What was your last RTFM adventure? Tinker this, read that, make something smoother! Or explodier.
As for me, I wanted to see how many videos I could run at once. (Answer: 60 frames per second or 60 frames per second?)
With my sights on GPUizing some ethically sourced motion pictures, I RTFW, graphed, and slapped on environment variables and flags like Lego bricks. I got the Intel VAAPI thingamabob to jaunt by (and found that it butterized my mpv videos)
$ pacman -S blahblahblahblahblahtfm
$ mpv --show-profile=fast
Profile fast:
scale=bilinear
dscale=bilinear
dither=no
correct-downscaling=no
linear-downscaling=no
sigmoid-upscaling=no
hdr-compute-peak=no
allow-delayed-peak-detect=yes
$ mpv --hwdec=auto --profile=fast graphwar-god-4KEDIT.mp4
# fucking silk
But there was no pleasure without pain: Mr. Maxwell F. N. 940MX (the N stands for Nvidia) played hooky. So I employed the longest envvars ever
$ NVD_LOG=1 VDPAU_TRACE=2 VDPAU_NVIDIA_DEBUG=3 NVD_BACKEND=direct NVD_GPU=nvidia LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia VDPAU_DRIVER=nvidia prime-run vdpauinfo
GPU at BusId 0x1 doesn't have a supported video decoder
Error creating VDPAU device: 1
# stfu
to try translating Nvidia VDPAU to VAAPI – of course, here I realized I rtfmed backwards and should’ve tried to use just VDPAU instead. So I did.
Juice was still not acquired.
Finally, after a voracious DuckDuckGoing (quacking?), I was then blessed with the freeing knowledge that even though post-Kepler is supposed to support H264, Nvidia is full of lies…
______
< fudj >
------
\ ‘^----^‘
\ (◕(‘人‘)◕)
( 8 ) ô
( 8 )_______( )
( 8 8 )
(_________________)
|| ||
(|| (||
and then right before posting this, gut feeling: I can’t read.
$ lspci | grep -i nvidia
... NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 940MX] (rev a2)
# ArchWiki says that GM108 isn't supported.
# Facepalm
SO. What was your last RTFM adventure?
Couldn’t get the geolocation work for weeks in openSUSE. I, supposedly, read the manual and checked everywhere and even asked in the opensuse forum, since the timing was perfect with Mozilla shutting down MLS, and it probably was a reason, but also any other alternative didn’t work. Some days ago I decided to RTFM of geoclue again, only to find out that I could just “hardcode” my location in an
/etc/geolocationfile >:(for me it usually goes
me: reads the manual, fails, then asks for help
person helping: heres a canned tip
me: didnt help
person helping: you should read the manual
me: no i am beyond that, i need help with my problem
person helping: oh turns out i couldnt actually help you, anyways go try somewhere else
And if it was an issue on github:
Closed: “couldn’t reproduce” 10 seconds after that last comment.
For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I’d care to enumerate. There’s a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!
Oh I love the “walk me through what I’m about to do” concept. Dry runs should be more common – especially in shell scripts…
The world would be a better place if every
install.shhad a--help, some niceprintf’s saying “Moving this here” / “Overwrite? [Y/N]”, and perhaps even a shoehorned-inset -x.Hope your r/w wasn’t eaten up by the subfolder incident (that I presume happened) :P
I’m lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn’t think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.
Hardware related on a Linux home built NAS.
My mobo has 2 nvme ports and supports 10th and 11th gen intel cpu. I have a 10th gen i5 and 2 nvme ssd for cache.
The biggest 512Gb ssd is on the front (normal) side of the mobo, under a heatsink. The smaller 128Gb is under the mobo, inaccessible once fixed onto the case.
In bios and in OS I can’t see the 512 cache drive, only the 128. Quick RTFM on the motherboard manual states: “Front nvme slot only works with 11th gen cpu”.
FFS 🤦♂️
The server is fully built in a hard to fit everything ITX case.
Guess who is having only 128Gb cache instead of disassembling everything ?
I have been burnt too many times by vendor incompatibility at work to not read the manuals before deploying something.
One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.
I’m very intrigued. Could you please explain it? Even if you abandoned it, you still learned valuable knowledge.
Yes, that’s true and a better way to look at it, thanks!
Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.
So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq’s mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.
I did learn a lot though. Since then I’ve been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I’ve collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I’ve begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!
Round two, hell yeah.
The aesthetica of a stack of notes, born from a “dead end”, is secretly an odd motivator. You look back and see
Here is the breadth of what we did wrong.
and then beyond you, the effort lays itself out in a pretty trusswork.
_or_maybe_i_just_think_well-used_notebooks_are_pretty
