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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I have been sort of following Wayland’s development for over 10 years now. I have been using Wayland for over 2 years now. I have been reading and watching various lengthy arguments online for and against it. I still don’t feel like I actually know it even is, not beyond some handwavey superficialities. Definitely not to the extent and depth I could understand what X11 was and how to actually work with it, troubleshoot it when necessary and achieve something slightly unusual with it. I feel like, these days, you are either getting superficial marketing materials, ELI5 approaches that seem to be suited at best to pacify a nosy child without giving them anything to actually work with, or reference manuals full of unexplained jargon for people who already know how it works and just need to look up some details now and then…

    Maybe I’m getting old. I used to like Linux because I could actually understand what was going on…






  • Floating Point Unit. The thing that does mathematical operations on floating point numbers. It used come separately from the CPU as an add-on chip, but around the 486 era, manufacturers started integrating it on the same die as the CPU. Of course, as these things go, from the system programmers point of view, there is still no difference between an add-on FPU and an integrated one.

    The one pictured here is an add-on FPU for an Intel 80386 CPU.








  • waigl@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlInvest in hwat?
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    4 months ago

    Top Left – More or less the default position, sensible enough, if a bit naive. Nothing wrong with this.

    Top Right – Having knowledge is a good thing, and so is making decisions based on sound risk-benefit analysis.

    Bottom Right – Well, at least it’s an informed decision. Just don’t try to pass off the risk on someone else if it backfires.

    Bottom Left – Oooouuuuh, you don’t want to be in this quadrant, trust me…


  • In all seriousness, digging tunnels is a military tactic that gets some use sometimes. The Russians have done it in the southern part of Avdiivka. I haven’t heard of a case where militaries used an actual tunnel boring machine, though.

    Tunnel boring machines are not just extremely expensive, they’re also extremely bulky and highly visible when on top of the ground. If you ship one to where you want to start your tunnel, there is a high risk that enemy intel will spot it, ruining the surprise.

    The actual digging is extremely slow, meaning there is no way of knowing whether the tunnel will even still have some tactical use when you’re done.

    Once you emerge on the other side, it won’t be long until the enemy notices your exit and does something about it, like bombarding it, stationing troops there or sending something of their own back through the tunnel. That means even if you succeed, you only have a very short window to do something with your tactical advantage, and said something will very likely be a suicide mission.

    Tunneling through the loose mud of Ukraine would not be easy. You can do it if you send a work crew after the machine to immediately build strong walls behind it, but that would be even slower and more expensive.

    All in all, it would just be more useful to use either much smaller and shorter tunnels that don’t use tunnel boring machines or utilize some form of artillery or drones to achieve the desired effect behind enemy lines.