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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • At the time of the K-T extinction, we looked like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatorius

    The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event,[a] also known as the K–T extinction,[b] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth[2][3] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kg (55 lb) also became extinct, with the exception of some ectothermic species such as sea turtles and crocodilians.[4]

    Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion-eaters survived the extinction event, perhaps because of the increased availability of their food sources. Neither strictly herbivorous nor strictly carnivorous mammals seem to have survived. Rather, the surviving mammals and birds fed on insects, worms, and snails, which in turn fed on detritus (dead plant and animal matter)

    Luckily, great-grandaddy squirrel-critter was a survivor and had a taste for insects:

    It is thought to have been rat-sized (6 in (15 cm) long and 1.3 ounces (about 37 grams)) and a diurnal insectivore, which burrowed through small holes in the ground.



  • Looks fine to me.

    Little side question: Will the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the motherboard work in Arch? From what I could gather, the drivers for it should be in the latest kernel, but I’m not 100% sure.

    If they don’t for some reason and you can’t get it working or need some sort of driver fix, can always worst case fall back to a USB dongle or similar until they do. Obviously, preferable not to do that, but shouldn’t wind up stuck without them no matter what.



  • Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

    He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

    The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

    It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.


  • The downside of building the phone/tablet into the car, though, is that phones change more quickly than cars.

    A 20 year old car can be perfectly functional. A 20 year old smarphone is insanely outdated. If the phone is built into the car, you’re stuck with it.

    Relative to a built-in system, I’d kind of rather just have a standard mounting point with security attachments and have the car computer be upgraded. 3DIN maybe.

    I get the “phone is small” argument, but the phone is upgradeable.

    And I’d definitely rather have physical controls for a lot of things.


  • Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

    You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.


  • That’s not a completely reliable fix, a third party library could still call setenv and trigger crashes, there’s still a risk of data races, but we’ve observed a significant reduction in SIGABRT volumes.

    Hmm. If they want a dirty hack, I expect they could do a library interposer that overrides setenv(3) and getenv(3) symbols with versions that grab a global “environment variable” lock before calling the actual function.

    They say that they’re having problems with third party libraries that use environment variables. If they’re using third-party libraries statically-linked against libc, I suppose that won’t work, but as long as they’re dynamically-linked, should be okay.

    EDIT: Though you’ve still got an atomic update problem with the returned buffer, doing things the way they are, if you don’t want to leak memory. Like, one thread might have half-updated the value of the buffer when another is reading the buffer after returning from the interposer’s version of the function. That shouldn’t directly crash, but you can get a mangled environment variable value. And there’s not going to be guarantees on synchronization on access to the buffer, unlike the getenv() call itself.

    thinks

    This is more of a mind-game solution, but…

    Well, you can’t track lifetime of pointers to a buffer. So there’s no true fix that doesn’t leak memory. Because the only absolute fix is to return a new buffer from getenv() for each unique setenv(), because POSIX provides no lifetime bounds.

    But if you assume that anything midway through a buffer read is probably going to do so pretty soon, which is probably true…

    You can maybe play tricks with mmap() and mremap(), if you’re willing to blow a page per environment variable that you want to update and a page of virtual address space per update, and some temporary memory. The buffer you return from the interposer’s getenv() is an mmap()ed range. In the interposer’s setenv(), if the value is modified, you mremap() with MREMAP_DONTUNMAP. Future calls to getenv() return the new address. That gives you a userspace page fault handler to the old range, which I suppose – haven’t written userspace page fault handlers myself – can probably block the memory read until the new value is visible and synchronize on visibility of changes across threads.

    If you assume that any read of the buffer is sequential and moving forward, then if a page fault triggers on an attempted access at the address at the start of the page, then you can return the latest value of the value.

    If you get a fault via an address into the middle of the buffer, and you still have a copy of the old value, then you’ve smacked into code in the middle of reading the buffer. Return the old value.

    A given amount of time after an update, you’re free to purge old values from setenv(). Can do so out of the interposer’s functions.

    You can never eliminate that chance that a thread has read the first N bytes of an environment variable buffer, then gone to sleep for ten minutes, then suddenly wants the remainder. In that case, you have to permit for the possibility that the thread sees part of the old environment variable value and part of the new. But you can expend temporary memory to remember old values longer to make that ever-more unlikely.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.worldWhen I grow up...
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    6 days ago

    I don’t know how viable it’d be to get a viable metric.

    https://www.goldeneaglecoin.com/Guide/value-of-all-the-gold-in-the-world

    Value of all of the gold in the world

    $13,611,341,061,312.04

    Based on the current gold spot price of $2,636.98

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

    He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$227 billion as of November 7, 2024, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[3]

    So measured in gold at current prices, he’d have about one-sixtieth of the present global gold supply.

    However:

    It’s hard to know what the distribution of gold hoards are. One dragon might have an exceptionally large hoard.

    It’s hard to know how many dragons we’re working with.

    It’s likely that a world with dragons has a different value of gold.

    That gold in our world isn’t actually accessible to Bezos at that price. If he tried buying that much, it’d drive up the price, reducing the effective percentage of the global share that he could afford to buy.


  • When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

    If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

    I think that there’s more to it than that.

    My own guesses are:

    • I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

    • Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

    • This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

      In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

      They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

      So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

      kagis

      https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

      Smartphone dependency over time

      Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

      Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

    • I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

    • Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

    • Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.





  • Assuming that this is the episode and the Factorio dev post that references, I think that that’s a different issue. That dev also was using Sway under Wayland, but was talking about how Factorio apparently doesn’t immediately update the drawable area on window size change – it takes three frames, and Sway was making this very visible.

    I use the Sway window manager, and a particularity of this window manager is that it will automatically resize floating windows to the size of their last submitted frame. This has unveiled an issue with our graphics stack: it takes the game three frames to properly respond to a window resize. The result is a rapid tug-of-war, with Sway sending a ton of resize events and Factorio responding with outdated framebuffer sizes, causing the chaos captured above.

    I spent two full days staring at our graphics code but could not come up with an explanation as to why this is happening, so this work is still ongoing. Since this issue only happens when running the game on Wayland under Sway, it’s not a large priority, but it was too entertaining not to share.

    I’d guess that he’s maybe using double- or triple-buffering at the SDL level or something like that.