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PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

@ PorkrollPosadist @hexbear.net

Posts
41
Comments
676
Joined
5 yr. ago

Hexbear's resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • If the Midterms happen, it's going to be a bloodbath, and a LOT of new Democratic Warriors are going to enter Congress, carrying the righteous indignation of the voters.

    I've seen this one before, in 2018. The entire party, media, and generally any member of the public who could be described as vaguely progressive was in complete hysteria about the end of democracy. A massive national soul-searching was undertaken (within the boundaries of Liberalism). A massive pondering of "how did we get here?" Setting the absolute fixation on Russia aside, ideas of an epistemological crisis driven by disinformation campaigns on social media weren't unfounded. It also raised deep questions about the health and wellbeing of democracy in the US. There were so many problems to tackle, from felony disenfranchisement, to voter roll purges, to gerrymandering, media consolidation, the asphyxiating torrent of corporate campaign finance. All of these things contribute to creating the perfect storm which is our shambolic electoral system. For a moment, it seemed like people (like, powerful people) were beginning to realize we had let this shit slip too far, and that deep reforms were necessary to save the republic.

    I was THERE. I was a true believer. A patriotic liberal who had come to realize what a smart thing Obama did. Taking a trust-fall into the arms of the institutions, rather than expediently circumventing them to side-step the oncoming disaster. I trusted the system. I felt a personal responsibility to contribute. I went to demonstrations, contributed to electoral campaigns, and spent nearly every waking hour trying to spread the gospel on social media. I had people on r/Politics asking me to run for Congress.

    The Trump regime enjoyed total impunity for two terribly long years. At last the Democrats had retaken the house. Now was the time for investigations, transparency, accountability, reform, impeachment. They poured water on that REALLY quick. Delayed for demured for nearly a year before finally impeaching Trump over some extremely contrived bullshit, rather than the fucking across-the-board fraud and corruption.

    With the incoming administration in 2020, it was time to fix all of these holes. To do something, ANYTHING about the onslaught of corporate money in elections, the ubiquitous corruption, gerrymandering (2020 was a Census year, after all), ALL the fucking bullshit they use to turn our elections into a fucking joke. It was also a time of acute revolutionary crisis, with the George Floyd Uprising fighting back in steadfast resistance to the impunity of the police state.

    The time was ripe for long overdue reforms. What we got instead was a shriveled warm body who was run for the explicit purpose of preventing that from happening. The Biden administration spent another four long years doing everything in its power to sharpen every implement of state violence, reforming absolutely nothing of substance, only to hand the keys right back over to Trump.

    This year a number of new Democrats will be elected as freshmen representatives. Some of them might even be GOOD, but the incumbents aren't going anywhere. They are the ones who control the party, control the committee assignments. They are the ones who will choose the leadership, and their decision will be driven by the same calculus that it always has been.

    Jeffries and Schmuckie aren't likely to survive the leadership vote, and the next leaders will have to be willing to stand up to MAGA. This is what the people, and the incoming Congressional Warriors, are going to demand.

    What gives you this impression? Congressional leadership is not a popular election. It is one of the first orders of business after swearing in a new Congress, when public pressure on the caucus is at its lowest. Schumer might leave just because he's ancient and bad for the brand, but we're not getting a radical. We're getting somebody who can maintain the status quo, but do the messaging better.

    This is how the 90s Republicans spawned the Tea Party, which took over the party, then morphed into MAGA, and took over. The Dems are at the stage of creating their own Tea Party (Progressives) that can take control of the Democratic Party, and reconfigure it to reflect the true values of the Democratic VOTERS.

    Again, do you live under a rock? What do you think the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were? They were EXACTLY this. They fucking crushed it. It turns out the bourgeoisie finds social democracy to be utterly repulsive, while they couldn't care less about the personal power-play of a couple oil tycoons who want to "run America like a business."

    If Democrats manage to gain power again, they'd better hold people accountable, or we will hold them accountable.

    We've already run though the cycle of expecting the Democrats to hold people accountable, and then trying to hold the Democrats themselves accountable. There is NO accountability.

    And weak citizens like you, trying to convince people that it's already over,

    Ok. How many hours have you spent standing in Lafayette Square shouting at the White House in the pouring rain? How many times have you skipped going to party with your friends because something must be done, even though you know that something will change absolutely nothing.

    It is over buddy, but don't worry. It is not the end of the world. This sclerotic republic must die, so something new and beautiful can be born from the ashes.

