Vaŭ

In Esperanto

My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.

I believe you’d still be controlling the player character, you’d just be seeing through the eyes of the enemy

I don’t know how well it would work as a game mechanic, but I could see a cool take on this in a cyberpunk setting where the player character is blind, but can hack into other people’s eyes to see, so you go around seeing yourself from different viewpoints

I imagine it would get weird

You shoot someone and suddenly you can’t see through their eyes any more since they’re dead. Or maybe their bionics are still powered for a while but they’re not facing any useful direction, maybe they fall face down and all you can see is the floor tile they’re laying on, or they’re facing up and all you can see is the ceiling until you walk right over their corpse

Maybe after you kill a room full of enemies you need to lug around a corpse or maybe just a severed head so that you can find the exit because none of them fell looking the right direction.

I’m not normally much of a writer, but that idea actually inspired me a bit, so here’s a little short story I guess

I walk into the lobby and I begin to see through the eyes of the security guard seated at the desk. He’s reading a newspaper - an actual ink-on-paper newspaper. I didn’t know they still made those.

The door chime beeps and his eyes are immediately on me, zooming in, trying to get a read on me. I see my own features, distorted by the fisheye lens of his implants.

These security types always have some high-end bionics- night vision, thermal imaging, zoom, image stabilization, extra-wide field of view, facial recognition, the works. They think they can see everything but somehow they never seem to see it coming.

A notification pops up in his vision “Unrecognized person detected, check ID” the angle changes as he begins to get up. I see the back of his hand as he raises his arm in a “stop” gesture. He’s wearing a wedding band. That’s unfortunate.

I see movement in the bottom corner of his vision. He’s doing something with his other hand but I can’t tell what. Is he reaching for his gun? Is he smoothing out the wrinkles from his shirt? Is he just trying to put the newspaper away?

Maybe that’s why he reads an actual newspaper. He’s supposed to be alert and paying attention, if he read on his phone or tablet like anyone else his employers could track it, they’d know he was slacking off. Smart.

Through my own ears I hear him ask for my ID.

Through his eyes I see myself reach into my coat pocket he zooms in slightly. I love it when they zoom, it makes what comes next so much easier.

I see my gun come out. The angle changes abruptly but strangely smoothly, that image stabilization is doing some heavy-lifting as he tries to duck for cover and reach for his own gun.

His eyes are fixed on it, he’s staring right down the barrel, I can even just about line the sights up through his eyes, he’s making it too easy.

A flash. A loud bang heard through my own ears. Flashing warnings at the corners of his vision reporting critical vital signs.

The angle changes again, I think he’s fallen backwards and is propped up by his chair. He’s not looking straight up at the ceiling, but he’s not looking straight forward at me either. I can catch glimpses of the top of my head here and there as I stumble blindly towards him.

My face comes into full view as I make my way around the desk. I start going through his pockets looking for a key card to let myself into the elevator.

I find a rectangular piece of plastic on a lanyard stuffed into his pocket, and hold it in front of his eyes to confirm that it’s what I was looking for. I tap it on the sensor on the desk and hear the elevator doors slide open.

I point his head towards the elevator so that I can see where I’m going. A message notification pops up in his vision from “Bae💜” asking if he’ll be home for dinner. I see myself sigh as the door closes behind me.

The steel and concrete of the building sever me from his ocular feed as the elevator starts climbing and everything goes black once again.

Couple months ago I found myself needing to stop at a McDonald’s in probably one of the worst neighborhoods you can find outside of the inner city. Nature was calling and it seemed like my best option.

It was for paying customers only, fair enough, I made a token purchase of a McChicken and some fries, and got an employee to unlock the door for me.

I was greeted with that eerie blue light that bathrooms in places like this use to deter drug use because it makes it harder to find a vein.

It gave off an all-around really unsettling vibe, but I will admit that, at least as far as I could tell given the lighting, it seemed to be immaculately clean.

This is probably going to vary a lot depending on where you’re applying, every state has their own regulations and every department their own standards, so there’s probably not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer for you.

At the very least, if it comes up, it’s probably not going to be seen as a mark in your favor. If, hypothetically, the hiring choice came down to you, or an otherwise identical candidate who isn’t autistic, 9/10 times they’re probably going to go with the other guy.

