have to be the one to force that issue, another friend in my gaming group already made the decision that he would switch to Linux and no longer play any games that did not work on Linux/Proton. So it was pretty easy for me to just switch last year.
My thinking was that I’ll use the Steam Machine for whatever I can. If there’s some title that friends really want to play and that requires kernel anticheat, and it exists in geforce now, I’ll do that from the steam machine.
If it’s something even less doable than that… well I’ll do without.
But you're playing with friends, right? So you don't actually need anticheat at all. Or are you playing with friends and random assholes from the internet?
I'm curious because if a game requires anticheat that means there's an intention that I'd be playing with people who would cheat if they could. And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that. I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
> But you're playing with friends, right? So you don't actually need anticheat at all.
There are a lot of games out there where a group of friends parties up and then goes against other parties of friends out there. Sometimes I want to play with my friends against others instead of only against my friends. Its been a pretty common kind of game style for decades.
> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
Yeah, it'd be nice to somehow exclude those assholes who would cheat. Maybe if there was some kind of technology which could limit the ability for people to use cheats, some kind of "anti-cheat". It would probably have to be pretty low level in the system to properly enforce this "anti-cheating" integrity, maybe in the kernel and hardware level?
I'm curious which ones you had trouble with? I switched last week, and have been testing all the games in my library. I'm quite impressed with how all of them just work with zero or little tinkering. The only games I haven't been able to play are the ones with anti cheat that explicitly deny Linux.
In Proton: Age of Empires 2 DE multiplayer went out of sync which ends the game. BeamNG Drive (now Linux native but wasn't a year ago) took 20min to preprocess shaders, then was laggy compared to Windows on the same machine, then reproducibly crashed from a memleak. Both were known issues on ProtonDB, but the rating still said "gold," so I stopped trusting the ratings.
Dolphin is Linux native. Works fine except for the huge input lag using GameCube controllers (via wii u adapter which is the only solid way), which means I can't really use it. Known issue with some driver, I tried a kmod to overclock it but no dice.
It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
I just did this at home, and my 9 year old, without my bias or prompting, was pointing out that sea of thieves and MSFS are both microsoft games but run better on Linux
I can't believe what a non-event it was switching the kids over
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
As a sibling comment pointed out, Reaper is not FOSS, it's fully proprietary. What makes it stand out is its great Linux support, and very generous licensing.
If you want to venture into the FOSS DAW realm on Linux you have to go to LMMS and Ardour. I've played around with them, they're a little bare-bones, but they do work. Issue is I haven't been able to use them properly, because I just can't stand to look at them, they are afflicted with the medium-size open-source project curse of looking particularly horrid. I hope this isn't taken as an affront to any of the developers behind these projects, a DAW is a hard task, but I keep asking myself, out of the set of developers who work on these projects, is there really no one who feels the same way as me? Am I just afflicted with some weird pixel-peeping autism-esque disorder that makes me stare at the constantly-reocurring-throughout-all-FOSS-applications clump of jarringly gradient-ed grey buttons with white icons on them, their round corners contrasting with each other because they're clearly placed way too close together than they were meant to be? (I swear I see this in every mid-scale project using QT and older GTK!)
And I also need to confirm, this isn't just a "slight annoyance" for me, I have genuine issues when I have to concentrate on a project within some application that is suffering from the FOSS UI affliction, my mind wanders to looking at those buttons again, or those #00FF00 greens, or at some label that has clearly seeped a few pixels downwards out-of-alignment with the button it was placed in...
Ugh, I know I have some issues for sure, but I know someone else has to care about this too? It's the main reason why I fail at using non-textual FOSS software, and have to resort to Logic Pro or Ableton!
Sorry for the rant, I had to get it out of me. I wish I had more time in a day, then perhaps I could go to these projects and help out with UI, but I have a feeling my proposals will be rejected, even if I had the time to make them, I have found most FOSS developers are quite happy with how their UI usually looks like, including many people here on this forum.
No, Ardour is disgustingly ugly, so is Gimp and other FOSS apps stuck in the 90s. Some people dig that though I guess.
Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?
