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6h ago

Fluxor as discord alternative? Thoughts?
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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 6h ago

I haven't tried either, but stoat seems more promising: https://github.com/stoatchat/
Matrix is lowkey dead. Everyone is waiting to see what will replace it, but none of these Discord alternatives check the federation+E2EE boxes yet.

8h ago

What's he writing?

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 8h ago

18h ago

Sunday is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 18h ago

Still playing Moria. Just stepped on a nasty gas trap which has left me deeply confused and unable to cast any spells. Also had a few run-ins with worm-masses reproducing explosively. The ones on this level set you on fire.

18h ago

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets. It has not paid off

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 18h ago

For lack of a better term, there is a deeply Orwellian aspect to all of this. Through digitization, we've managed to make all of the learning materials completely ephemeral. Textbooks (if you could still even call them that) can be revised on a day to day basis. Controversial subject matter removed or reframed on a day's notice. You used to need to replace an entire fleet of hard-bound textbooks to do this kind of revisionism, but now you can simply pass a law like New Hampsire outlawing "the dialectical method" and have the changes implemented throughout the entire public education system within a week. And it's not even a matter of skipping a couple chapters of the textbook in the lesson planning, it simply ceases to exist.

2d ago

Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 8

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 2d ago

Hopefully it's not out of turn for me to post the weekly submission

No, this is COOL.

Our military has a core of competent fighters who can handle dangerous beasts and invaders mostly. I think we ought to use new migrants to expand, get a few extra squads up, and put them in iron gear for the near term. It's not technically optimum but steel is going to be a long haul, to say nothing of having expert armorers and weaponsmiths. Don't want perfect to be the enemy of good, and all.

Steel IS going to be a long haul, but it shouldn't be THIS long. The setup is incredibly inefficient. There are multiple bottlenecks which can be resolved.

As far as the military goes, I basically scrapped it and re-constituted it during my turn. We had multiple squads with a lot of vacancies, I consolidated melee into one squad, and might have created a crossbow squad later as an afterthought. The training routines, barracks assignments, and availability of resources can use a review.

An artifact was stolen, I was not able to catch the perp, so I pass that mystery along.

With the amount of ~~espionage fronts~~ performance troupes we've got, there's basically no point of even investigating this lmao. Artifacts are simply going to evaporate.

Our military was able to kill it but there were a lot of casualties. Fingers crossed that migrants still want to come.

I got a couple decent "despite the danger" migration waves last year. Dwarves live for this shit apparently.

2d ago

Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 8

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 2d ago

some sort of consistent trade request that we always ask for,

Not a bad idea, but I think we have all the staples in this instance (sand, clay, coal, steel). Coal is limited, but we've still got some, plus a million trees to fall back on

an agreed on fort policy for guest residency applications. Maybe this is me revealing that I play the game strangely but I must assume nobody intended for the fort to have 63 poets dancers and musicians permanently on retainer.

I agree. Two, maybe three troupes. I rejected ALL of these during my turn, but there are so god damn many already. I still took the soldiers and monster slayers though.

Some way to document big changes to layout or work orders that have happened between years? I'm not sure WHEN the clothing industry got shuttered

That was me, so it hasn't been out of commission for long (sorry). I had chronic problems through my turn of dwarves not taking up urgent labor assignments, so I culled a bunch of work orders. Clothing is the kind of thing where once you satiate it, it can ride for a couple years, so I cancelled many of the orders.

In general, the workshop layout is extremely inefficient. Everything takes ages. Very few of the inputs/outputs are close to the actual workshops where they are needed. I ended up tearing down the walls so at least there is some space around the workshops, but I did not attempt to wrangle the stockpile chains.

Maybe a livestock policy? Culling this herd is going to be a monumental task

I lowkey attempted this during my turn too (tried to sweep this non-vegan enterprise under the rug and decommissioned the butcheries like it never happened). I had two butcheries running around the clock and they each ultimately ended up with hundreds of rotting animal parts in them. There needs to be an ample supply of wood and barrels, as well as LARGE stockpiles to store them before attempting this again.

In general, I think everything located around the top cavern layer is a shit-show (no offence, I love you all, and I am not innocent), and it might not be a terrible idea to begin a clean slate lower down.

3d ago

Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 8

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

3d ago

Google Maps Is Now Less Useful If You’re Not Signed In

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

Oh, neat.

3d ago

Google Maps Is Now Less Useful If You’re Not Signed In

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

It's not perfect, but check out Organic Maps. It can work completely offline and is available on F-Droid.

3d ago

What does your pet like to "supervise" you doing?

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

3d ago

loss32: let's build a Win32/Linux

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

3d ago

New Leak - Chrono Trigger Remake In Development!

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 3d ago

Akira Toriyama leaves behind deep shoes to fill.

4d ago

Bulletins and International News Discussion from February 16th to February 22nd, 2026 - The Neoliberal Fait Accompli of Muhammad Yunus - COTW: Bangladesh

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 4d ago

There are of course exceptions to this, such as Amazon, but by and large this is usually the case. Now, this is a pretty bad thing in a world where access to the education and certification nesscery to become considered 'high-skilled labor' is behind a paywall, but it isn't, in-of-itself a bad thing.

