Mikina

@Mikina@programming.dev

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Mikina,

I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.

I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.

I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.

And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.

Mikina, (edited )

I was using LibreWolf before, but I really like the idea of bundling VPN + Browser, and also the way they handle payments - not only is Mullvad VPN kind of cheap, I can just pay with crypto and don’t need any account (kind of - you just generate username that also serves as an password, without any other contact information required).

But what I like the most about it is the idea of making a browser with the goal of having the same fingerprint between users (as much as possible), and offering it with a VPN - becuase that means that most of other users of the VPN will probably also have the same fingerprint from the browser, so you will blend in with them. I wasn’t really sold on the idea of VPN before that and didn’t use one, but this was what convinced me.

But tbh I haven’t done much research into the company, or into the effectivness of their implementation. I’m kind of betting on their cooperation with Tor Browser, which should have most of this stuff already figured out. But it’s possible that other browsers are just better at it, I never checked.

I do however still use LibreWolf for the occasional site that breaks with Mullvad, but it’s not something that happens too often.

I use(d) the VPN alongside it and found the add-on “hints” regarding the correct DNS settings more frustrating than helpful, too.

Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anything about DNS. I think I’ve actually never click on the browser vpn extension, though :D Is it the encrypted DNS hint?

EDIT: Found this, apparently it’s doing pretty well privacytests.org

Mikina,

I’ve been having a pretty good experience with Mullvad, however I don’t hear many people talking about it. I wonder why is that, IIRC it’s being developed with Tor Foundation, and is basically a Tor browser for clear web, and that sounds perfect. So far, I didn’t run into any issues, so is there a catch, or are they just not well enough known yet? Or, maybe people are turned away by their optional VPN?

Mikina,

Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.

Mikina,

Thank you! My main issue is that while I’m familiar with all those algorithms, its usually pretty simple to find how do they work and how to use them for very basic stuff, but its almost impossible to research into actual best practices in how and when to use them, once you are working on moderately complex problem, especially stuff like formations, squad cooperation and more complex behavior (where I.e behavior trees start to have issues once you realize you have tons of interrupt events at almost every node, defeating the point of behavior trees - which can happen if you’re using them wrong, but no one usually talks about it at that level).

And I’m also dealing with issue that isn’t really mentioned too much, and that is scale. Things like GOAP would probably be infeasible to scale at hundreds of units on the screen, which require and entirely different and way less talked-about algorithms.

I’ve eventually found what I needed, but I did have to resort to reading through various papers published on the subject, because just googling “efficient squad based AI behavior algorithm” will unfortunately not get you far.

But its possible that I’m just being too harsh, and that the search results were always the same level of depth - only my experience has grown over the years, and such basic solutions are no longer sufficient for my projects, and it makes sense that no-one really has a reason to write blog posts of such depth - you just publish papers and give talks about it.

Aside from the AI related keywords. I’m still salty about what the buzzword did to my search results.

Mikina,

I’d recommend getting Kagi.com. It’s one of the best software investments I’ve recently made, it makes searching for technical questions so much better, because they have their own indexer with a pretty interresting philosophy behind it. I’ve been using it for a few months by now, and it has been awesome so far. I get way less results from random websites that are just framing clicks on any topic imaginable by raping SEO, and as an added bonus I can just send selected pages, such as Reddit, to the bottom of search results.

Plus, the fact that it’s paid, I don’t have to worry about how they are monetizing my data.

Mikina,

While I did see Kagi recommended on Lemmy, I’ve made the switch because of a recommendation by my colleague at work (now that I thing about it, that would funnily probably be the case even if I was actually working for Kagi :D), and it has been a nice experience so far. Plus, we’ve just been talking about it today at the office, so I was in the mood of sharing :D But I haven’t done any actual search comparisons, so it may just be placebo. I’d probably say it’s caused by a lot people trying to be more privacy-centric here, and mostly deeply against large corporations, so the software recommendations tend to just turn into an echo-chamber.

As for the second point, yeah, I guess you are right, Brave Browser being one of the finest examples of it. But it’s a good reminder that I should do some research about the company and who’s behind it, just to avoid the same situation as with Brave, thanks for that.

Mikina, (edited )

This right here. I’ve spent a few hours troubleshooting why I can’t play Hell Let Loose, which also uses EAC, even though it should support Linux. Turned out, that you need to specifically search for (in your Library) and install “Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime”, which is a separate game that for some reason didn’t get installed when you install the game.

I suppose it’s going to be the same with Battlebit, because I’m sure I played it on Linux and had 0 issues.

Mikina, (edited )

if you’re an atheist you can’t just willingly choose to believe

I wouldn’t really agree with this. As a programmer, I was always sceptical and an atheist, but I never had problems with believing into something obviously not true, such as when LARPing or TTRPGs. And when I once got into a rabbit hole of mysticism in high-school, one of the movements I read about was advocating for doing “paradigm shifts”, forcing yourself to believe into a specific religion, like truly believe, so you can try it out in practice and see whether you get something out of it or not and should move on. And since that felt like a fun experiment, I tried it with various dogmas or religions, and once you get over the inherent jugement and feeling pretty stupid chanting, drawing circles and burning incense in your room (which may take a while), you may get to point where you slowly convince yourself to believe. That is, if you are serious about it. And it’s also pretty fun.

But of course, it’s not for everyone.