Seconding Reaper, great software. Renoise is also extremely fun to use if you’re comfortable with trackers (for midi input not that they track you) and you make electronic music
Thank you for flagging this, indeed you are right. I do have a long list of problems to go through. The editor mostly relies on the browser Audio/Video codecs which I learned after trying FFmpeg out. They have wide support but also a bunch of limitations. Actively working on it, thank you for the feedback. It is the first time I take such a deep dive to all of these.
Closed source is fine, but there are a few other things that are required of LGPL, some of which are
- Provide links to the source of the version of ffmpeg you used in your code
- User should be able to replace the ffmpeg libs with his own compatible builds if you're using dynamically linked libs. For statically linked libs, you need to provide the tools to re-link against a compatible build.
I went through an LGPL review recently so some of this is fresh in my memory, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
You can have multiple WASM modules communicating with each other (though you would probably need extra interop code?), or statically link them into a single module, the concepts work mostly the same
With a browser plugin I'm sure you could swap out a WASM module on the fly, if said plugin doesn't exist, maybe it should. Would make debugging in a prod URL simpler if you can just load a page with a testing WASM file.
Is there a browser plugin enabling to swap out any parts of a website/app with own ones? With prompt/vibe-based input, so any user can customize websites in any imaginable way. Maybe it should.
I knew about the soft copyleft (the source code requirements) but didn't know there was the requirement to have libs be replaceable. Now I want to know how useful that would be in reverse engineering closed systems (particularly nintendos, since I've always had an interest in the homebrew scene there)
iirc, the video player application VLC used to come without any mpeg support, and you had to go through a process to download ffmpeg separately ...not sure how easy it made it to replace individual libs, but I'm also not sure the license requires you to make it easy.
I think you're right, also an interesting aside: LGPL software is even trickier on the iOS app store, where its out of your control to "let the user link" the software. I guess in that case the only real way is to somehow give them access to the linkable files or allow them to pull in your copy of an LGPL library, but for them to run it on their device, good luck...
I'm slowly leaning towards eventually just adopting MPL which is kind of weaker than LGPL but more friendly for iOS, course I mostly just default to MIT license these days. I prefer to let my users use my software however they want without fear that if they someday overhaul my code and build something that works for them, that they would lose it.
I'm just here to share my love for this film. I'm a big movie fan. I've been watching the Fifth Element since high school, and I've only grown to appreciate it more and more as a film as I get older.
It's so full of life, creativity, color, humor, and themes we can all relate to (purpose, love, loss, etc).
This is peek Bruce Willis, and the movie is filled with other exceptional actors including Gary Oldman and Ian Holm. Milla Jovovich is extremely entertaining to watch as a sort fish-out-of-water, and I know Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone but in my opinion it's right on-brand for the film. Cracks me up every time for decades.
Mostly the effects have aged really well. That's generally thanks to heavy use of practical effects, as this article highlights.
I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.
> Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone
Yeah this comment to me is incredibly surprising. Chris Tucker played an absolutely incredible character in that movie. So creative, so well executed, so memorable.
He was up there with Bruce Willis as top two in that film.
Such a brilliant movie - and definitely feels like a lost art.
I'm blown away by the idea of not using Chris Tucker for Ruby Rhod. It is like imagining anyone but Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. They are basically perfect castings.
Agreed -- it's a wonderful film, and deserves a special place right up there with Star Wars and Harryhausen for its practical effects.
While the article mentions Moebius, I think this level of praise still merits an extra Incal callout, even if it just serves as a recommendation to those who want more of this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incal
I must have watched it at least 8 times, and only on the 9th time did I pause and realize that in this movie the hero and villain never meet. Willis and Oldman almost cross at the elevator but never actually meet.
> I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.
Another one of the things that I appreciated from George Miller with Mad Max: Fury Road. There's definitely CG used, but so much of the stunts were real and not SpiderMan level nonsense.
In the recent Mad Max films, Miller used CG for compositing, but insisted that all the action be real. There are no CG people jumping bikes over 16-wheelers. CG was only used to get rid of safety equipment, change the sky, etc.. The results feel viscerally real.
