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jwcooper

1,305 karma · joined July 10, 2010

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jwcooper··on PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"
I would guess we'll start seeing more open source projects with much tighter restrictions on who can participate. Closed contributions and heavily automated (or even closed) issue tracking is probably already happening and will spread faster.

I entirely sympathize with these maintainers too. I've had 2 instances where an LLM has surfaced a bug and I just couldn't get myself to open a PR and dump more work onto these maintainers, even after manually writing one up (neither were critical bugs, it's fine).

Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.

jwcooper··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
I was on a Macbook Pro (multiple models for many years) and jumped to the 12th gen intel framework. It is fantastic laptop, just showing its age a bit (mostly battery life as I still have the smaller battery and 12th gen intel wasn't that great for battery).

I upgraded the screen and speakers, nothing else really needed changing throughout the years.

I was so tired of the bad docker performance on macOS that I went to a framework with Linux. Linux on a laptop (Fedora/Gnome specifically) worked so much better than I expected too.

I'm hopeful I can pre-order this new model as well.

jwcooper··on Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'
This is ridiculous. The school will notify you if the student is not at school, or the teachers will eventually (or their grades/missing assignments).

Also you don't need to track your kids to enable school time mode, if you want to lock down their phone during school.

What are you going to do when they go to college? Track them? Monitor them? Make sure they go to classes?

At some point, you just have to trust your kids to do the right thing. It's a part of them learning how to grow up and be independent. It's better to make mistakes the younger you are so you can learn from them when there is less on the line.

jwcooper··on Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance
Oh yup, you're right on that. I guess my point still stands as Bayer and BASF kind of fit the bill as well.
jwcooper··on Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance
The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers.

They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.

They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.

When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.

The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

jwcooper··on Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux
> The sticking point like always will be media playback (read: DRM/widevine). That is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die. If Kagi can legally and technically solve the widevine integration on a non-standard Linux webkit build, they win. If not, it will be a secondary browser for documentation reading only.

I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them. Hopefully, that day is sooner than later.

It's pretty frustrating that peacock (and all xfinity streaming) doesn't work and you can't get 1080p or 4k on most other streaming platforms.

jwcooper··on Wayland Nvidia
Your grandma doesn't need to know what wayland is to use linux. This is an enthusiast forum for people interested in this exact topic.
jwcooper··on Wayland Nvidia
Most of this article seems unnecessary in 2025 and is very specific to Arch.

For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.

There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.

jwcooper··on Wayland Nvidia
You can do that now, and for at least the last year.

Very few games don't work anymore, and most that don't are using kernel level anti-cheat or are generally hostile to users anyways (Fortnite and Destiny 2 could work, but they actively block Linux).

I main Fedora with an Nvidia 3080 and haven't had issues for quite some time now.

jwcooper··on Railroad Tycoon II
Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.

The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).

jwcooper··on Railroad Tycoon II
The Steam Deck is basically the successor to the Steam Machines. The actual hardware didn't go that well, but they laid the foundation in software for what we have now.

So, in a way, the Steam Machines were a great success.

Also, Valve has (for better and worse) far more power and control in the gaming ecosystem than most companies Microsoft has to deal with.

jwcooper··on Rails for everything
I figure if it's good enough for login.gov [1], it's good enough for my sites as well.

I also find devise pretty simple to get setup and use. It's so easy to mess up some small thing while writing your own auth. I've always pretty much trusted myself to at least get devise setup properly.

[1] https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/blob/main/Gemfile#L30

jwcooper··on What's New in Ruby on Rails 8
I'm not saying GitLab is poorly designed, but a poorly designed website will be slow on the fastest of languages or frameworks. It's not necessarily a Rails or Ruby problem here.
jwcooper··on Amazon to increase number of advertisements on Prime Video
Same here - ads in their "prime" (more like sub-prime now) video service were what made us cancel as well.

Honestly, it's been fine. It turns out a lot of other retailers have almost caught up to Amazon with choice and some even shipping speed.

jwcooper··on Dear Roku, you ruined my TV
Mostly cost - a 55" Samsung Odyssey Ark computer monitor is like $1800. You can get a similar TV for 1/2 that price.
jwcooper··on Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right
They would have needed controllers and actually cared enough to support steam on it.

There is zero chance Valve would release HL:Alyx without full steam support on the device.

That being said, I get what you're saying - that a killer game could have helped the value proposition. They clearly didn't design it for that though, even based on how much lower their refresh rate is for hand tracking.