  • While there's a reasonable chance the Democrats take the White House on the sole issue of wanting to slow the chaos, the party has no constituency at all anymore, aside from people who consider reading the bourgeois press to "keep informed" a matter of civic duty.

    The way the overt fascism and criminality is ramping up almost guarantees another attempt at an auto-coup, but like somebody commented recently, the US lacks an influential, organized, menacing left, leaving the regime with full impunity on one hand, but no convincing enemy to scapegoat on the other. The regime is going to be exceptionally unpopular (and that's saying A LOT) come 2028, despite their enthusiastic fascist base. It will come down to a matter of force (generally, how the officer corps feels about things).

  • Dawg what fucking world do you live on? Have you seen the Democratic leadership? Schumer was chumming it up with Rubio YESTERDAY. They are not going to hold anyone accountable.

  • People have hung fliers in the laundry room here selling bulk detergent.

  • It is an ancient rhetorical flair

    Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.

  • Somebody is going to get indicted and the indictment will assert that all these posts about beanis are code like when the mob talks about picking up the cannolis and dropping off the gabagool.

  • Per Unicorn Riot: Up to 10,000 people gathered for a vigil after ICE killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026 - short video from the vigil site. Story is developing.

  • Meanwhile on Mastodon

  • Literally the biggest staff of any paper in the country. Can't send a single fucking photographer to any site of civil unrest.

  • At risk of sounding naive, I never bought the "spheres of influence" thing. The US was never going to settle for anything less than global domination. With domestic reforms being completely out of the question, the only thing preventing the US from being eclipsed technologically and culturally by the other "spheres" is to completely asphyxiate them.

    It does feel like something has transformed fundamentally over the last month, but while we sit here waiting to see how the other great powers respond, the shift so far appears to be unilateral.

  • There has been a CLEARLY observable pattern over the past two decades of internet communities being completely fucking RUINED by corporate interests, only for people to find refuge on a new corporate platform with IDENTICAL fucking incentives to the one they just left. The cycle is as obvious as the Sun, the tides, and the seasons. Bluesky is filled with the fucking idiots who still couldn't recognize this in 2024. People who think the Sun ceases to exist at nighttime.

  • Reject modernity. Retvrn to tradition.

  • I doubt it. Elon Musk is an egregious example who is easy enough to single out without attacking the reputation of more conventional tech / "AI" firms. The contemporary bourgeois politician is little more than a glorified social media influencer. Their social media accounts are their meal tickets. They are simply cowards who are afraid of losing their followers by having their access to the platform revoked. They will be the last ones to abandon the sinking ship, along with the podcasters.

  • Not sure exactly how things work on Mint, but toggling back and forth between nvidia (the driver) and noveau isn't convenient at all. With both drivers installed, one of them needs to be blacklisted to prevent it from being loaded and switching requires a reboot to take effect. The incompatibilities run further up the graphics stack though, with nvidia relying on its own custom implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and EGL while noveau and most other drivers use the implementations provided by Mesa3D. On most distributions, these packages are conflicting (they provide different versions of the same files) and cannot be installed at the same time. Some people have written scripts to manage having both installed at the same time and being able to choose in the boot-loader menu, but these were all too hacky for my tastes (a person who wrote a series of bespoke systemd units to bring up an encrypted multi-drive bcachefs array on Gentoo).

    Basically, the only way to switch cleanly is to fully uninstall everything associated with the nvidia driver.

    Disclaimer: it has been a few years since I had to deal with this personally. My memory might not be perfect, and the situation might have changed.

    ...

    Now, to go back and actually read the OP :)

    I forgot you were using a laptop. The way graphics works on modern laptops is a bit wacky, so that can explain a couple things. Typically, laptops with a dedicated GPU actually have TWO GPUs - an integrated GPU which lives inside the CPU (Intel or AMD), and the dedicated GPU (Nvidia or AMD). This was pironeered on Intel / Nvidia platforms, but the architecture has become more-or-less ubiquitous today.

    These laptops will do almost everything with the integrated GPU due to its (comparative) power efficiency, and only create rendering contexts on the dedicated GPU upon demand (applications may do this transparently for things like video playback or 3D rendering - or they might not, running games on the iGPU when you'd really prefer for them to run on the dGPU. This used to be a complete shitshow, but nowadays it mostly works correctly). The integrated GPU drives the display itself, optionally with video from the dGPU getting multiplexed into the image.

