“They’re a private company” (with a state-sponsored monopoly on an essential good).

I don’t know how anybody is surprised by this. Who do you think would buy a privatized municipal water supplier, other than people trying to squeeze as much money as possible from a population with no recourse and no say in the matter?

There is no wise way to use that information.

But the foolish ones could be entertaining.

Saying RAM can help because you can reencode the video to h.264 or h.265 to make use of hardware decoding is more than a bit of a stretch. You can just reencode it to the normal disk instead. Unless it’s the speed of the local block device that’s the bottleneck here (and there’s no indication that it is, and it would be extremely unlikely), using a ramdisk/tmpfs for any part of that is just pointless.

Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

* Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.

You just gave me flashbacks to that abomination of a programming language they call sqf.

Hm, agree in principle, but it should also really be noted that a donation that is required to get an account (or arguably even smaller perks) does not count as a donation anymore. At that point, it’s a weasel-wordiy way to say “payment”. Which should, IMHO, not be supported.

Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib’s day) with a name but no numerical date.

Who’s Rich? Did you mean Randall?

Files and directories starting with a dot are hiden by default. You are aksing for this stuff if you manually unhide them.

I can see it going both ways. Talking about execution times, this would be an exaggeration, but then, these memes always are.

und ich hab nichts gesagt.

Going by what OP thinks “Chaotic Evil” means for sysadmins, they have clearly never heard of BOFH.

Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn’t yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that’s how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

• Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
• Don’t comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
• Don’t comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the “what” style comments for where that just isn’t possible.
• Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
• In some cases, comment the “why not”, to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.

MacOS is basically a different world.

The KDE team has already determined that this is not a bug and that both you and me must just be imagining it:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481058

In a language that has exceptions, there is no good reason to return bool here…

Corporations holding residential real estate are a growing part of the problem, but still a small one. The vast majority of single famliy homes are still owned by either their residents or small time, non-incorporated landlords.

Never mind increasing the supply of housing would drive down prices and remove pressure regardless of who owns the existing stock.

Okay, this bullshit. It’s not shareholders who would be negatively affected by this, and it’s not shareholders who are actively working against doing something about the problem. Shareholders are just an easy acceptable target to point your fingers at, whether it makes sense or not.

What needs to be done to tackle the homelessness problem (not the only thing, but probably the most important one) is to zone much, much more land inside or directly next to cities for affordable mid-rise multi-family homes. Guess who is opposed to that and has the power to do something about it? Existing property owners. Specifically owners of detached single family homes. Because doing that would negatively affect their property values. Personally, I think that shouldn’t matter, because what good is living in home that is worth absurd amounts of money on paper going to do you if society is falling apart because of it? But home owners are always massively concerned about their property values and will torpedo anything that might threaten it. Of course, pointing your fingers at home owners is much dicier than pointing them at shareholders, because even in a bubble like this one, you are bound to point at some people here who will feel personally attacked by that…

“Shareholders”, on the other hand, aside from those that are also home owners at the same time, don’t really have much reason to care one way or another about effective projects to reduce homelessness.

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.

As someone who is in tech… not sure, either.