I remember coming home from school and telling my mom Columbus "discovered" America. She told me it was a load of crap, and set me straight. Mom was a hippie who challenged the status quo. At the time, it embarrassed me, I'd get frustrated and just wanted her to be like the other parents. I realized later how lucky I was, and do the same with my daughter. #indigenous #fuckcolumbus #indigenouspeoplesday
On my AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC, NVDA is a bit sluggish in some cases in Firefox; e.g. cursoring through messages in Gmail folders. For reasons I don't fully understand, setting the processor affinity to a single CPU core and setting the process priority to "above normal" helps significantly, even when the CPU is nearly idle. I don't currently have the time/energy to debug the root cause for this or write a proper add-on, but I wrote an NVDA global plugin to make the change for me automatically when NVDA starts. If it breaks something, you get to keep all the pieces. ``` import ctypes
import globalPluginHandler
class GlobalPlugin(globalPluginHandler.GlobalPlugin): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) p = ctypes.c_void_p(ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetCurrentProcess()) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetProcessAffinityMask(p, ctypes.c_void_p(1)) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetPriorityClass(p, ctypes.wintypes.DWORD(0x00008000)) ``` #nvdasr
@kev This isn't about changing overall CPU settings. It's about changing the way Windows schedules the NVDA process, both which core it uses and what priority it has relative to other running apps. You can do this from the Task Manager context menu, but the global plugin I provided does this automatically from within NVDA.
@kev I can understand above normal priority anyway but how does the afinity help? That's strange. I thought NVDA would have a couple relatively busy threads running at once and so should be distributed over a couple cores, especially when doing all that IPC and managing a virtual buffer.
@x0 @kev I honestly don't even really understand priority. If the CPU is near idle, there shouldn't be much contention (and thus nothing should have to wait), especially with multiple cores, since there are more than enough cores for all the things. As for affinity, NVDA is largely single core, primarily because GUIs (and thus accessibility APIs) are pretty much main thread only. Most of the work of a virtual buffer actually happens in NVDA's injected code in the GUI thread of the remote process; e.g. inside Firefox. I haven't tested this, but I think this is more likely to be the many cross-process COM calls NVDA makes to query the focus, etc., not the buffer stuff. That involves a lot of context switching.
@x0 @kev not sure about how NVDA manages its work, but restricting processor affinity can help keep memory cached closer to the core that's running the thread. if there's lots of state (either lots of small allocations or a few big ones), you can pay a price waiting for it all to be paged in
@vt52 That's my best guess too, but I'm just surprised by how much that seems to impact things in this case. There are a lot of very small IPC calls, which I guess could result in a lot of small allocations, but we're talking maybe 10-100, not thousands. @x0 @kev
@vt52 @x0 @kev It'd also be interesting to know why this problem anecdotally appears to be worse on AMD CPUs than Intel ones, though of course there are just so, so many variables there, no pun intended.
@kev My original post included the code. That can go in a .py file inside %appdata%\nvda\scratchpad\globalPlugins, but that requires developer scratchpad to be enabled. If that's not something you're familiar with, you're probably best leaving this one alone for now. I don't want to go through the process of creating this as an actual installable add-on at this stage.
Also, for some reason, the process priority does not get set with this code but the affinity does. However, if I run the code as a one-liner in NVDA's Python console, it returns "1" and does what it's suppose to.
@twynn Hmm, I can't repro that here. Both get set by the plugin. I'm running latest alpha, which... might make a difference because of 64 bit? I tried to write the code to be independent of that though.
Not sure if I'm checking it properly, but when I invoke the code in the Python Console, it returns 1, and Task Manager reflects the change. If I just, say, restart NVDA, only the affinity gets reflected. I don't need it anyway, so it's not a big deal.
I don't use email in a browser like that, so maybe that's why, but on my 2012 3570K, NVDA is never the thing that lags, it's always everything else around it. To be fair it's actually not a laggy machine at all despite it's well-warn age, but if anything does, it's never the screen-reader.
@FreakyFwoof What's really intriguing about my situation is that clearly, it's not really anything in particular that is slow, but rather, how NVDA gets scheduled by Windows. That's not a bottleneck I ever expected to be noteworthy. One of these days, I might try to profile it and figure out what's really going on, but definitely not today and probably not any time soon.
oh yeah I've been doing this for quite a while now on a HX370. I have very little experience with NVDA addons so entirely possible I messed something up somewhere, but it works for me. This let's you set CPU affinity and priority in NVDA settings. Addon: iamtalon.me/cpuPriority-1.0.0.… Code: code.iamtalon.me/Talon/cpu-aff…
@talon Even though I have no problems, I'm gonna try it anyway because I'm curious if I'm just used to this old machine being slightly laggy, and since I don't know any different, I just deal with it. Got me curious.
