@Tim Tim, I'll be honest, I think it's remarkable that you haven't been suspended from the network already; you're persistently unwilling to change anything about how you interact with it after very patient feedback that it's unproductive (including both in the questions that you post, and in this room where these complaints of moderator persecution keep coming up). As I've said before, I also think you do get a bad deal sometimes.

@Tim I understand that your life circumstances are difficult, particularly at the moment, but I encourage you again to make use of any services that are available for counselling in order to help you to adapt the way you respond to things that happen. There are online services and resources at least if in-person isn't available to you at the moment, and self-guided CBT is viable if not ideal.

@Tim I'm also happy to talk to you about options for planning an employment future, and we've had discussions about PL topics in the past. I know you're very focused on learning things that are in demand in industry. You clearly have skills that could be useful and it's a pity you don't get to apply them. I understand that you've done at least some graduate study in the past at well-known institutions, and I am also happy to discuss how to work with that to make the most of your experience.

@Tim But, the way that you respond to things at the moment is often detrimental to meeting your goals, and it leads into spirals where everything just gets worse because there's a ping-pong back and forth of escalating reactions between you and other people that leaves both of you upset. That's not good for anybody. Those are the things I think the counselling could help with; it also may be useful for holding a job, but that's severable from the more applied technical advice towards that.

@Tim In any case, please consider all of that. I think it's possible for some more focused study to lead into work, if that's the direction you want to go in, but it's not really getting there at the moment and getting shut off from some of those avenues of assistance preemptively would be a shame.

@AndrasDeak Mixing libraries from different releases isn't a good idea in general, but you already know that.

Upgrading or downgrading leaf packages is ok in general. Or even libraries that only support one or two programs. But tinkering with more general system stuff is problematic.

However, judging from the number of people who do this, it's possible Linux distributions (for example) could do a better job of communicating it to their users.

Well, folks, at least from my perspective, I guess I can call this the Cyclone that wasn't. But I expect it's caused (and will cause) damage elsewhere in Maharashtra. I'm just grateful we were spared. I had visions of losing internet and possibly power, which would really not have been fun. Especially since we've been stocking food in the fridge and (still) can't go out.

Tangently on-topic: does anyone know of a historical graph of RAM prices over a long period? Perhaps this is something that would be too complicated to make, considering how much change has happened in this area even just in the last 20 years.

I looked online but did not find much, except apparently memory prices has gone up around 2017-2018 and then had gone back down more recently. Not sure about the current situation.

I'm hoping to build a second computer soonish, so this is relevant.

@FaheemMitha it's probably hard to create an accurate and informative graph, due to the way that capacity grows very rapidly. There are plots for price/capacity such as hblok.net/storage_data/storage_memory_prices-2015-12.png, not sure how useful these are for your purposes

and also whatever currency they are using to quantify the cost will also vary with time...

@AndrasDeak That's a crowded graph. Which of those correspond to RAM?

Current RAM is DIMM I think. Laptops definitely use SO-DIMM.

of course there are many generations within those categories...my new laptop has DDR4 SDRAM

A quick search suggests that RAM was SIMM but more recently is DIMM.

And SIMM doesn't seem to be present before 1990. At least that's where it starts being present on the graph.

And this graph terminates at 2015.

Going up one level, the server lets me lists the files. Which is normally a no-no for security reasons, but whatever. It looks like till 2017 is the most recent version available.

I'm missing a huge drop in that figure for HDDs (perhaps "small drive" means something else?). I was under the impression that the Nobel-worthy discovery of GMR used in spin valves led to a capacity jump for HDDs. Perhaps the price followed that...

@FaheemMitha good catch

It looks like DIMM prices have levelled off around 2013 or so, and are fluctuating.

@AndrasDeak I'm not sure what small drive means here.

Oh, I see the scale is logarithmic, so I should not put a linear interpretation on it.

Yeah, no. Something something Moore's law.

At any rate, it looks like RAM prices have droppd at least 10k times since 1990.

Probably more. It's hard to tell from this graph, and I suppose they will continue to decrease.

But the memory need of software rises to meet it. The overall costs don't decrease that much.

