At my last job, doing firmware for datacenter devices, almost never. JTAG debugging can be useful if you can figure out how to reproduce the problem on the bench, but (a) it’s really only useful if the relevant question is “what is the state of the system” and (b) it often isn’t possible outside of the lab. My experience with firmware is that most bugs end up being solved by poring over the code or datasheets/errata and having a good long think (which is exactly as effective as it sounds – one of the reasons I left that job). The cases I’ve encountered where a debugger would be genuinely useful are almost always more practically served by printf debugging.

Profilers aren’t really a thing when you have kilobytes of RAM. It can be done but you’re building all the infrastructure by hand (the same is true of debugger support for things like threads). Just like printf debugging, it’s generally more practical to instrument the interesting bits manually.

Based on the reporting two things seem clear to me: (1) the commercial value of Reddit is fundamentally a question of selling data access; and (2) the major subreddits will be made to continue operations come Hell or high water.

When (not if) Reddit circumvents the blackout by force, the obvious next move is to poison the well—make the data worthless by drowning it in noise (AI-generated, if you’ve a flair for the poetic). I doubt that will happen since (a) it would require coordination among a substantially larger and more dispersed userbase than the moderators and (b) it’s something of a nuclear option, but it’s an interesting idea.

You can collapse comments on the web interface (don’t know about the apps), but it doesn’t appear to persist across page reloads. Might be a good feature request

Friendship ended with font gatekeeping and dogpiling, accessibility is my new best friend

if the steam locomotive is also called the iron horse, then rail enthusiasts are technically a kind of horse girl

Thank you <3

RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV’s single player mode: it’s a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.

RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn’t want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between “interact with item/character X” and “start mission with character Y” can be and the game’s tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.

The soundtracks from NieR:Automata and NieR Replicant are definitely my favorite of all time.

Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST are also very good.

I’m @sjolsen@tech.lgbt. Just set it up though, so there’s nothing to see yet :-)

which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network

Makes sense, after all matrix multiplication is O(n²).

If you’re not playing hand-held, make sure your TV is set up to minimize input delay (usually called “game” mode or something like that). An extra few tens of milliseconds of lag can make a game like Hollow Knight unplayable :(

I hadn’t really actively engaged with Reddit in years, and I stopped lurking almost cold turkey when they killed off the personal homepage on the mobile web interface earlier this year. I deleted my account when the Apollo news broke (I’ve never even used a third-party app, but it’s crystal-clear what direction the wind is blowing). I only found out about lemmy after I pulled the plug.

Now to figure out how mastodon and all the other “fediverse” apps work :-)

It’s weird, a little confusing, and a little janky. Love it so far. It’s not a novel observation on my part but it definitely feels new and exciting the way Reddit and Tumblr did back in the day.

My two favorite Emacs jokes:

• What does EMACS stand for? Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
• Emacs is a great operating system; it only lacks a decent text editor.

Can you imagine a world where a program originally designed to manipulate documents was extended through a highly dynamic, kind of half-baked interpreted language to the point of underpinning almost every application you interact with on a daily basis and using an order of magnitude or so more resources than are actually necessary?

Me, a firmware developer, writing baby’s first CSS:

Most non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to non-free-firmware

GRUB packages will by default no longer run os-prober for other operating systems.

These were the two actionable takeaways for me. Easily sorted, and so far bookworm is humming away smoothly.

Loot is great when it’s unique, or at least rare. Unique weapons and lore items in Dark Souls come to mind.

But yeah, loot that just fills up your inventory (or worse, your equip load) until you go sell it is just Worse Money.

Based on my own experience and years of spectating flamewars I figure somewhere between 40-80% of any programmer’s aesthetic preference is familiarity. I use Liberation Mono (probably because it was the default on some ancient version of CentOS or something) and I doubt it’d be anyone’s first choice, but every now and then I’ll come across something with its own defaults and it just bugs me.

On topic, the most obvious difference between Intel One and Iosevka is the radically different aspect ratio.

I can’t remember whether this was the default behavior, but on the original iPod Classic you could browse your albums sorted by artist, and within artist by year. It’s a small thing, but it made the iPod feel like it was designed by someone who really cares about music, for someone who really cares about music, and I haven’t seen that approach replicated anywhere else in the 15 years since that model came out.

Just as a point of comparison YouTube Music by default doesn’t show your own library, and even that by default is just a hodge-podge of anything music-adjacent you’ve watched on YouTube. :(