@FreakyFwoof If you don't have a cpu with high performance and high efficiency cores this will probably not do much for you. But hey been surprised before. Let me know what happens
@FreakyFwoof You might get a very very negligible boost from setting the process priority to high but honestly I'd be surprised if anything at all happened. lol
@talon I think you're right, honestly. I won't see any performance gains until I upgrade this machine's well, everything. It's running better than it ever has though, Jake hooked me up with a GPU instead of Intel onboard graphics, and I upped it from 16 to 32 GB RAM. Windows 10 but it's not end-of-life because of the I guess, EU mandate so I still get updates. Never felt so good lol
@talon GTX 970 for the curious. On a hunt for the 3770K from Ebay just to really max it out. Plan is to donate it to the boy once I'm officially done with it, would make a perfectly usable NAS/Linux box, refuse to scrap it just because MS says I should.
@FreakyFwoof That's what we've been doing as well. Our homelab is pretty much entirely made of old parts that eventually got upgraded. Very happy with this setup.
Oh wow. Surprised you need this on a CPU like that. Makes me wonder whether there is some weirdness with AMD processors that NVDA is hitting because as much as Intel irritates me for other reasons, I don't have this issue on my Intel laptop.
Not entirely sure, and also not even sure how I'd debug that. I'd imagine since it's a mobile CPU it's related to the power profiles, and changing them does improve things a little, but it makes a huge difference especially if you're running in a more energy saving mode. It switches to them especially when running on batteries and I haven't found out how I can prevent it from doing that, but to be honest sometimes I don't even want it to do that because it means giving up quite a lot of battery time. But setting CPU affinity and priority seems to do a good enough job that I kinda forgot about it until recently when I tried to get it working as an addon and not as a weird set of external scripts.
@talon My 8845HS is in a mini PC, so still a mobile-ish CPU but theoretically less of the power saving silliness. Obviously an older generation than yours though and I was thinking that was the cause, but I guess not. I'm definitely curious about the underlying cause, but now that I have an interim solution, I'm not quite curious enough to be motivated to dig into it further. I might get nerd sniped enough one day, we'll see.
yup, this is pretty much my situation as well. This works well enough for me that I don't feel like digging, and there are people out there that know much more about this than me that have a much higher chance of figuring out what's going on here.
As if today couldn't get any worse, the bill for the server that runs this instance came out today and it was £1.60 more than expected. I never got any emails saying I'd gone over any limits or anything, but anyway, I'm now £0.02 negative. Some support to help keep this server going and help my other services grow, as well as covering personal costs, would be greatly appreciated.
At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate.
The majority of people hate rich people because it's been proven that many show narcissistic/psychopathic tendencies. You only have to look at the various big tech CEOs and many in the current administration to see this play out in real time.
@ZBennoui Yet I've met rich people and they are interesting people who don't even discuss money, of course, most were not billionaires, but millionaires, for sure.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that all wealthy people are narcissistic jerks who deserve nothing, but the fact of the matter is that many are. It also depends on how you got rich in the first place. If you were born into wealth, you will simply not relate to people who either don't have the extraordinary amount of money you do, or who have come into it honestly by doing good work. There's a lot of nuance here, as with everything.
@ZBennoui Most of the milionaires I've met, including even some blind ones, made businesses. I only met 1 person born into it, and he's british royalty.
When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.
In addition to working better with screen readers, this also matters for Braille transcription (I used to work for a company that develops a Braille translator). If a document author properly uses styles, then the software can infer what she is trying to do and do an appropriate thing when formatting the corresponding Braille document. It is harder and a lot more error-prone for software to try to have logic to, say, try to infer that a heading is intended based on text being bigger and bolder.
In the late 1980's there was an MS-DOS program called PIANOMAN. Yup, in the docs, it's written in all caps like that. This program would let you compose, play, edit, and save tunes, and even compile them into self-contained executables to give to others who didn't have a copy of PIANOMAN themselves. This program's claim to fame was that it could create pseudo-polyphonic music through the monophonic PC speaker by playing different notes extremely rapidly. This was a shareware program (try it for a while, if you like it, send in a registration fee to get the latest version and another disk of sample songs). I just found the shareware distribution of version 4 on Archive.org. One of the included tunes, which exists here only as a compiled, self-contained executable, is a version of a Tom Lehrer classic. Naturally, I figured some folks might be interested in this. It's set up to play repeatedly until a key is pressed, so I've only included three playings in this recording, and the last one fades out. Enjoy! #TomLehrer
Ah, the memories! PIANOMAN was one of the programs I used to play with when my brother got his first PC back in the 80s. I never figured out how to record songs like those demos, but it was fun to play the keyboard like a monophonic piano. Drove everybody crazy when I played it during Computer class at school, but I didn't care.
If you put solar panels over all the fields where corn is grown for ethanol today, you could power all of North America and still harvest shade crops underneath them.