I got my first computer in the summer of 1998. Right around the time that the SIMM to DIMM switch happened, though I didn't notice. And from that graph RAM was around USD 1 per MB. So it's dropped around 1000-fold since then.

@AndrasDeak Increasingly wastefully so.

@AndrasDeak Emacs usage, for example, has stayed around the same.

And TeX has not exploded. Though I believe that newer libraries like PGF/TikZ is much more resource-hungry than TeX used to be.

Well, yeah. But surely you won't buy 4-8 GB of RAM for the sake of emacs ;)

@FaheemMitha as long as it's tex/pdflatex there's static allocation, right?

My current computer has 16GB of RAM. Which doesn't last long with the memory leakages (if that's what it is).

@AndrasDeak Probably. I don't really know how TeX works.

There you have it. Emacs only doesn't make the problem worse.

I wonder if I should double up to 32GB, or go higher. Thoughts?

I switched from 8 to 16 with my previous laptop a few years ago, which was practically rebirth for that laptop.

@FaheemMitha depends on what you do and how bad your leaks are, as always.

@AndrasDeak Just browser stuff, but it seems to leak pretty badly. Part of the problem might be streaming, which I do quite heavily.

I'm happy with 16, though opening too many imgur posts in firefox will evantually eat several gigabytes. Nothing a firefox restart can't solve though... If I could "afford" it 32 would be perfect.

@AndrasDeak Switched? You didn't just add new memory?

@FaheemMitha one thing I noticed a few years ago when I started watching Okeanos Explorer's live seafloor dives was that watching that stream ate up memory in firefox. Might be the same issue...

@FaheemMitha that's what I meant, sorry

But I had to replace 2x4 with 2x8 so it was pretty much a switch

Just opening a new Amazon Prime Video tab can make available memory drop over a GB. No idea what it's doing, but it's clearly not very efficient.

I doubt regular web pages or even SE chat are an issue.

Probably not. We have netflix and that doesn't lead to any problems in firefox.

@AndrasDeak Oh. Because there was only space for so many memory sticks? What did you do with the old memory?

Yeah, two slots, and I think the CPU couldn't handle 1x16. The old ones are in a drawer somewhere :)

my new laptop came with 4 GB so I did the same thing to it right when I bought it

@AndrasDeak Dunno. Maybe it's a hardware problem. Since I disabled swap, my RAM seems to run out pretty fast.

@FaheemMitha well if it's just amazon prime video tabs I wouldn't bet on that...

What browser is this?

By the way SSDs are also getting rapidly cheaper.

at least 2x cheaper than they were 5 years ago

Ah, I just checked. I put 1x16 in the new laptop so that I can expand it later to 32 if necessary.

@AndrasDeak Firefox. Currently Chromium isn't working for Prime Video, though Chrome is. That's on Debian.

So we have a similar setup.

@AndrasDeak You think Prime Video might have worse memory management than Netflix?

@AndrasDeak I've got SSDs in this machine. I added them. There are still HDDs in here.

Purchased and added in 2017.

That particular SSD is no longer available.

amazon.in/gp/product/B00S17G21K/…

@FaheemMitha I have absolutely no idea. Netflix doesn't seem to trouble my firefox at all. And "Chromium isn't working for Prime Video" sounds like a red flag. I wouldn't be surprised if it only half-worked for firefox, causing memory issues...

@MichaelHomer your notes above were perceptive, thoughtful, and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to write it up. Makes me proud to be part of this community.

I don't know if it's the website or the browser's responsibility to handle buffering, but if half an HD video gets pushed through to your end it could easily eat up memory.

You can try watching network use...

FWIW I watch Prime Video with Firefox on Debian 10 without any problem.

@JeffSchaller Yes. Hear, hear @MichaelHomer. Thank you.

@AndrasDeak Hmm. Does Netflix reliably work on all of Chromium, Chrome and Firefox in Debian, then?

@StephenKitt Oh, there are no problems as such. I'm just referring to memory usage. If you have swap enabled, it might make a difference. I don't know.

I also use something called Hotstar, which Disney now owns, I think. It also has Disney+.

It's got a surprisingly bad user interface.

Yes in 2017, that item was Rs. 14,400.00. Now its successor, the 860 EVO, is listed as 7,199. About half.

