Post smarmy assholes you find when searching for tech questions

[Friendly Primarina]

I was looking for a reason why a certain feature of Linux is disabled by default and found this exchange. Brad here can go choke on a dick:

 

[Stasi]

More a gaming one but still, trying to look up if a game has controller support and find threads with pricks like this. Hur durr why you want controller for PC game, why don't you buy some shit to use a mouse and keyboard on your lap instead. I find a lot of these kinds of responses trying to look up info for old PC games - autists making smug or condescending comments instead of addressing the question.

 

[Grundlejungle]

Literally anything to do with printers. They're always seems to be some paid corporate shill in every thread. I don't want to buy a new printer, I don't want to upgrade to some scam help desk service. I just want to know why the fuck it is taking 30 GODDAMN MINUTES to print each individual page.
"hAvE yUo TriEd emAIliNg SuPoRt oR uSiNG tHe OfFiCiAl HP fOrUM??"
What the fuck do you think I've spent the last 3 hours doing? trying to turn it into a goddamn sandwich? None of those resources have ever been useful, and fuck you for being a cunt and suggesting it.

 

[Dick Justice]

Most normal humans cannot tell the difference between uncompressed audio and audio compressed at 128kbps with a modern codec. Maybe you think you're one of the 1% that can somehow, but are you sure? If someone sat you down and did a blind test, are you sure you'd be able to differentiate between compressed and uncompressed audio at least two-thirds of the time?

At any rate, it's not really YouTube's job to show you videos with amazing archival-quality video and audio. In reality they compress the hell out of the files they serve because at their scale they save a lot of money by sending people a 4.8MB fiile instead of a 5MB file. So yes, 128kbps is quite likely to be the best audio bitrate you can expect from a YouTube video.

 

[THEY STOLE MY FORESKIN]

I was searching why Wine has problems switching the resolution back when exiting full screen games and early on they put the blame on Xorg, so I found this exchange:

The problem persists to this day. Wine marked it not our bug and Xorg still has it open. It's been 15 years.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I was searching why Wine has problems switching the resolution back when exiting full screen games and early on they put the blame on Xorg, so I found this exchange:

X is on life support to make way for wayland (which is it's own can of worms) and I don't really expect any wonders happening. Every major update to X in fact seems to break more things than it fixes.

That being said, a simple work-around would be to call the game in a script and just force-set the resolution via xrandr after quit/crash. A wrapper script that calls the wine executable with all parameters and does just that would be the most simple solution.

 

[Frail Snail]

I was searching why Wine has problems switching the resolution back when exiting full screen games and early on they put the blame on Xorg, so I found this exchange:

View attachment 2962584

The problem persists to this day. Wine marked it not our bug and Xorg still has it open. It's been 15 years. View attachment 2962593

In my case, that usually happened with old games. They would also fuck with your gamma settings. WINE hasn't fixed the bug, but it has virtual desktops which are a foolproof way to avoid this short of starting a different X server with Xephyr.

 

[Pee Cola]

I have a crusty old Windows XP laptop that I've set up for emulating a few different platforms, and I've decided to install separate emulators because fuck RetroArch. The first search result was a reddit thread (archive), and this winner who claims to be a MAME dev decided to be really helpful.

It's cunts like this that give the emulation scene a bad name.

EDIT: Most of the other reddit threads about MAME and Windows XP are nearly as fucked as this one. surprised Pikachu face

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

MAME was easier than ever on the Xbox with 64MB of ram. It assumed you used a controller which was nice. I haven't used it in years so maybe there's a global setting in current MAME that says "yes, I use the standard Xinput controller with the layout everyone knows, please god at least map something to it!"

 

[Pee Cola]

MAME was easier than ever on the Xbox with 64MB of ram. It assumed you used a controller which was nice. I haven't used it in years so maybe there's a global setting in current MAME that says "yes, I use the standard Xinput controller with the layout everyone knows, please god at least map something to it!"

There's something about MAME on older platforms that's super comfy. If all you want to emulate is 8-bit and 16-bit stuff, it's not like you need a Ryzen 7 with 32GB RAM and Windows 11/Linux to run it, which is why I find the elitism of some MAME devs to be fucking hilarious.

About the only emulator I've had even the tiniest bit of trouble with on the crappy old Windows XP laptop I use for retrogaming is Vice, and that was only because True SID emulation is CPU intensive. Switch to Fast SID and it runs great. The speakers in my emulation laptop are crap anyway, so the difference between True SID and Fast SID is minimal to my ears.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

r/buildapc is full of these. God forbid someone wants to have "old tech" on their PC like Blue-ray players or wants to use all of their fan slots on their case. If someone is adding a CD/DVD player in this day in age there is likely a reason for it and they don't want to hear about your opinions on CDs being obsolete.

My favourite are the guys that bitch about intel vs amd. You can almost taste the Cheeto dust from their fat smug fingers. Most people just want to know what's going to give them the best bang for their buck.