If at all possible, don’t bring it up. If it comes up on a form or something, don’t lie, if you get caught in a lie that’s probably gonna be an automatic disqualification, but if they don’t ask, don’t tell them. Don’t volunteer the information that you’re autistic unless it’s specifically asked for. If there’s a question anywhere along the lines of “do you have any conditions that will prevent you from carrying out your duties as a police officer?” The answer is “no” unless you do believe that your autism will be an impediment, in which case, don’t be a cop.

Also, between stuff like this and the potential of RFK wanting to send people to work farms, I think it’s very important for people to ask themselves before pursuing a diagnosis for autism (and other conditions) “how do I stand to benefit from a diagnosis, and how will it potentially hurt me?”

If you’re at the high-functioning/low-support-needs/however-you-want-to-phrase-it end of the spectrum, what kind of additional resources and support will a diagnosis actually unlock for you and do you really need them? Or will it just come back to bite you in situations like this? Unfortunately people really do need to be weighing that.

the Latin word Caeser

…which comes from the name Caesar

If you haven’t noticed there’s a lot of people out there are incredibly dumb, and don’t understand basic math, let alone how a company like EA works.

I can guarantee you that there are more dipshits out there than you’d think who would look at that number and say “well it’s less than 100 percent, so they don’t have total control, so what’s the big deal?”

Now as for whether any amount of clarification is enough to convince those idiots that that’s not how things work, that’s a fair question.

Could also just be the rim being kind of dirty and corroded and needs to be cleaned up a bit of bead sealant.

I’ve had it happen to me a couple times, tires just always lost air sort slowly, I never cared enough to bring it in just for that, not a big deal to stop by the air pump once a week or so when I was getting gas anyway.

I’m sure if you brought your car in just for that they’d probably slap some token $10-50 price on it.

But if you bring it in for another service I feel like a lot of places will just do it. I know I brought my car in to pep boys one time for an oil change or something and asked them to look at it and they just did it, no extra charge.

I feel like it’s one of those little things that no one is quite sure how to write it up in the system, and figuring it out is more of a pain in the ass than just not mentioning it to the boss, not like he’s gonna notice they used an extra scrap of sandpaper and blob of sealant anyway.

I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

But a couple things jumping out at me

The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

*fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.

It’s actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it’s fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you’re supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you’re supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It’s not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don’t know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that’s just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.

As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.

My buddy works security at a bar. Last night he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there with some SS lightning bolts on his shirt. Bar manager wouldn’t let my friend kick him out because he wasn’t otherwise causing a problem.

I hatch a plan, I pull up the jukebox app on my phone, turns out you don’t actually have to be at the bar to queue up music there (I’m pretty sure that used to be the case, I’m pretty sure at one point a decade ago I had to spoof my location on a rooted phone to pull this kind of thing)

And I start queuing up as many anti-fascist songs as I could think of. Cost me a few bucks but I considered it money well-spent.

This and a few other woody Guthrie songs were of course some of the first things I thought of but sadly were not available on the jukebox.

But I managed to find a good handful.

According to my friend, he got visibly frustrated when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on and left the bar to have a cigarette.

And when he came back in he was greeted with Youth Against Fascism my Sonic Youth

Only took about an hour of that before he packed up and left.

Apparently someone also left a review online complaining about Nazi boy, and after the owner saw it my friend now has more authority to take out the trash.

Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

And then a big gap

And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.

Married for 7 years, together for probably about 10 total

Can’t really think of a time we wouldn’t have had that sort of exchange.

She’s also been jokingly threatening me with divorce since we got married. I’m pretty sure we left the courthouse holding the receipt for our marriage license joking that we needed to hold onto it in case we needed it for a return. Still have it around somewhere, someday we’re gonna put it in a little shadowbox with “in case of irreconcilable differences break glass” stenciled on it.

I understand that oil isn’t just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we’re also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

But I’d be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we’ve drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

I’m thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

Of course there’s also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you’d probably have to do it in a hard diving suit

I’m all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I’ll agree with you that “fascist” probably isn’t the best label for Iran

But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don’t conform and towards external enemies, etc.

I don’t know that they’re exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let’s be real, the line’s pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

And they don’t exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they’re certainly not exactly sitting around singing “Kumbaya” with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there’s certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it’s not the best label for what they have going on it’s certainly not the worst either. I’d maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like “Farscism” if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from “classic” fascism.

And similarly I’d probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term “theocracy” as well before applying it to Iran, I don’t think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

And now that I’m looking at it, “fascist theocracy” might be a contender for how I’d label them.

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

Thank you for your help!

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

And everything went off without a hitch from there

Thank you for your help!