@FaheemMitha I included memory issues in “problems” ;-)

@StephenKitt Hmm. Well, maybe swap makes a difference. Though I think that ideally it shouldn't be such a critical part of memory usage. Especially with a lot of RAM.

16GB is supercomputer levels of memory, by historical standards.

@FaheemMitha I wouldn't know. I've used firefox since forever

I see there is now something called QVO.

I don't think swap should come into play as long as you have decent amount of free RAM.

@FaheemMitha 16G should be plenty, my Firefox instance is currently using 3.5G total with hundreds of tabs open

@StephenKitt did ... did you say ... hundreds?

@StephenKitt It should, yes. Do you do much swapping?

With 60 swappiness at least.

@JeffSchaller I did ;-) I’m awful at closing tabs

@JeffSchaller 100s isn't particularly unusual, in my experience. It's alarmingly easy to accumulate huge numbers of tabs.

@StephenKitt That's something we have in common, then.

I also have 500+ tabs in FF. Don't know the exact count because my "tab counter badge" extension isn't available now.

wife has 1k+ so I'm fine

@FaheemMitha my workloads are unusual so I’m not sure it’s all that relevant, but I’m currently using 5G of swap with 16G available memory

My "solution" is to just not attempt to recover the tabs on a reboot or crash, or after closing the browser.

I have 2 tabs open. :)

luddite! :P

I find I look up a lot of stuff.

Like, all the time.

@AndrasDeak true!

I close lots of tabs too. But on the occasions I look at my tab history, it's a bit terrifying.

So mostly I don't.

Anyway, might be hardware issues. This computer was assembled in 2013.

It wouldn't be too surprising for it to now have some issues.

I quell my tabs every year or so and keep the necessary ones. They have been ripe for a while now for the next round.

For example, one couldn't drive a car for 7 years with no issues and no maintenance.

most of them are "I should look into this later" and "I should delvote this later"

If some page looks interesting, I save the url in a list.

Me too. The list is called the tab bar ;)

A bit primitive, but it's workable.

@AndrasDeak Doesn't that get lost when you close the browser?

Of course not. Otherwise it would be hard to gather hundreds of tabs.

I'm not sure what this tab bar is.

I just meant the collection of tabs in firefox...meaning if something looks interesting I leave it open in a tab :D

I even figured out how to copy over all my tabs in a session (seemed that firefox no longer supports "bookmark all tabs")

@AndrasDeak So you save the files to a tab? I think browsers do have history, but they might not be convenient or easy to search.

Also, they might get garbage collected at some point.

@StephenKitt Ok. Well, that sounds quite modest.

@FaheemMitha you can export the tabs into a string, basically. And sort-of-import that back in.

@AndrasDeak Oh. I don't think I've ever done that.

when you start thinking about a database for the exports, it's time to take a break :)

@JeffSchaller Database for the exports?

@FaheemMitha the exported tabs. If you have too many.

@JeffSchaller Firefox itself uses a SQLite database for that, so you can query that directly

@StephenKitt ahhhh! That's what your neuralink hooks into. Now it all comes together.

I asked a question on the help-bash list, found out new stuff about the shell that I didn't know before, and got help from Greg. Might do a Q/A from it later unless it's a dupe here or someone else does it first. lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bash/2020-06/msg00007.html

What I said are real. I don't really have mental problems. I don't act in reality, the way on the Internet. Thanks for saying nice about some thing that was tangentially related. Yes, I have to focus. @MichaelHomer

and anyone else. Thanks.

@JeffSchaller There's a database?

apparently! I was joking, but reality was stranger than fiction

@StephenKitt Firefox uses a SQLite db for tabs?

@JeffSchaller Databases aren't particularly strange, but I wasn't sure what you meant.

@FaheemMitha looking into it a bit more, apparently not; it uses SQLite databases for other things, but the tabs are in a JS file

@StephenKitt Oh.

@Daniil I don't know about Mint in particular, but if the installer offers a choice about where to install, take note of the disks & partitions that you have for Windows, and avoid those :)

choices like "use all my disks" should be avoided

I don't know off-hand. unix.stackexchange.com/… would be a start.

