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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • I fear not so. Maybe for easy stuff. But when it comes to actual troubleshooting, Lemmy is severely limited by its tiny user base.

    (There’s only about 40k monthly active users on Lemmy, and that number includes bot accounts. For comparison, that’s fewer active users than the Crackberry forum or the LTT forum. Reddit has over a billion of daily active users, so around 25 000x as many as Lemmy.)

    Chances are there’s nobody on Lemmy who uses the same hardware, the same distribution and the same DE as me, so if I need help debugging an issue that’s specific to my combination, I’m out of luck.

    Even on Reddit the same is true for many issues. While there might be someone with my exact combination who might even know the answer, that person first has to stumble across my post among the millions of posts that are created every hour on Reddit.

    So chances are if you ask a deeper question than “How do I copy files” you will not get an answer. Instead you likely will just get snark and “RTFM noob!”

    In fact, even though I have been using Linux for well over a decade now, I ran across a problem I couldn’t debug: Games would run fine on my 4070 today, but they’d randomly slow to a crawl (multiple seconds per frame) the next day. I’m a Linux software developer, so I know how to go about this. Reboots and all the usual stuff didn’t help. Logs didn’t show anything relevant. Google didn’t help either. I asked on Stackexchange, but the question was closed as duplicate to an entirely unrelated question. By the time I got it reopened, it was so far down the queue that it didn’t get any answers. Asking on Reddit just got me “Lol, noob, RTFM, works on my machine”-type of answers.

    So I bit the bullet after about a year of getting nowhere and asked AI, and the first answer got me to the right track.

    Turns out, flatpak keeps its own copy of the Nvidia driver. This version needs to be identical to the system driver version. If it’s not, the GPU isn’t used at all and instead it falls back to software rendering. So if I do dnf update and it updates the GPU driver, it breaks the performance. Running flatpak update && reboot fixes it again. So any time I ran dnf update without flatpak update && reboot after it, it would break the performance. And I often ran flatpak update first.

    AI reall can help debugging weird issues.





  • Technical debt is a management term.

    The reason we use it is to tell non-technical management people why implementing a simple feature might take an hour on a fresh project and a week on an old legacy project.

    It’s used to tell them why we shouldn’t go with the quickest and dirtiest solution but instead should go with a more expensive proper solution.

    It also tells management why we might have to spend some time imrpoving our code base without any tangible improvements to the customer.

    And because it’s a term that speaks to non-technical management it uses financial language, becausee that’s what they understand. Technical debt means “I am choosing to cut corners today, but we will have to pay up in the future by fixing stuff that wouldn’t be broken if we do it right today.”

    And because it’s aimed towards non-technical management and not towards developers, it’s of course not very specific. Non-technical management doesn’t need to understand about dependency hell, unclean code or bad developer documentation. That’s not their field and it doesn’t have to be.

    The real problem in OOPs example wasn’t that there’s no clear metric or definition of technical debt. The problem was that non-technical managemnt thought that technical debt is an engineering concept instead of a management one, and thought that they themselves were allowed to meddle with it.

    The right way to handle that is to ask the people who are actually impacted by technical debt what they want to improve. Any developer can quickly give you a good list of the most pressing tech debt issues in their code base. No need to pull in someone from outside of the project to make up some useless KPIs that will end up missing critical topics.


    Btw, engineers already have engineering terms for what’s described as technical debt. E.g. “dependency hell”, “low test coverage”, “outdated dependency”, “bad code style”, “unoptimized code” and so on. And since these are engineering terms, they actually have specific meanings and most of them are testable and quantifiable in some specific way.









  • I usually try and pick up a console a few years after its done. Its usually cheap and the nostalgia wave hasn’t hit yet. At that point its probably been hacked and the store shut down so I feel no qualms aquiring games however I see fit. Though there seems little reason to do so after the 360 and PS3 since most games play on pc too now.

    That’s what I do too, but there’s a sweet spot. I got a bunch of New 3DS XL for the family just before the eshop closed, and I paid €80-100 for each of them. That made sense to me. But paying €300+ doesn’t make sense to me.

    DS and 3DS are hard to replicate well on a single screen device. So i get those, but there are newer handheld emulators with dual screens. Nintendo also keeps shutting down 3DS emulators so progress is slow. Vita emulation is still in its infancy.

    DS/3DS emulation works well enough with a phone and a portrait mode controller attachment. That way you get the stacked screen layout and it’s handheld too. And the screen is way better too, which is especially noticeable if you compare it to running DS games on the 3DS.




  • In general playing games on original hardware is going to be a better experience than running it in an emulator.

    Tbh, I think that depends. On the 3DS it does make more sense, you are right, especially if you want the 3D effect. That one is really not replicable.

    On a New 2DS XL without the 3D effect, I don’t know… Most games I played don’t really use the touch screen a lot (though that obviously depends on the games) and a phone with a portrait-mode controller can replicate the dual-screen quite well.

    But yeah, everyone has their own preferences.





  • I have a Wii U too, but I got that thing for €60 back then.

    If I would be getting into that right now, I’d just load up CEMU (or other emulators) onto my living room PC. That one also works with Wiimotes and other Bluetooth controllers. It also nicely plays PS1 and PS2 games (haven’t tried anything newer yet). Setting up these emulators was super easy so far.

    On the Wii U I don’t have to fuss with emulators, but instead I have to hack the console and fuss with whatever’s the current homebrew solution. (Btw, I should really update some time. I’m sure I am way outdated by now.)