Guitar dude's exploding rig was definitely CG. Don't kid yourself that it was limited to what you stated. Yes, the stunts were real humans, but it also had CG elements
I'm talking about the end of the flamethrower guy when the rig wrecks. There's a bunch of debris that flies around including the steering wheel that perfectly comes at camera spinning exactly times so the center wipes the frame. That sequence has lots of CG
This has tended to be significantly overblown recently with a huge amount of 'no CGI' advertising coming from studios, which often verges into utter BS. There's an incredible amount of CG at every level of modern productions, regardless of how much stuntwork and practical effects were done as well. (this video series has a good breakdown on it, which has included studios releasing doctored 'behind the scenes' footage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo ).
That's not to say that doing these things is pointless or unimpressive, but it's often used to denigrate and minimize the work of a lot of already quite underappreciated artists.
I thought slightly less of the casting for Fifth Element after I learned about the "Born Sexy Yesterday" thing in conjunction with Luc Besson's personal life. Same with Leon.
Hmm, I mean that "thing" appears to be the opinion of one guy on YouTube. Which he is entitled to of course, but I don't necessarily agree.
Especially considering he's using Leeloo as "the most quintessential example" but then also "emphasizes that the Born Sexy Yesterday trope intensifies the dynamic by positioning women as submissive rather than equal partners", which is clearly not really the case here.
Or for example a scene early on where Korben tries to kiss her, to which she reacts with a gun to his head and says "never without my permission". Doesn't really sound very innocent or without agency to me.
I get the point of the analysis and it's certainly not completely wrong, but it seems to be a bit far-fetched and incoherent to be honest.
That's a pretty wild take, but ok. I think you really have to be digging deep and "looking for trouble" to take issue with a fun and relatively wholesome movie like Fifth Element.
I love it too, and the best part is, I had not heard of it until my buddy dragged me to the theater to see it. I was completely blown away, and have watched it dozens of times over the years. I had the same experience when my mom took me to see the Matrix. I didn't watch much TV back then and didn't keep up with movie previews.
I don't believe it to be honest; model making and painting remains a popular hobby for millions of people, the only question is whether filmmakers will want to use it.
And recently, especially in e.g. Star Wars franchise entries, they have gone towards using models / sets again instead of just using CGI for everything.
CGI has amazing and always given me a wonderful advance for film making as a cinefile but I absolutely do not like how it replaced everything in movies for a while. Absolutely slop seeing actors in a green room trying to act through scenes and sfx puke we get instead of better directing, practical effects and magic of movies.
I agree that now we are finding our way back to a balance of using everything together to tell stories and I'm personally here for it.
I was flipping channels in a hotel and I assume the Peter Jackson hobbit/Lord of the Rings were on. The scene I watched was some sort of interior castle scene and it looked really bad. I felt like it was very flat and cardboardy and filmed on VHS.
But I wonder at what point digital effects become 'good enough' in some sense that they never look aged beyond the containing film. At some point surely there's no more perceptible 'resolution' to be had.
In practice digital effects haven’t approached being convincing the way practical effects do. In many cases, especially when used liberally, digital effects still clock as amazing digital effects rather than reality. It can be enjoyable but I don’t see what would move forward other than recognizing cgi isnt the best solution for everything.
This is not true, you just don't notice the vast majority of effects. You sit down to watch a summer blockbuster, there are 1000 shots that have been altered, pretty much anything that isn't two people talking in a room.
The advertising tries to tell you "we did everything practical!", it's always a lie and you believe it.
True, but that’s using “effects” in a broader sense than people seem to mean here. The discussion seems to be about the visible effects the audience experiences as effects, and whether those age well, not invisible digital cleanup, compositing, or set extension.
It's not true either way. Very little is actually practical, it's just that when something looks good people think it is practical because they want to believe that.
Marketing feeds into this and tells people movies were done all practical or made "heavy use of practical effects" and it's just lies.
Even before this people were saying stuff like mad max was done "almost all practical" because they saw behind the scenes stuff of flipping a few cars even though the movie is wall to wall digital effects. Sometimes the elaborate "practical effects" don't even move right and are used for reference and completely replaced.
This comment doesn't respond to what I actually said. I said that heavy-handed CGI tends to read as CGI. You responded by "informing" me that more nuanced CGI is commonplace. Everybody knows that.
That's not at all what you said in your first comment, this is a total back pedal.
