I spoke against the need for realistic graphics last time the topic came up, and I’ll say a word in favour of it now: It’s pretty awesome having realistic lighting and shadows when you’re admiring the scenery in Skyrim. My 6600 can barely keep up, but the work it’s doing there is fully aesthetically worthwhile. The same can’t be said for every GPU-hungry game that comes out, and it may not have the central importance that it used to, but nice graphics are still nice to have. I say that as someone who appreciates NetHack at least as much as any new AAA game.

For the people unaware of how different the game I’m talking about is from the one Bethesda released in 2011, I recommend Gate To Sovngarde as one place to start if you want to find out.

The front page, huh. Slow news day I guess. Those who don’t already know about it are probably underestimating how many Skyrim mods exist, and how many new ones are being created every day.

The new Community Shaders also seems good. Things I learned include:

DynDOLOD — If you reduce texture sizes one step more then maybe it won’t try to use more RAM than exists in the entire universe when it runs. Finally got my grass LODs sorted out.

Pandora Behaviour Engine — The latest release version works for me, but only after letting the Proton 9.0 beta install a new wine prefix. I’m not sure how long I’ve been using the older one, but Skyrim itself still seems to prefer it, good thing I kept a backup.

Bluesky as a whole should also join the fediverse.

The fediverse is the one halfway viable alternative to the rotten big platforms that has a chance and I continue to be perplexed that Ed Zitron isn’t on it. We’re building the future of social media over here. Maybe that was you back in 2018, giving up after two days when it turned out you didn’t have an instant audience of millions after two days on mastodon. Maybe the problem didn’t seem so urgent back then. Maybe you got a bad first impression for some other reason. Try again. You make the case for it without being part of it. Join the fediverse, Ed.

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the linux world may be lacking in some things, but I’m pretty sure “configuration tools for sysadmins” is not one of them.

I wonder how many of those one in four people are even aware that everything they say gets uploaded to a data centre somewhere. I had a phone with speech recognition as a prominent feature until I wiped it and installed a different OS, and I don’t remember seeing any warning at all about that.

I like the way she’s cheerful and optimistic, and ready to throw fireballs at anything that stands in the way.

I’m not usually going to have a Skyrim follower, but if I’m going to have a Skyrim follower it’s definitely Sa’chil.

An interesting factoid buried under three layers of stupidity. The gist of it is that watching video uses electricity.

That’s not ignorance, it’s malice. Elon has made it clear that he’d like nothing better than to require everyone to show their official ID for “age verification” purposes before being allowed to use social media. I’m not sure exactly why. Easier to file lawsuits against anyone who uses it to make fun of him, or perhaps it’s just one small step in some kind of grand totalitarian vision of the future. But he can’t hope to get away with imposing it on Twitter unless competitors are required to do the same.

Someone said jokingly that the tiktok algorithm is so good that it can tell when you’re a researcher looking for evidence that tiktok pushes people towards political extremes, and show you exactly what you’re looking for. I thought it was funny, but it also seems like it might be sort of close to what happened here. Normal people would not just passively watch all that shit without reacting in some way.

Disappointingly, Tiktok could not figure out my desires at all when I tried it. I liked one exceptionally good dance video and then it just kept showing me superficially similar dance videos that weren’t so good no matter what I tried to get it to stop.

Okay I guess I had enough of this “playing some other games” phase. There’s that new vicn mod too. Back to Skyrim it is.

Apparently I have fewer problems with it than some. It’s snap. Maybe I could come up with some other minor complaints, but nothing big really. It’s mostly just snap. That is what prevents me using or recommending Ubuntu any more.

Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).

On my system that consistently gets results around 10s and 5s so the difference is sort of interesting. Mine’s a Ryzen 3600, maybe newer CPU features are of substantial benefit to xz.

The .tar.xz format decompresses more than twice as fast as .tar.bz2, allowing you to get up and running in no time

$ time tar xjf firefox-134.0b3.tar.bz2 

real    0m9.045s
user    0m8.839s
sys     0m0.450s

$ time tar xJf firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz                                                

real    0m4.903s
user    0m4.677s
sys     0m0.510s

Nice! Presumably it’d be twice as fast if disk was infinitely fast or something. Unfortunately by testing this I’ve already used up a hundred times more time than I’ll ever save as a result of it.

There are currently zero bluesky servers that aren’t fully dependent on bsky.app.