Anthropic stole the books I co-wrote in order to train their planet-burning hallucination machine, so I've filed a claim. They wept that if every plagiarised author does so, the company will go bankrupt. Boo emdash hoo. www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
У меня есть приятель (у него есть «остаток», — на нашем жаргоне это значит, что он не совсем слепой, немножко видит). Так вот, он говорит, что ему прям вот супермегаудобно платить часами и что он бы в жизни не отказался от них только ради этой функции. Ну в смысле, платить в кассе в магазине, например.
“Apple is now treating federal agents—who are public employees exercising government power—as if they’re a vulnerable minority group in need of protection from ‘discrimination.’ This isn’t just a misapplication of content policies; it’s a fundamental inversion of what those policies were designed to do.”
Just when you think corporate content moderation can’t get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine “protected class” in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to int…
🕚Z На початку години слухайте #НашГолос радіопрограма у Канада, передачі якої ведуться українською та англійською мовами. Програма спрямована на українську діаспору Ванкуверського регіону: транслює як і сучасну, так і традиційну українську музику у виконанні артистів з України, Канади та Сполучених Штатів. Він також представляє новини та погляди з України та української громади в Канаді. Слухай сюди. theglobalvoice.info:8443/broad… #TGVRadio #Україна 🎤📰🎶🇺🇦🌻🌿🔱⚔️🍲🐎🇨🇦🍁🦫🔁
- use mimalloc as default allocator in scenarios where we know memory safety domain violations are unlikely (Rust, managed languages, ...). this probably solves most of our multi-thread SG performance issues actually, since the pattern is mostly prevalent in Rust and interpreted languages like Node
- let browsers use their bundled mallocs, since they are tuned for the browser
- figure out how to improve the global lock in musl's malloc-ng, probably by using atomics more heavily (but this may actually hurt performance worse since it's multiple atomic ops)
What does SG stand for in this context? I've heard of poor performance in Rust programs when using musl's malloc-ng. I wonder if this is an indication that Rust encourages a bad pattern of overly frequent memory allocations that we, meaning Rust programmers, should try to avoid.
@matt scatter-gather. i think the allocation pattern is fine for a language like rust where we don't need a hardened malloc. it's on us to fix alpine's rust toolchain to use mimalloc instead.
It looks like mimalloc is just over an order of magnitude larger than musl's malloc-ng, by (stripped) object code size. Presumably having a larger, more complex implementation of such a fundamental component is a liability. And if one has chosen Alpine over all the glibc-based distros, one presumably values smallness, simplicity, and security (which I guess comes partly from simplicity) over speed.
@pj Ouch. I like Rust, and I'd rather not write any more new C or C++ code than necessary because, while I value smallness and simplicity, I value safety and correctness more. But I recognize you have a valid point about the size and complexity of the Rust project, and it does make me uneasy.
hay humans: recommendations for good strings midi things? We want to maybe add them to a few of our tracks to pad things out a bit, especially if the songs are slow and depressing...as they inevitably are.
Fracture Sounds Blueprint series, all free. ProjectSAM TFO, again free. Self-serving demo but it uses some of these things. The music I made for my podcast was all made using free instruments. Sending so you can hear what can be done with purely free things: youtu.be/Ra7prQ6d9Pw
This piece of music is for the podcast 'StroongeCast' I co-created with my wife Kirsten. Every podcast needs a musical intro (or at least I believe so) and t...
The majority of the tech industry has no valid vision how to contribute to a liveable future for humanity on this planet. Their dystopian fantasies don’t match with human needs. That’s why we will keep sliding from one bubble to the next. Everything has to be artificially inflated to hide the massive abyss of meaninglessness behind it all.
@jcsteh Hey I read about your App2Clap project. I'm curious how you can isolate audio from one particular application. For years now, I've been using Total Recorder to record system audio. Before definitely Windows 7 and possibly Vista, in other words, as late as XP, I could record audio as received by the system, exclude applications, do accelerated recording, etc. But then with the newer audio driver, I had to record after processing by Windows, which meant all audio was resampled to the default output sample rate, I could no longer exclude apps, etc. When you said App2Clap requires Windows 11, that gave me the impression that Windows 11 restored some of that older functionality, but I really can't find anything, and Total Recorder hasn't been updated in years. Thoughts? Thanks.
Windows 10 (see previous message about that) added WASAPI functionality to allow capture of audio from a specific app instead of loopback audio for an entire device. I think it's still processed by Windows though.
Microsoft wrote a sample app for this API which does this, but you'd have to build it yourself, which might be tricky if you don't have dev experience. I also don't know how well it works; it was only intended as a sample.
Here's a link to the sample, but I can't help you any further with this. Ultimately, I think you're going to have more mileage and flexibility using OBS or REAPER, but I also understand the desire to avoid being entangled in yet another tool. learn.microsoft.com/en-us/samp… @TheQuinbox
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