Not sure if you're talking about the tech side of things or the warehouse automation side, but assuming tech, the thing these tech companies have going for them is that all these layers of automation and abstraction are largely open source. The frameworks and technologies which are used to build these state-of-the-art large scale systems can be studied and experimented with in large part by the public. There is a lot of potential for the creation of third party training materials, certification programs, question and answer sites, etc. People can take these components and gain experience using them in their own projects. There is a long line of underemployed autodidacts eager to do this work.

With manufacturing, things are quite different. Every machine is remarkably proprietary. Training is provided exclusively by the vendors. Learning materials on the open Internet are incredibly scarce. The vendors have an extremely old-school approach where everything is locked down and disclosed on a need-to-know basis. Their paranoia about Chinese clones runs so deep that they are completely willing to undermine their own product lines rather than allow their machines to be augmented by the end user. And this is just for operating training. If you want to modify the machinery to integrate it into a larger scale process, you simply can't. You need to wait for a constellation of approved and affiliated companies to develop the technology, but because it is so specialized and theoretical, by the time these systems are being built and assembled on the shop floor it really is like you're paying a bunch of techs to integrate all these independent machines for the first time ever. These "turn-key" solutions are constantly years behind what the state-of-the-art ought to be, and if you wanted to actually build a state-of-the-art factory which runs from soup to nuts (rather than just a warehouse filled with general purpose machine tools) - even though all the individual technologies have been perfected to greater and lesser extents - you still basically have to engineer everything from scratch.

5d ago

Can a .torrent file be a virus or malware by itself?

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 5d ago

This default setting is easily one of the stupidest and most costly mistakes in the history of computer engineering. It is incomprehensible that they have insisted on keeping it this way since XP.

It literally just begs you to ask "why does this picture have a .jpg extension while the rest don't?" before double-clicking on it to find out more.

6d ago

known fed sepia thinks hexbear is spreading olympics propraganda

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 6d ago

If you look at

, above the balls, above the poop, above the butthole even, it's what the tail is doing.

6d ago

Should we be using the Three Arrows as antifascist symbol?

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 6d ago

I'm surprised the anti-tankie crowd hasn't adopted it to a much greater degree than the occasional reference.

While the Liberals are largely ignorant about history, I think categorizing the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as the same thing is a bridge too far even for them. This is why they focus on abstract critiques like "authoritarianism" or "totalitarianism." These allow you to discard any alternative to the status quo without having to argue that the people who liberated Auschwitz are exactly the same as the people who built it.

edit before I read purpleworm's reply:

Most of the time when Liberals are shitting on Communism and making grossly ahistorical claims (e.g. calling Putin or Trump a Communist), they are operating in the realm of rhetoric. The history is immaterial to them. They know from decades of programming that Communist is a cheap insult and they'll use it whenever a strained analogy presents itself.

The type of disillusioned Liberal who is actually searching for the point where the United States strayed from the path righteousness, the type of Liberal who would use a symbol like this to differentiate themselves from the standard bearers of American decay, is not operating on this level of slop rhetoric.

6d ago

Are your bosses / managers acting more aggressive lately?

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 6d ago

I work in a machine shop and they're firing people over increasingly petty bullshit. Work is genuinely slowing down due to a combination of increased raw material costs and our clients cutting orders as a negotiation tactic to reduce their own increased costs. I think management broadly (beyond this company) is cannibalizing their institutional knowledge as a cost cutting measure. There are few "old heads" left who know the operations and typical defects and failure modes inside and out.

1w ago

Sunday is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 1w ago

An ongoing RAID reshape operation has severely reduced the I/O performance of my PC. I noticed that by unmounting the filesystem, the speed of the operation increases such that it will only take 26 hours, rather than over a week.

Anyway, I'm playing Moria on a tty. My high score so far is 2392. A level 8 Dwarf warrior who succumbed to the acid attacks of a Green Naga. A Rot Jelly had destroyed all my remaining food on the previous level and things were looking bleak.

1w ago

Bulletins and International News Discussion from February 9th to February 15th, 2026 - The Return of the Special Period - COTW: Cuba

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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 1w ago

To this day, Apple still maintains a monopoly on application distribution for Apple phones and tablets. While Google was the first to censor the Upscrolled app, the impact of this action is much less severe than if Apple - bound by the same financial, legal, and political incentives - followed suit. On Android phones (for now), end users have the option of installing alternate app stores, or installing applications directly via .apk files.

On the other hand, the entire architecture of Apple's app distribution monopoly is deliberately designed to suffocate the proliferation of Free Software.

0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

It is impossible to distribute software to iPhone/iPad applications to end-users with Freedom 1 intact (the second one, in case of Markdown rendering shenanigans). While they may receive the source code and study it, there is no way for them to modify it and run their modified versions. Each individual user must pay for and be granted a license from Apple to do this. Freedom 2+3 is likewise restricted, because receiving a copy of the application or its source code is not enough to actually make use of it - because it cannot be loaded onto the phone and run without Apple's blessing.

As a result, the ecosystem of Free Software applications available for Apple's mobile devices is severely stunted. The legality of distributing GPLv3 software on the platform at all is substantially questionable. This is a very bleak position to be left in, in this moment of accelerating tech company collaboration with the empire.