Let's forget for a second that "heavy handed cgi" is tautological because it wouldn't look "heavy handed" if it looked real, and forgetting that some things like energy beams have no analogue in real life so are obviously effects.
You said "digital effects haven’t approached being convincing the way practical effects do" and the truth is this isn't true at all, you just don't know that you're seeing digital effects and you think you're looking at photography or something practical.
i don't remember that, was that when he was talking to the food truck guy? heh "last time i checked my msgs one was from my wife saying she was leaving me, the next msg was from my lawyer saying he was leaving.. with my wife." lol so many great lines.
hah whenever i see a Stay Clear sign i whisper to myself, "i'm trying". Oldman did an amazing job btw, i really enjoyed every scene he was in, "you saved my life, so i'll spare yours".
Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.
However, I've also learned recently it depends what you're doing.
Software development, I just want one single maximized window on a single laptop monitor. If I have a near-retina DPI monitor with 120hz+ (I can't deal with low DPI fuzziness and low refresh all day) I'll usually have a 3-4 window layout on a single monitor with the IDE taking up half the screen.
There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.
Music production? Man, I could probably use like 3+ monitors. Main stems view, a separate monitor for open VSTs, a separate monitor for video, a separate one for piano roll maybe. The window juggling gets really cumbersome on a single monitor.
My friend who is a professional musician (makes music for TV shows) uses 3 large TVs for music production.
> Do you not feel like there's a similar hit from switching full screen windows?
I feel like it should be, but in practice it isn't.
Sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but switching between windows on the same screen has near-zero context loss.
I also use a 3x3 grid of workspaces (center one is browser, all the others are dedicated to a single project/context/session/task each), and navigating workspaces (modifier+shift+arrows) also has near-zero contextual hit.
Even more counter-intuitively, while a second screen produces a large and irritating context-switch cost, using a little (physical, pen-and-paper) notepad next to me has even less context-switch loss than switching windows or workspaces do. It happens without me even realising it - sometimes I'd arise from a long session of coding and be surprised at some notes I made while coding.
There's probably something learnable about the human mind in all of this.
Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case)
If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.
This is why I use no window management. Windows are arbitrary sizes of what I happened to drag out last time. Windows piled on top of eachother. Some stuff in the back of the pile dates back weeks. A couple other piles of various windows in other desktop spaces. I like to think it is like a messy desk. Maybe closer to how we think in real life. Like you the tiling was a lot of faff. What goes where, how big shoudl they be? How can I fit xyz on both these windows but they can only be 5 inches wide to fit it all on the screen? All that friction and mental load fades away with the pile of junk method of window management. You'd be surprised how easily you find things in that pile too.
After having tried many tiling window managers over the years, I have also come to the conclusion that the ‘pile of windows’ model (sometimes spread across desktops) works best for me.
The most important thing is to have a way to search through the pile. (Raycast window search is pretty good.)
I haven't used hyprland. I can answer your questions for XMonad, assuming you're using a typical standard layout.
> If you created a window right now, where will it go?
The new window becomes the focused window. It's inserted into the master position. Existing windows shift down the (conceptual) stack.
> Does it use your focused window?
It uses the same screen space, yes.
> Which window will it take its space from?
All of the other visible windows. It recomputes the tiles so that all tiles except the master become smaller, to make room for the new one.
> Your mouse position?
By default, mouse position is ignored. XMonad is keyboard-centric by design. You can set a mouse-follow configuration variable if you want. I've never tried it.
> If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them?
It recomputes the tiles in much the same way as above. It's as though you deleted the window from the tiling and it becomes floating. And vice versa. It's a very consistent model.
I find it very natural and predictable. As far as "cognitive load" goes, that seems like an exaggeration, but again I haven't used hyprland.
If by "hand control" you mean using the mouse, that's definitely not needed for window management. In fact by default, XMonad doesn't even support resizing tiles using the mouse, and I've never tried to enable that. I do commonly use the mouse for switching focus, usually because I'm navigating to some location in another window anyway, in which case focus moves automatically.
