I don’t have the patience to keep it up for a long time but I barely get any scam calls after pushing the button to talk to someone and then just asking about the plot holes in their script. Like the one claiming there’s going to be a warrant for me, why does the guy need to ask for my name and other information? Why would revenue Canada (of anyone who isn’t a scammer of some sort) ever want any kind of payment in gift cards? I’ll use a tone of voice on the verge of laughter, too.

One time, after I asked, the guy just asked me why I even pressed the button to talk to a person and then hung up. Most of the time they just hang up. Sometimes the English option seems to only be there to make it seem more realistic for those who would pick the Chinese option because the call disconnects right after picking English.

Though more recently I’ve just been hanging up early in the recording when I do get the odd scam call. They might filter that, too, because even the volume of those calls stays low. Which makes sense because even just making the calls probably costs them something, even if it’s just pennies.

I had to spend an annoying amount of time finding all of the settings to make it so that my windows machine would never wake up on its own, spread out over an even longer period of time because some of them aren’t easy to trigger on my own so it was a matter of trying something and then trying more things if I find it awake on its own again.

Even disabling the wake on mouse movement was a pain because it doesn’t properly label mice and keyboards and doesn’t have a global setting. I wanted to keep wake on keyboard but not have it wake if my mouse moved a nm because a butterfly flapped its wings too vigorously as it flew by the closed window.

After I installed Linux, I went to do the same thing there only to find it already had sensible defaults set.

It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn’t be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.

Or your internet is slow and it’s taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.

Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.

Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.

I joke but any one of those might actually be what’s going on.

I just did the switch myself on a new PC and getting gaming working wasn’t even that hard. I picked fedora cinnamon.

Difficulties I had:

1. When trying the initial live boot, it failed checksum… Because windows fucked with the drive after it saw the utility that wrote the image to it left it “unmounted” (and autoplay would had also fucked with it if I hadn’t turned that off ages ago).
2. Wired ethernet wasn’t working. Wifi does work, currently using that until I get around to working on that again, though it might just work now that it’s updated.
3. After installing steam, many games said they were windows games only. Had to enable a setting inside steam to get it to just run them all via proton. Only tried two games so far, but haven’t seen any issues yet. My saves are usable on the one game I was already playing on windows.
4. Optical audio wasn’t working. Worked around that by plugging in my soundbar to usb, though I’ve also confirmed that the analog port does work. This one might also have been resolved by updating.
5. Had to set up permissions for steam to use my games partition instead of my home dir for installing games, though I think this was because I missed a step during the install.

It took more effort getting YouTube (well porn but apparently the same issue affects YouTube) working (netflix just worked, quality seems to even be better, like it doesn’t seem to default to a low quality stream before moving up as the video plays like it would in windows). And even that was only because the desktop I picked didn’t use the same software as instructions for enabling 3rd party repositories and I for some reason decided to search for a GUI option instead of just running the command I could have run from the start.

The only difficult part is that with all of the available desktops out there that do things a bit differently, it can be hard to find solutions specific to the one you’re using. Like I might have caused some future issues by installing gnome-software since cinnamon uses a different tool for that. But at this point, I feel like making the jump to a different desktop (or even distro) will be much easier, so don’t feel like I’m committed to the one I did pick.

Which is so much better than windows because on that platform I had to struggle to not be committed to things I didn’t and wouldn’t pick. And it made me avoid updating often because I didn’t want to commit to whatever nagware ms added this time to try to get me to use some software I wasn’t interested in using.

My guess is they oursourced the work to people who only understand basic English and answer the question they were able to decipher from a few keywords and the assumption that the question is about the most basic aspect of those keywords.

With an alternative method involving a page in settings that only existed between may 2015 and feb 2016.

The important bit is to power one on first before the swap, then you’ll have one setup where the pi was recently powered on and another setup where the connected devices were recently powered on. You might see the issue on only one of the devices, at which point you can say if it’s the pi being off for a while or the devices that triggers the issue.

Impressive engineering, but it comes with a curse.

Where it gets messy is you’d need to supply power on the PCIe rail as well as any extra plugs the GPU needs without powering on the system itself. And then even messier if someone powers on that system. Mad scientist shit.

Just made that one up but it was based on another Frankenstein-like setup another user in a beta testing group was using that I don’t remember the specifics of. His issues started getting mostly ignored until he upgraded his system to something more normal lol.

Ah that’s interesting. If you can swap the devices from one pi to another, try powering it all up on machine A, then swap the devices to machine B and power that on. Might tell you if the issue is with on the pi side or with the devices.

Is latency higher on the first boot than on subsequent ones? I’d be looking into race conditions if you’re seeing a bit of lag cascade out into bigger problems. Race conditions are the worst, especially when the race most often goes the right way and just occasionally goes the wrong way. Though you can force the wrong way by adding delays in your code, if you have an idea of where the race is happening.

Or, after weeks of debugging an issue the user has logs proving they are having weird performance issues despite having a strong GPU, it turns out their parents wouldn’t let them take that GPU out of the family PC so they rigged up a PCIe to USB to wireless transmitter that hooks up to a wireless to USB to serial port that exploits a signal leaking from serial port to PCIe bus bug on the family PC motherboard to act as if the GPU is on their own machine, which both impresses and horrifies you.

And when you try to get approval to drop the issue as unsupported, your manager gives you shit and it takes another week to convince him that it isn’t a use case that you should support. And they only agreed in the end because a more senior technical person happened to overhear you pleading with your manager one day and only had to say, “that’s crazy!” for your manager to 180 immediately on the issue. But it’s still cited as a negative on your next performance review (“you spent weeks working on something we don’t even support!”).

Another angle to try is to set the date one day ahead and see if the bug shows up then. Might need to disconnect from network and set it in the BIOS for the test to work properly.

I could be wrong, but I figure after being off for an hour, all capacitors should have discharged by then, so it’s probably not based on how long the hardware has been unpowered.

Though one other angle I just thought of, if you have something that runs periodically, maybe the bug is related to that period being missed once or n times. Or it could be related to something that is meant to wake the computer to run some job and then go back to sleep but instead just sets it in a bad state.

One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).

Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?

Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.

Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.

That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.

I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).

And to add insult to injury, many of the issues in Windows are just “I don’t want to do this the way MS wants everyone to do this.”

Personally, I like vim. I do miss the mini map to speed up navigating through code, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a random crash or have it inadvertently fill up my home dir because I’ve had it open for too long.

I wonder if that was actually malware.

I disagree that that warning is reasonably clear. Even the comment that included it has the line of thought, where the user, not knowing what terms git uses thinks that they just did an action that is going to change each of their files. It makes sense that they’d want to discard those changes. That user then goes on with some snark about not wanting to learn any more about what they are playing with and that other programs would do the same, but “discard changes” seems like it would have a clear meaning to someone who doesn’t know git.

The warning says it isn’t undoable but also doesn’t clarify that the files themselves are the changes. Should probably have a special case for if someone hits discard changes on a brand new repository with no files ever checked in and hits discard on a large number of files instead of checking them in. Even a “(This deletes all of the local files!)” would make it clear enough to say what the warning is really about.

Or marked as duplicate and closed but when you click the duplicate it’s a different issue.

I’m not sure there’s any guarantee that it will ever be sorted, since bit flips will be random and are just as likely to put it more out of order than more in order. Plus if there’s any error correction going on, it can cancel out bit flips entirely until up to a certain threshold.

Though I’m not sure if ECC (and other methods) write the corrected value back to memory or just correct the signals going to the core, so it’s possible they could still add up over time and overcome the second objection.

Just because it’s a desktop doesn’t mean it’s more powerful.