JB julienbenjamin

Why I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years

Some may know me from over a decade worth of modding broken, under-performing or otherwise inconvenient aspects of PC ports. Dedicated users of Special K also know that I have spent as much time battling problems caused by Steam as I have defects in the games themselves.

My experience with PC gaming goes back a further two decades, to the days of shareware, dialing into a BBS to get game patches / user generated content and tedious DRM fetch-quests involving physical game manuals. I was irritated when Half-Life 2 shipped on PC and required a dedicated piece of software to satisfy DRM and patch the game, but at the time these were minor inconveniences. Valve tried to quell concerns of software preservation with the first of a long series of lies wherein they claimed to have a contingency plan for the DRM scheme reaching end-of-life.

Steam's DRM scheme has reached end-of-life multiple times without the promised parachute.

In 2002, the cl

Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them

TL;DR

You can take the same source code package that Ubuntu uses to build jq, compile it again, and realize 90% better performance.

Setting

I use jq for processing GeoJSON files and other open data offered in JSON format. Today I am working with a 500MB GeoJSON file that contains the Alameda County Assessor's parcel map. I want to run a query that prints the city for every parcel worth more than a threshold amount. The program is

Comprehensive Guide to SIMD in C++

Disclaimer: ChatGPT generated document.

1. Introduction to SIMD

What is SIMD?

C Speed Optimization Checklist

This is a list of general-purpose optimizations for C programs, from the most impactful to the tiniest low-level micro-optimizations to squeeze out every last bit of performance. It is meant to be read top-down as a checklist, with each item being a potential optimization to consider. Everything is in order of speed gain.

Algorithm && Data Structures

Choose the best algorithm and data structure for the problem at hand by evaluating:

time complexity

Gemini Lake Hardware-accelerated Transcoding

This is for a used Wyse 5070 I recently purchased, having the J5005 CPU and a huge 8 GB RAM all running on AlmaLinux 9.1. Why AlmaLinux? Because I'm partial to RHEL-based systems with its focus on stability, that's all. Unfortunately the downside is that oftentimes new software isn't readily available.

I want to unlock the ability to perform hardware-accelerated transcoding in ffmpeg so I can use it in Tdarr as a decent remote transcoding node.

Intel ARK - Pentium Silver J5005 shows that the CPU has Quick Sync Video support, and as such supports some form of hardware video acceleration.

The CPU is Gemini Lake and uses Intel UHD Graphics 605, which is Gen 9.5 according to the ffmpeg wiki. The machine should be able

Building and using mesa for development and testing

This explains how to build mesa from source, and how to use the custom built mesa to run some apps and games, without needing to replace the mesa libraries that your operating system runs on.

Let's assume that you are using an x86_64 system.

Building mesa

Overview

Conventional Commit Messages

See how a minor change to your commit message style can make a difference.

git commit -m"<type>(<optional scope>): <description>" \
  -m"<optional body>" \
  -m"<optional footer>"

	#include "SDL3/SDL_error.h"
	#include "SDL3/SDL_render.h"
	#include <SDL3/SDL.h>
	#include <SDL3_ttf/SDL_ttf.h>
	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <string.h>

	int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);

	#region Custom Function Definitions
	Function Test-Administrator {
	$CurrentUser = [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
	$AdministratorRole = [Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator"
	([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal]$CurrentUser).IsInRole($AdministratorRole)
	}
	#endregion

	#region Prompt Prep
	# Set ENV for elevated status

	#!/bin/bash
	# (C) Hritik Vijay
	# License: GPLv2
	# Suppliment to https://m47r1x.github.io/posts/multi-net/

	tmp=$(mktemp multi-net-ip-XXXX --tmpdir)
	TIMEOUT=5
	Table=200

	_ping(){