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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 14th, 2023

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  • I assume this sick Nazi fuck just wanted to make a snuff video of an innocent mom, wife and US citizen.

    It really does seem that way - the whole situation, especially being prepared recording and positioning himself at the front corner of the car so he could safely take a glancing bump from the car without actually risking his safety gives me flashbacks to bullies on the playground who would stand in front of you and move to block you just so that you’d run into them and they could call the teacher and say you pushed them. That but a grown ass adult and given a gun.


  • As a dev with roughly 10 years (or more depending on how you count) of experience, I would have done the same. Beyond maintaining self respect, I feel like we have a duty to each other to ensure companies that treat candidates like this have the hardest time possible finding someone willing to put up with it. I don’t even entertain companies that won’t let me use my choice of distro - especially considering I’m web UI focused.


  • If you tried BlueStacks and androidstudio and those don’t work, and you don’t have access to an old android device, then you could try something like BrowserStack - I’ve occasionally used them to test websites in specific combinations of OS and browser version on supposedly real devices. They have an option to test android apps, and you may be able to transfer your apk or paste in a share link to try it out there.

    I think they give you 30 minutes free, but I haven’t tried the app testing (since I’m a web dev) so idk if it would be excluded from the sign up bonus. The price for a single freelancer is $19 month to month.


  • I see! My metaphor was mainly meant to illustrate that whether anticheat is directly related to the current security issue is orthogonal to why I thought it was relevant to bring up. I could have picked a better one that didn’t imply that their misplaced concern about Linux cheaters actually consumes resources.

    Maybe a better metaphor would be a municipality refusing to do something about a small issue (maybe poor transit to a specific neighborhood) and also actively refusing to let that neighborhood solve the problem themselves (proton devs) with the excuse that allowing that neighborhood to have transit would cost too much (even if the neighborhood were to do it themselves) and cause more crime (painting Linux users as hackers) all the while some completely unrelated group is actually causing the crime elsewhere.



  • I think you’re misunderstanding why I’m bringing it up. It’s not because I think their server is protected by anticheat, but because they’re both forms of security. And my point is that their security posture is focused on the wrong area by scapegoating Linux instead of where they should be focusing, server security. If you don’t think their misplaced focus on Linux (which I agree is unrelated to server security) has anything to do with getting hacked then I don’t know what to tell you.

    To give it an analogy, if your local government had unmaintained roads and you commented about how they spend tons of resources on police patting down everyone to prevent them from planting gardens, sure you could say it’s “not related to roads”, but that’s the whole point of bringing it up. It’s unrelated which is why it’s dumb to be focusing on it. Client sided anticheat is not equal to server security, but the misplaced security focus makes it relevant even if it’s not specifically on topic.

    It’s like if a boat was sinking due to a huge hole and your captain was busy trying to stop people from tightening loose bolts on wobbly chairs. Yeah it’s not the same thing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to point out the misplaced focus.

    Does that make sense?

    (Edited to make the metaphors illustrate both 1. unrelated issues being relevant to a discussion within the scope of misplaced focus and 2. that the misplaced focus in this case isn’t even because they’re spending resources on the other issue, but rather trying to scapegoat and block people from fixing the unrelated issue)





  • I mean you’re not wrong it’s true to a degree, but especially in my parents case, they hardly store anything on the computer so the disk usage hardly registers on the pros and cons. If it provides convenience then it’s whatever. They’re still on an obsolete elementaryos but flatpak is still keeping them up to date until I can get around to visiting them again. If I understand how it works on debianland once a major version goes EOL, they’d be using backports which might not have the latest version right?


  • I did this for my parents, context: borderline elderly, late 60s, use their laptops for checking email, reading articles, and watching youtube. I visit every year or so and usually end up doing a little maintenance.

    Probably my main tips are:

    • Don’t pick elementary like I did years ago, I learned there’s no upgrade path between major versions and that’s been a pain
    • I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
    • Set up some form of remote access, I’ve used teamviewer but in hindsight it would be nice to have WG to SSH in
    • If I were doing it again today, I would probably use a universal blue spin for the atomic updates
    • With my parents’ level of computer experience, as long as there’s a firefox icon in the dock then they’re right at home

    Honestly there isn’t much to it, especially if they’re not tech savvy and aren’t doing anything complex. All you have to do is make sure familiar app icons are where they expect and that they know how to use the window decorations / DE. My only pain has been having to do a bunch of updates when I visit, so next time I’ll swap them to fedora and set up automatic atomic updates. Besides that, everything keeps chugging along because they’re not making any changes to the system when I’m not there.





  • Idk worrying about a lab leak type pathogen scenario through an ebay sale seems far fetched to me. I picked one that looked lightly used and clean and wiped it down with disinfectant when I got it. The chance of a pathogen surviving that long doesn’t sound like a realistic concern. Most things it plausibly would have been exposed to, save for like highly radioactive dust getting lodged in its crevices, is easily handled with basic sanitation and hand washing. And it’s not like I’m putting food on the surface anyways.


  • Also second hand lab equipment. I was tired of my kitchen scale breaking and having annoying features like auto off after like 60 seconds. Got an ohaus lab scale off eBay for like $50, handles 18lbs, has a configuration menu with tons of options and features like count mode, sequential weight summing, and lets you set auto off for up to 30 minutes or completely disable auto off. Takes regular AAs or plugs into an outlet. I love it and it’s built like a tank.