Maybe it's a boomer inside of me talking but when I see a PC case without even a single 5.25'' bay it feels incomplete to me. Hard pass.
Now this I like:

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I have a crusty old Windows XP laptop that I've set up for emulating a few different platforms, and I've decided to install separate emulators because fuck RetroArch. The first search result was a reddit thread (archive), and this winner who claims to be a MAME dev decided to be really helpful.

View attachment 3001629
View attachment 3001643
View attachment 3001645

It's cunts like this that give the emulation scene a bad name.

EDIT: Most of the other reddit threads about MAME and Windows XP are nearly as fucked as this one. surprised Pikachu face

That is MAME dev 'Richter Belmont'. He used to be the only MAME dev who bothered with linux, so he used to be the go-to guy on Linux questions for MAME.

From a very early date, most of the devs were assholeish. I think in the late 90s when it was picking up steam with more complex games, they would get flooded with EMULATE THIS NOW 'requests' it jaded them very quickly. Some were better than others (such as the founder Nicola, who owns the trademark in Europe but doesn't do anything with it anymore), but others were just complete scumbags. The absolute worst is 'MooglyGuy' who had I multiple run ins with, and I was totally unsurprised to find out years later that that faggot is also a furry.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Maybe not totally a smarmy asshole but still made me go "huh, why?". Was looking up info for a tiny PC because I want to used it as a dedicated home media server rather than using my laptop as a ghetto solution. Came across this video where a guy spends half of it bitching about how slow the CPU is and how bad the gaming performance is. Like, why nigga? Its a tiny computer with an ultra low power CPU meant for schools/businesses. Obviously not gona run GTA V.

Ended up buying the machine but it was from a lot and they all had slightly different specs. Mine came with display port connectors only. I dont have a display cable or even a device that will take one so now I'm sat here with my thumb up my ass waiting for a display to HDMI adapter to arrive

Its a tiny computer... meant for schools/businesses

 

[byuu]

That is MAME dev 'Richter Belmont'. He used to be the only MAME dev who bothered with linux, so he used to be the go-to guy on Linux questions for MAME.

From a very early date, most of the devs were assholeish. I think in the late 90s when it was picking up steam with more complex games, they would get flooded with EMULATE THIS NOW 'requests' it jaded them very quickly. Some were better than others (such as the founder Nicola, who owns the trademark in Europe but doesn't do anything with it anymore), but others were just complete scumbags. The absolute worst is 'MooglyGuy' who had I multiple run ins with, and I was totally unsurprised to find out years later that that faggot is also a furry.

The MAME devs are also eternally butthurt about the MAME2003 fork. which runs much better (or at all) on weak hardware like Pis.

 

[Ahriman]

A bit of a bump, but pretty relevant

And like he said, it's no wonder these fuckers banned ChatGPT, it's steamrolling StackOverflow. I hope SO dies soon.

 

[ditto]

I hope SO dies soon.

StackOverflow in a nutshell.

I wanted to know how to move the cursor on Ubuntu like you can with option-click on the Mac.
Turns out someone has already asked that exact question:

In Ubuntu terminal I can see placing Cursor at Mouse Position on Terminal with an Option+Click works.

The snarkiest most unhelpful non-answer given by someone with a 7500+ reputation:

By the very nature of how terminals work, the cursor is "owned", controlled by the application that's running inside. The cursor denotes the next position where the application's output will be printed at.

Should you somehow forcefully modify this position in the terminal, unbeknownst to the application, most likely subsequent output printed by the application will corrupt the screen big time.

What a few terminal emulators do is that they try to guess what keypresses to synthesize towards the application, so that in response the application will end up moving the cursor to the location where you wish to.

Any such heuristic has obviously very limited use, and is likely to break pretty often. How would the terminal know which application is running? Using hacks like digging into /proc or equivalent, which stops working across an ssh, tmux or other similar layers? If it knows what application is running (e.g. a shell or a text editor), how would it know what state that application is in (e.g. is the shell running a command or waiting for you to type a command? If the latter, is it perhaps in some special mode of readline? If it's a text editor, are you editing a file or are you in some other mode (e.g. a command line, a dialog etc.)? Does it have split screen, and do you need to jump to a different panel?) Shall we begin to teach the behavior of some well-known applications to the terminal? Hopeless.

No wonder that only very few terminal emulators try to offer you this convenience feature. I haven't tried this feature yet in any of them, but I'm pretty sure I'd find a plethora of bugs in just a few minutes. It's impossible to reliably know which keypresses need to be emitted so that the applicaton's response will be to move the cursor to the spot you requested. Any work that any terminal offers you is necessarily a fragile guesswork.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Ubuntu terminal", but based on the tags of the question you probably mean GNOME Terminal. Like the majority of the terminals out there, GNOME Terminal doesn't attempt to address the impossible.

You should get familiar with the power features of the applications you're using. Does the application support mouse? Maybe you need to enable it, and then the application receives mouse clicks and most likely moves the cursor there. If not, are there any keyboard shortcuts that move the cursor in bigger steps? E.g. Ctrl+Left, Ctrl+Right to jump by words? Newer versions of bash and readline can jump up and down to the next visual row, which I've personally connected to Ctrl+Up, Ctrl+Down. Etc. There's no "one size fits all" solution for repositioning the cursor.