I'm using Hyprland right now for its wayland support, but IMO so far the best mental model for window management I've seen is that of herbstluftwm with static layouts (you can still use dynamic tiling and tabs with it of course)
Yes, I tried a tiling window manager for about an hour and then stopped. It was absolute madness as the window size and positioning was seemingly random. I can't comprehend how anyone can use them
Used to use AwesomeWM for almost a decade before I forced myself to simplify to Gnome for other reasons, but I never felt like window sizing and positioning was random, it always opened in the logical place, which I kind of feel like is the whole value proposition of a window manager in the first place.
For curiosities sake, what window manager did you try?
I prefer desk based management. Windows like papers on my desk, piled on top of eachother peaking out from the sides. Seems chaotic but it is more aligned with how your brain works in the meatspace than looking at a bunch of things at once.
Agreed. However, I just recently "launched" a side project and Cloudflare made a lot of the stuff you mentioned easier. I also found that using AI helped with setting up my LLC when I had questions.
Exactly. The "writing code" part is literally the easiest part of building a software business. And that was even before LLM assisted coding. Now it's pretty much trivial to just spew slop code until something works. The hard parts are still: making the right thing, making it good, getting feedback and idea validation, and the really hard part is turning it into a business.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, why didn't the various police cruisers and even the ambulance itself just push the damn thing out of the way? That's what the push bars attached to the front of their vehicles are for.
When my mom was a firefighter, and a car was blocking a hydrant, she happily broke windows and pushed the hose right through the car. Didn't happen a lot, but did happen more than once.
A human police over eventually got into the drivers seat to move the car. They sat around for minutes before doing so. They could’ve gotten into it immediately.
But yea they absolutely could’ve also just slammed it and moved on too.
The cops only do that if they can be sure they will be able to charge someone else for the damages. For their vehicle, for their "injuries", and also adding in to their department bonuses, but they get none of that if they can't charge somebody with a crime easily. Ambulances aren't really made to do that and are crazy expensive, plus the drivers would likely be taking on a bunch of the liability from the crash, although the ambulance itself likely would survive just fine because they are tough. The fire department are the only ones that have the trifecta of vehicles made to push other vehicles out of the way, are not paid by the extent that they can extort people for money, and are not going to be held liable for damages.
Ambulances can be seriously damaged by attempting to do it. Police cruisers can do it, but then they may be sued for damages. I know that cars blocking fire hydrants were a serious problem in the past and owners sued firemen for pulling water hoses through their cars after breaking the windows - the law was not allowing it even if the line through the car was the only option.
> owners sued firemen for pulling water hoses through their cars after breaking the windows - the law was not allowing it even if the line through the car was the only option.
I'll bet anything you have no citation for this.
Sovereign immunity and necessity combine to make sure that firefighters and cops can do whatever the fuck is required.
The aftermath is even more brutal. You will receive multiple tickets for this, you will receive a bill for damages to the hose they had to thread through your windows (or to the police car that rammed you out of the way), and your car insurance will point to a clause in their policy that says that you are personally on the hook for all of this.
You may even face civil or even criminal liability for any damages to whatever is on fire, or loss of life, that a good prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer can convince a jury is directly traceable to your egregious conduct in parking your precious car in front of the damn fire hydrant.
The articles I can find say he's staying on as a EP, just stepping down as the main show runner. That seems very different than leaving the show behind.
What are the options, then?
In my apartment I’m running 2 AirGradients. One in the bedroom and one in the main room.
Awesome little devices, btw. They monitor temp, humidity, CO2, TVOC, and various particulate matter metrics. They expose prometheus metrics for scraping, and can be configured through a REST API to never phone home. I’ve got grafana alerts set up to push notifications to my phone when things get to “bad” ranges.
Anyway, the big issue is that the only way I’ve found to clear CO2 and TVOC is to open windows. However, windows open means increased humidity and particulate matter, even with air purifiers running aggressively. Also, opening windows at night kind of sucks for obvious reasons. In the summer it also sucks to lose that cool air.
I found these devices you put in your window, sort of like window fans, that can open/close airflow completely, but they don’t fit in my side-opening windows.
The only other thing I can think of is some kind of home automation with a little gadget that cracks the window until the metrics are back in an acceptable range. My AC unit unfortunately does not have a mode where it takes air from outside. I know some things like this exist for opening blinds, etc, but haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.
Anyone find a good way to solve this problem?