Random Dent

I had a boss who asked me about a similar thing, their computer was going slow. I saw them checking their email by booting up their (quite old) Mac, launching a VM which loaded a full Windows installation, then opening Outlook inside Windows. I asked about it, and apparently they used to have a PC and Outlook set up for their email, then at some point had switched to Mac and somehow landed on that as the solution. I told them you can just install Outlook directly onto the Mac and they said I was being unhelpful lol.

Hmm, I have no idea to be honest! I just back up to an external drive. It does look like you can rsync to anything you have SSH access to, but I’ve never tried it personally.

Yeah same here, my current uptime is 3.5 hours lol

I’m interested in the rsync part for backups, do you have a good guide or video for that? Thanks

I don’t really have a guide or anything for it to hand, but essentially what that alias is doing is:

• rsync = running rsync
• --ignore-existing = as you might have guessed, this tells rsync not to copy a file if it already exists at the destination.
• -rav = additional arguments. r = recursive, IE also copy subfolders. a = archive mode, preserves things like symlinks etc. and v = verbose, just tells you extra info about what’s going on.

So with that alias, I can just type rs [target folder] [destination folder] and it’ll copy it across exactly as it is, ignore anything that’s already there and tell me precisely what it’s doing.

I do mine in Obsidian, I just have a folder for ‘computer notes’ and whenever I figure out a new thing I drop it in there.

Some stuff I use often I set up as an alias too. So for example I have alias yt='yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"' for my most commonly used yt-dlp settings, so now I can just do yt [URL of video] to quickly download something from YouTube. Or alias rs="sudo rsync --ignore-existing -rav" for my rsync settings for a specific backup folder I copy a lot.

It does sort of solve the ‘blank page problem’ though IMO. It sometimes takes me ages to start something like a boring insurance letter because I open up LibreOffice and the blank page just makes me want to give up. If I have AI just fart out a letter and then I start to edit it, I’m already mid-project so it actually does save me some time in that way.

Yeah that’s how I use it, essentially as an office intern. I get it to write cover letters and all the other mindless piddly crap I don’t want to do so I can free up some time to do creative things or read a book or whatever. I think it has some legit utility in that regard.

My main issue with the first game was that I felt like it didn’t respect my time. There were some missions where the game would send you miles away to get something or find a person, only for you to arrive there and have an NPC go “Nah it’s not here” and send you miles in the other direction and do the same thing, and sometimes arbitrarily dump like 6 bandits on you along the way that you had no hope of defeating, so you’d die and go all the way back to square one again. I had to bail on eventually because of that.

It stopped working for me recently. It’ll play the first 5 seconds or so of the video and then just freeze up.

Yeah I would classify it as sort of like if they released a new version of Windows where they removed all the bloat, made it not look hideous, and fixed every annoying decision they’d made over the last 30+ years in all aspects of everything across the entire OS lol. So basically if they removed literally everything that made it identifiable as Windows and replaced it with something not shit.

Yeah I literally just close the tab. Same if anything comes up with a paywall or login or weird capcha thing. Just like “ah fuck this” and move on lol.

IIRC Julian Assange had something like that set up. There used to be a file you could download from WikiLeaks that was encrypted and supposedly contained something very spicy, and if anything happened to him the password would be released somehow.

No idea if that’s still a thing or not though.

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I suspect he won’t do another two full terms, but not because of any inherent virtue in the system. I think it’ll just come down to biology. He’s 78, not in good health anyway and about to enter a very high-stress job. If he’s still going at 86 I’ll be surprised.

And that’s assuming the cabal of demented fascists he’s assembled around him don’t tear him apart the second he shows any sign of weakness or of no longer being useful to them, which they definitely will.

I bought a quite expensive piece of animation software (that cost over $1000) to use professionally. The specific term it was sold to me under was a “perpetual license.” I took this to mean “never ending”, which is the dictionary definition of the word “perpetual.” You can probably guess where this is going.

A few years later, in the middle of a professional project, it stopped working. I contacted support, and was told that they changed the way they were doing licenses so I’d have to buy a new one (at almost double the price) or eat shit. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So yeah, if you’re thinking of buying a Toon Boom Harmony perpetual license, maybe save yourself a lot of money and hassle and just pirate it instead. Or tell them to get fucked and use their direct competitor. I have done both.

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I’m a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I’m 98% sure I’m just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

Yeah for me the inescapable fact seems to be that humanity is currently facing a series of somewhat existential crises (climate change, looming authoritarianism, a global pandemic etc.) and we’ve utterly failed to meet each one by backsliding into selfishness and idiocy. With climate change especially there doesn’t seem to be any fixing or avoiding it now, it’s just a matter of how bad it’s going to be, and a lot of predictions seem to be pointing towards “worse than we thought.”

So I dunno, for me the logical response to that would be depression and cynicism. We knew it was coming, we had every chance to avoid it, we didn’t, now we’re fucked.

As with most irritating Windows features, I assume there’ll be an option to turn it off hidden in some obscure place, which will either not work, or it’ll turn back on after a random amount of time.

That’s what I do. I’m in a place that really doesn’t give a shit about Piracy (the worst they’ll do is send a letter, one of my friends got one and called up his ISP to complain about it and they told him to stop seeding so much lol) but I still run a VPN 24/7 anyway just to be safe. It costs peanuts and doesn’t slow down the internet hugely so I figure why not.

I searched “Peter Molyneux NFT” because my first thought was, if any of them are on the NFT grift it’ll be him.

First result lol.