    On such a machine, you can have a perfectly functional GUI and even modest graphics performance without the nvidia driver installed at all. That said, the dedicated GPU often is required for things like the HDMI port to work (or sometimes, the HDMI port will work, but audio through HDMI won't and it's actually because of the graphics driver (my experience at one point)). This is probably what's going on in your case. The nvidia driver isn't loading for one reason or another, but it isn't completely preventing you from having graphics because it only serves an auxiliary role in this hardware architecture.

    ...

    The reason the nvidia driver isn't loading is less clear, but it probably has to do with DKMS. The nvidia driver is an "out of tree" driver, which means it needs to be re-compiled and re-installed as an additional step after each kernel is installed (this process is usually automated by the package manager). The driver itself has two core components, a source-code "shim" which gets built for the specific kernel in use, and the "binary blob" which is the proprietary black box responsible for actually operating the hardware. DKMS ("dynamic kernel module support") is tooling which allows out-of-tree drivers like this to get re-built automatically whenever a new kernel is installed. I don't remember how this works exactly, but it might be a situation where even though older kernels are lying around in the boot directory, DKMS is only building out-of-tree kernel modules for the most recent "currently installed" kernel version (in your case, the one which doesn't boot).

    ...

    You don't need to wait for a new kernel version (on a stable distro tracking long-term maintenance versions, this might take a long time actually). initramfs images are generated automatically by a script, and you can simply re-run the script. Like @trompete@hexbear.net mentioned, dpkg-reconfigure is the ideal way to do this. It allows you to re-run the configuration stage (post-install scripts) of package installation. The meaning of this varies from package to package. For most packages, this will do nothing. For postgresql, it will initialize a database cluster so you can actually start the SQL server. For kernels, it should do things like generate an initramfs image, place the kernel and initramfs images in your boot directory, update the bootloader menu, run dkms to rebuild any out-of-tree modules, etc. I think it will do all of these things, but I don't have a debian-based system at hand to test it. You can scrutinize the output to see if any errors occurred along the way. It might just reveal what went wrong in the first place.

    ...

    All of that said, I think it's great that you haven't given up on this. I learned so much from just wrecking my OS over and over again when I was younger. It is a great opportunity to see how things break, how one system is related to or dependent on another. Your OS does sound pretty cooked though so it is probably worth it to do a clean install at some point so you know you are starting from a coherent state and there aren't subtle things broken which will eventually manifest down the road after updates.

  • The weiner wrangler

  • Hell yeah dude.

  • Cheltenham is the new Tannenberg

  • Even people I respect are making this mistake.

  • music @hexbear.net

    Los Prisoneros - Latinoamérica es un pueblo al sur de EEUU

  • Games @hexbear.net

    The World’s Memory of the World: Disco Elysium and its fictions

    thebaffler.com /salvos/the-worlds-memory-of-the-world-winslow-yost
  • Games @hexbear.net
    Featured

    Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 4

  • Games @hexbear.net

    Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 3

  • Games @hexbear.net

    Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 2

  • Games @hexbear.net

    Fortress Friday - Beardrenched: Episode 1

  • Games @hexbear.net

    Introducing: Fortress Fridays

  • libre @hexbear.net

    (F-Droid) An experiment in automated building from source, 15 years later

    f-droid.org /2025/11/24/an-experiment-in-automated-building-from-source-15-years-later.html
  • traingang @hexbear.net

    It happened again

  • Games @hexbear.net

    WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S UNREACHABLE?

  • music @hexbear.net

    Dick in a Box

  • fakenews @hexbear.net

    Truth.social to enable ActivityPub federation next week

  • music @hexbear.net

    Apropos of nothing (ACDC - TNT)

  • technology @hexbear.net

    Why the Hell Does Android Even Exist Anymore?

    fireborn.mataroa.blog /blog/why-the-hell-does-android-even-exist-anymore/
  • libre @hexbear.net

    I'm working on a process to convert a Mastodon instance into a Misskey instance

  • technology @hexbear.net

    ORMs are stupid. Get rid of them.

  • Games @hexbear.net

    I forgot how to make fire stop happening.

  • music @hexbear.net

    This is an emote on hexbear dot net

  • music @hexbear.net

    Open Letter to a Landlord - Living Colour

  • music @hexbear.net

    MMMMMM (Metal covers of VVVVVV soundtrack by Jules Conroy)

    www.souleye.se /m