Mikina,

How does Mint compares to Fedora? I decided to finally switch almost a month ago, and went with Fedora because it seemed like the best solution for general development, and I really like their Toolbox. However, I’ve been running into some issues mostly regarding gaming and NVIDIA drivers, and in general getting some applications to work on Fedora was more painful than apparently in most of the other systems.

So, should I switch, or will the Wine/Steam/Lutris experience be mostly the same on Mint as it is on Fedora?

Mikina, (edited )

I went with Fedora when switching almost a month ago now, and I’ve been having issues with some games not working as expected, and also had trouble getting NVIDIA drivers to work correctly (which I’ve already solved, I hope). (And some applications weren’t working at all, such as Unity)

What would you consider as major advantages of Fedora, in addition to what you mentioned? So far, I usually couldn’t find a Fedora-specific version of the applications I wanted, unlike for other more well-known distributions. I do work as a programmer, which was also why I choose Fedora - I really like their Fedora Toolbox, but I would like to game regurarly on my PC and so far, it seems that Fedora doesn’t really handle it too well. Will I have similar issues on other distros, or will switching to something like Pop!OS be worth the time?

EDIT: Just found out about Nobara, I guess I’ll give that one a try.

Mikina,

I know its a joke, but cutting PFF power is never a good idea. It makes any kind of forensics a lot harder, and its probably not going to help anyway. You should isolate the computer from the network, and then call a professional.

However, putting the computer to sleep/hibernate it may help, just so I.e ransomware can’t continue encrypting, but maybe still has keys in memory, if you’re lucky. This is only my theory, though, not sire what are the best practices.

Mikina,

I’m also running NVIDIA (RTX 4070), and while I did have to try drivers from a few different sources, I eventually got it working pretty quickly.

But my mistake was choosing an OS that doesn’t bundle non-free drivers (Fedora), from what I’ve heard some distros like Ubuntu come with NVIDIA support by default, so I guess that’s also an option.

Mikina,

I literally did this two weeks ago, switched Win11 for Fedora and so far it has been an amazing experience. So far, I only had to dual boot to Win once, and that was because I wanted to play some SteamVR games, which is the only thing I didn’t manage to get working (I know there’s ALVR, but SteamVR refuses to launch for me unfortunately).

Just go for it, get a new SSD drive and dual boot your choice of distro. You can always go back, and unless you use bitlocker you can just access your windows files from the Linux, so there’s not need to move stuff around that much. With dualboot, you have nothing to loose.

Mikina,

True, but iirc there are several alternatives, from different repositories, and i was unlucky enough that j choose the wrong one for the first time.

Mikina, (edited )

That is true, but can’t they (a company that wants to, not the goverment) do that already if they want to, under ChatControl 1.0? And I wouldn’t say that whether a service is E2EE or not makes any difference here - scanning private user messages shouldn’t be allowed, whether they are encrypted or not. IMO if ChatControl 2.0 passed and was made mantadory for everyone, the fact that it is mostly noticable on E2EE apps is only a side-effect of blanket surveilance, and not the main issue with the proposition.

What’s the point of them agreeing that they will let the 1% of users of E2EE services keep their privacy, while they already scan 90% of communication (I mean, just GMail + FB/IG + iCloud, that is already being scanned, makes for most of the worlds communication) for the past year or so?

Now I’m curious whether Facebook/Instagram, who does offer encrypted chats and also scans all your content under ChatControl 1.0 voluntarily, also scans the encrypted chats or not. I’d vager they do, but that’s just a speculation.

But they did briefly mention that they will begin “phasing out” chatcontrol 1.0. I wonder what does that means, and how long will it take.

Mikina,

Just a headsup - don’t focus too much on meds, it won’t really help that much if you’re also lacking willpower.

I have the same problem as you, but have started meds about half a year ago. It helps a little bit, but also made me realize that whenever I’m stressed or have to do something I’m uncertain of, the problems are back.

I thought it’s anxiety that’s stopping me, because right now I have to finish my thesis to hand in in a week, and I’ve been sitting home and staring at the screen unable to work, progressing at a snails pace for two weeks already, to the point I will not be able to make it.

Due to that, I’ve gotten a short term medication for anxiety, because I thought that’s what’s stopping me and I can’t get over it.

It didn’t help, and while I wasn’t feeling that awful, I still didn’t manage to force myself to work more, and even though I would’ve comfortably made it, I progressed so slow that now I probably won’t. But it made me realize that the problem wasn’t anxiety, but willpower, and that the focus on it was just an excuse to justify postponing work.

I’m not saying that meds will not help you, but make sure you don’t fall to the same trap as I did - I used waiting them as an excuse for too long, that I’ve learned to just be OK with procrastinating. And when I finally got them, it didn’t help much , because I never tried building the willpower and have gotten too used to the excuses that even when the “need to wait for meds, nothing I can do” excuse wasn’t true, I was still turning to procrastination by habit. Or you’ll just think “meds aren’t helping, I need stronger”.

If you start forcing yourself, even if at slow pace, to not be OK with procrastination, then the meds will be a miracle that will suddenly make it so you don’t have to struggle so much anymore. If you on the other hand learn to give up trying and accept the excuse that you need the meds and there’s no point, and that it will be easier once you have them - my experience is that it won’t, because then getting rid of the internalization of excuses only made it as hardy, or even harder, than it was without them.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • localhost
  • All magazines
  • Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #