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Our jackdaw regular will tear up things around it and throw them around when it gets frustrated (such as when it wants a treat without having to put in any effort).

It could simply be bold and really frustrated.

Well I upvoted the post so that people will see the comments!

You managed to get your money back?! How?

I think that’s an american thing. Besides, that money is long gone since I made the purchase several years ago.

I asked for a refund when they kept delaying shipment of my Librem 5. I was simply denied and that was it. They told me I could still choose to receive the phone, but I don’t want it since it’s a bad, practically useless product now.

I reported them in my country for it.

I don’t remember encountering the particular bug they’re describing. I was hoping it was about the behaviour of drag-and-dropping something into the browser, such as with those “drop a file here to upload”. I am often simply unable to make that work because instead of the thing being dropped into the webpage’s element, it opens the file in the browser instead, which is not really something I ever want to do.

Same problem, 1070, NixOS Plasma

While it’s possible that this is the case, we don’t actually know that because the people with the right skills aren’t spending a lot of time and resources on experimenting with new ideas and concepts unless there’s profit to be made from it.

Chances of coming up with an idea for a new kind of OS that will bring great return on investment in terms of profit and market share are very low, so entrepreneurs are spending their time thinking about more lucrative ventures.

If we lived in a post-scarcity Communist society where everyone is free to do what they feel is important and fulfilling to them, we’d be more likely to see new and novel ways of interfacing with computers (and technology in general).

But we don’t.

Edit: Also, operating systems are a lot of work.

I finally got around to restarting my system after adding hardware.nvidia.modesetting.enable = true; to my NixOS config and it works perfectly! Thank you for the suggestion. I likely wouldn’t have figured that out on my own any time soon.

Thanks for the suggestion. sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset indeed prints N, so I’ll try adding that to my system config.

I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.

I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.

Good news is that we humans are complex adaptive systems! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.

(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)

Ok I’m done rambling.

As soon as it works. A recent update included Plasma 6.0.2 (on NixOS unstable/24.05) which apparently defaults to wayland, but it just exits to login right away. I’m not in a mood to tinker, so for now I plan to simply wait for things to Just Work. When I select “wayland” and things work and look the same (or better) is when I’m happy to rid myself of the horror that is X11, because as horrible as X11 is, it simply isn’t giving me trouble these days - my system is stable and I like keeping it that way.

Edit: perhaps important to mention that I’m using a GTX 1070.

Edit 2: I realise that I’m sort of contradicting myself with how I worded the above. I don’t mean to imply that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything to embrace Wayland; just that as it stands I don’t think the benefits of Wayland outweighs my ability to use this computer the way I need to.

There’s another thread just like this one posted 2 hours earlier in this same community, fyi.

Just gonna copy my comment from there:

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

While all of it is doable, be aware that it takes time and effort to learn Nix and NixOS. It can be difficult to figure out how to get a particular environment set up properly. There is a lot of documentation, but it doesn’t always give easy answers if you have specific requirements for a particular dev environment and such.

It’s been a few years since I worked with Unity3D professionally, but I did so in NixOS with very little trouble. Rust has very good Nix infrastructure and so do many other languages. I can’t tell you anything about UE5 or the other proprietary tools, but there are FHS-compatibility helpers (steam-run usually works fine when I need to run arbitrary binaries made for ‘normal’ distros).

If you’re willing to figure things out sometimes (and especially in the beginning) and are motivated to take your OS to the next level, NixOS is definitely worth it. Been using it for many years and I can’t imagine ever using a mutable OS again as a daily driver (unless the way I use my computer drastically changes). I configured everything just the way I want it; it’s magical to have almost everything in one place and being able to try different things without fear of breaking something.

I didn’t know about this game. I love pirate stuff. The boats and aesthetics of that era, the natural environments of the Caribbean, the relevant sociopolitical developments at the time, and of course the stories and mythologies… but Skull and Bones fails to interest me even the slightest bit.

It appears to be an arcade game where you just press keys to move your ship around, shoot at things until their health bar depletes, and go around playing minigames to collect loot/resources. I don’t know anything about the story content but I’m willing to bet there’s at best some passably written character arc but nothing resembling a deep commentary on the relevant issues of that time (nor our time).

I’m almost laughably far from being a representative of the average gamer but the number of 'A’s assigned to titles (so far) hasn’t been indicative of quality as I perceive it. Budget and effort is mostly orthogonal to the artistic and creative value of a work.

That seems like it should work in theory, but having used Perplexity for a while now, it doesn’t quite solve the problem.

The biggest fundamental problem is that it doesn’t understand in any meaningful capacity what it is saying. It can try to restate something it sourced from a real website, but because it doesn’t understand the content it doesn’t always preserve the essence of what the source said. It will also frequently repeat or contradict itself in as little as two paragraphs based on two sources without acknowledging it, which further confirms the severe lack of understanding. No amount of grounding can overcome this.

Then there is the problem of how LLMs don’t understand negation. You can’t reliably reason with it using negated statements. You also can’t ask it to tell you about things that do not have a particular property. It can’t filter based on statements like “the first game in the series, not the sequel”, or “Game, not Game II: Sequel” (however you put it, you will often get results pertaining to the sequel snucked in).

Well I don’t know what you are referring to, but I’m not going to argue about your perception. I listened to the whole thing again (there are usually things that pass me by the first time, so I don’t mind doing that for the interesting episodes) and I don’t know how he could have done a better job at steering the conversation. He’s a podcast host; he needs to pick at the parts that are of particular interest to him and his audience in a limited amount of time, as well as keeping the level of technicality just right so as to be digestible.

For someone familiar with the topic, it’s natural to feel like they could have gone on about something at a more advanced level, and for someone entirely unfamiliar, it’s natural that they would want to linger on things they don’t quite get instead of moving on to something else.

Anyway, I’m not really going anywhere with this. Just curious about your perception since I tend to think of SC as someone quite smooth and approachable around people (unlike me). I guess even he can’t be smooth enough for everybody all the time.

I’m relistening to that episode now because I’m curious about what it is you perceived.

He interjects sometimes to help tie things together (“and this is interesting because of [earlier observation]”) or to adjust the level of technicality to suit his intended audience (“we’re allowed to use the word torus here”). Not all Mindscape guests have a solid feel for the podcast and default to giving popscience breakdowns with analogies and leaving out technical jargon, and so he has to set the bar a bit by explicitly allowing the introduction of technical terms and bringing together of complex related topics.

Don’t know if that’s what made you feel like he was trying to show off.

Climate change denial is too common here. Our third (nearly second) largest political party is neofascist and “sceptical” of climate change. Lot’s of conspiracy theories and “alternative truths” floating around in that demographic.