It feels like a consumption device like the iPad, with some productivity mixed in.

jwcooper··on 'Pokémon with Guns' Game Goes Viral, Angering Nintendo Loyalists
This is a pretty good video (11 minutes) where a video game IP lawyer discusses palworld vs pokemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkNcV0kpxvg

Mostly surrounding the similarities in pokemon vs pal visual design.

Spoiler...it's complicated.

jwcooper··on Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter
This is a survey from gamers. There are a lot of games that only work on Windows, or work much better on Windows.

It's only been somewhat recently that games that support Linux have exploded in numbers. Somewhat coinciding with the release of the steam deck and the massive community it brought with it. There are now launchers for other stores for Linux and more every day.

Still, a lot of gamers don't really have a choice but to at least dual boot into Windows if they want to play some of the most popular games (Fortnite, for one).

jwcooper··on Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter
It's because they break the other distributions by version.

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS 64 bit

VS

"Arch Linux" 64 bit

Other Ubuntu versions appear to be in the "Other" category.

jwcooper··on Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month xtra
We also just canceled our decade+ prime membership.

It used to feel like a great deal, not anymore.

$150 a year is just too much for what they offer when we didn't use the music or photos or very limited kindle offerings.

jwcooper··on Dungeon KeeperFX 1.0
Reminds me of Moonring that recently came out. It's an homage to the old Ultima games, but is new and looks and plays fantastic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/
jwcooper··on I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens.

They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework.

They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they are a very young company, but their promise has held up thus far).

Hopefully more folks that are interested in upgradability and repairability are purchasing frameworks to show other companies that it's worth it to do (I'm unaffiliated with Framework, just a customer).

jwcooper··on Use singular nouns for database table names
Rails seemingly handles it the same way as Laravel and it all makes sense very quickly.

The argument here that you would end up with 'addresss' is silly as you can also quickly handle that with a new inflection and it rarely even happens in practice.

Also, to be pedantic, rails handles this just fine by default: irb(main):001:0> "address".pluralize => "addresses"

jwcooper··on U.S. proposes 56% vehicle emissions cut by 2032, requiring big EV jump
Small cars already exist. The Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model 3 are small EVs for USA standards. VW Golf, Mini Cooper, Mazda 3, Kia Rio are more examples of smaller cars.

They're just not as popular as SUVs and trucks in the USA. People want big cars, so companies manufacture big cars too.

Electric scooters would work for 5 months of the year where I live (and we have and use them when we can).

jwcooper··on A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
To make matters worse, Apple killed off the web version too, and didn't replace it with anything.

The Dark Sky website was brilliant as well. It loaded quickly, wasn't covered in ads, and the UX was comparable to their app.

I haven't really found anything to replace it with yet. I've defaulted to weather.gov, but the UX isn't really there yet (it's great for storms, or when you need to drill down into good data though).

jwcooper··on Rails on Docker
Docker can be a pain sometimes (especially docker for mac!), but in moderately complex apps, it's so nice to be able to just fire up 6 services (even some smaller apps have redis, memcached, pg/mysql, etc) and have a running dev environment.

If someone updates nodejs, just pull in the latest dockerfile. Someone updates to a new postgres version? Same thing. It's so much better than managing native dependencies.

jwcooper··on GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support
We used SVN in an application to grab a single folder and its contents from a repo on GitHub. It was the quickest and easiest approach at the time (that I knew of) and worked well.

We switched a year or so ago to use git sparse checkout that was released in 2.25.

jwcooper··on Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready
We're using puma and set the RUBYOPT=--yjit in a systemd environment variable for our puma service.

The performance impact of enabling yjit was quite obvious in our charts. Another giveaway that it's properly enabled is the servers will use consume more memory.

jwcooper··on Heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future
Where I live, it can get very cold. Not always very efficient to open windows for 5 months out of the year.

A great option for keeping CO2 levels down in a house is with an HRV (or ERV) [1] that will heat the fresh air coming in to cycle it throughout the house.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation

jwcooper··on Twitter API Page
But it's likely they could have made money off of 3rd party apps. For some reason they didn't figure out how or didn't care to try.

My twitter usage is so fine tuned to tweetbot, that I'm also just a lost user. I miss some of the people I followed, but it's fine. I have no interest in using the official twitter app.

It's back to RSS feeds for me, which I find fill a similar niche to twitter.

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