@Daniil you’ll need to pay particular attention to the Installation type step, see the guide for details

@Daniil really, read the guide. You’ll get a boot menu installed automatically.

@Daniil you should make backups before installing a new operating system...

@Daniil the swap partition is on the disk, not in memory.

(maybe being confused with 'ram disks'?)

Heh, gedit confused me for a good two minutes. I tried editing a file, and I accidentally mashed some keys, saw some popup blink for a nanosecond, and then I couldn't edit the file anymore. It somehow turned read-only. No setting I could find to change it. No useful hits in google (duckduckgo). Closed the file's tab, reopened it, same thing...

permissions show file's fine and editable

I had to restart gedit and try editing again to see a banner that tells me the file is already open in another gedit window (on the next desktop), and the default action for the banner is to open read-only :D

@AndrasDeak "I see you're already editing the file; do you see that you're already editing the file?"

What confused me the most is the "things are frozen in read-only". I've only seen that yet from libreoffice and I hate it.

The worst UX I see these days is opening a csv or similar from the command line with libreoffice, waiting minutes for it to load (it's never fast), only to realize that there's a popup waiting in an existing libreoffice window asking be about how it should import data from the file...

@AndrasDeak When weird stuff happens in this kind of situation, it's usually a good idea to check if a process has that file open.

now you tell me ;)

Interesting. I missed the timing of some change. Custom close vote reasons aren't generating comments any more? For example - has 4 close votes with custom text, but no comments.

belay that, slightly. There's a deleted comment that seems to be the source of the close votes.

Interesting times in the United States. Or perhaps I should say - more of the interesting times.

@JeffSchaller yesterday or today I saw Jon Skeet vote to close something with a custom reason and a comment :)

@AndrasDeak thanks! I'm always prepared to be surprised by SE changes, but this appears to be just new user behavior: VTC with custom reason, then delete "your own" comment on the Q

apparently that leaves the Q in the close-review queue with that custom reason as an option

That makes sense to me.

and I may have done that in the past...

Not sure why. Perhaps I deemed that the required close reason needed to be harsher than what would have been nice in a comment... I can't remember

one side benefit may be that you may not be pingable on subsequent comments

I guess...although that never bothered me. When comments are unwelcome they serve as good reminders to delvote.

hi, does anyone know if .desktop apps are broken in Ubuntu 20?

@Tim The internet is part of reality, and you're still you either way. If what you're saying is that you're always just trolling, well, ok, that has a swifter solution, but otherwise it's not about "problems", it's about modifying behaviours that are holding you back from what you want (even if we think the behaviours are right and reasonable, other people's reactions to them have an impact on us; for example, preventing you from posting on a site). All the offers still stand, in any case.

Ok, in bash, without cheating now, what would SECONDS=0; sleep 0.5; echo $SECONDS output?

Depends on wallclock time, right?

Unfortunately, yes.

Not in zsh though.

There, you'd always get zeros, unless you've declared SECONDS as a floating point variable.

I had some code behaving very oddly because of this.

@Kusalananda The latter part seems somehow even worse

@MichaelHomer Latter part of what?

That typeset -E SECONDS changes behaviour behind the scenes

You mean -F?

Well, either

I don't know that it's worse. You get a fractional time back, that's all. In the source code, it's quite clear that the integer SECONDS value is just the floating point value truncated.

At least it's not ticking with the system clock.

Well, Chet says he's changing it for the next release anyway, so that hopefully means it's getting fixed.

I'm just uncomfortable with redeclaring an existing variable that I never assign to creating a behavioural change

Like doing typeset -U -g PATH path ?

I suppose it's consistent with the idea that SECONDS=$(compute_floating_point_seconds) is constantly running and the value just gets truncated

Yes.

@Kusalananda This is also uncomfortably magical, yes

On the other hand, you may redeclare the variable knowing that you create a documented behavioral change.

In any case, my comment was more aimed at pointing out a somewhat surprising aspect of bash.

... and I'm off to bed.

@AndrasDeak Nonsense, of course Firefox could bookmark all tabs. Right click on any tab, select all tabs, bookmark tabs, done.

Ah, thanks. That's not the kind of interaction I'd expect. "Select all tabs" makes no sense to me.

Which is to say, I had no idea you could select tabs.