Skip Navigation

PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

@ PorkrollPosadist @hexbear.net

Posts
36
Comments
589
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.>

  • I selected both drives when installing Bazzite, creating one big volume. How much is that going to fuck me up down the line?

    Jump

  • I'd redo it before you get too committed. It will work fine as is, but if you're going to merge different speed/capacity disks into a single volume you're going to want to configure some sort of caching or prioritization strategy.

  • California has spent 7 years on an 8 mile bike path, estimated to cost 1 billion billion dollars, that hasn't begun construction. How?

    Jump

  • Fools! They should just leave the trash and sell inner tubes and tire levers to whoever gets a flat!

  • Soft power

    Jump

  • advanced social and technological achievements

    From personal experience, drinking beer through a straw is like drinking a full pint of head. It is like the "what if communism was a beer" meme. China is far too advanced to be making this sort of fundamental mistake.

  • California has spent 7 years on an 8 mile bike path, estimated to cost 1 billion billion dollars, that hasn't begun construction. How?

    Jump

  • Dawg a bike path is just bitumen and gravel what the fuck

  • Uh, ok

    Jump

  • Greatest city in the world, baby!

  • UK government spends millions shifting to the outdated Windows 10

    Jump

  • I'm pretty sure Azure (cloud services) is already Microsoft's most profitable business unit. Windows and Office just provides some extra walking around money at this point.

  • UK government spends millions shifting to the outdated Windows 10

    Jump

  • Lots of MRIs are running windows XP or probably windows 7 for example.

    This stuff is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. These are appliances, not workstations. They should have no custom software installed on them that the manufacturer didn't put there. There are IT implications involved with running embedded systems based on obsolete operating systems software, but there is nothing you can do about these systems as an end user besides isolating them to their own highly restricted subnet.

    The story is exactly the same in manufacturing. There is a lot of CNC machinery based on unsupported versions of Windows. You're not getting service from Microsoft, and the only good thing your IT department can do with these machines is create a back-up image of the hard drives and whatever floppy disks / CD ROMs they find inside the electrical cabinet. If you actually wipe the thing and re-install Windows from scratch (let alone anything else), it will never work again unless you fly a service technician out for a full week. The configuration of these machines is very fragile, based on top of a ton of undocumented in-house drivers for hardware which isn't even available on the open market, and a lot of settings which need to be adjusted based on which motor they happened to have in the warehouse in the particular month it was assembled.

    This kind of machinery has nothing to do with what operating system or productivity software is used throughout the office.

    I can relate to the FileMaker thing though. This is exactly what the company I work at is doing. They've got something like 30 internal applications based on it and an expensive ERP system and for better or worse it will be around until the company goes under. Lord knows why they didn't just use a Postgres database. They're paying multiple salaried in-house software developers anyway. They would have saved literally millions of dollars in licensing.

  • Black Death - Novo General Megathread for the 10th-13th of November 2025

    Jump

  • Reddit is like the private bittorrent tracker of social media.

    "No download, you must seed!"

    "Well, if you let me download something then I can seed it!"

    "No."

    Except for posting.

  • Removed

    No music for you commies [fake]

    Jump

  • Not many people know this, but Kid Rock is the reason why most paper shredders come with a dedicated slot for CD ROMs.

  • Locked

    Bulletins and International News Discussion from November 10th to November 16th, 2025 - The Trials and Tribulations of Tinubu - COTW: Nigeria

    Jump

  • I'm pretty sure the NYPD does have their own antiaircraft weapons (not an S-300 though, obviously).

  • fuck the troops and this fake ass holiday

    Jump

  • I saw the flags at half mast today and was wondering which right wing propagandist got their shit blown smoove off. I thought maybe they got Ben Shapino this time.

  • When people say that the tech market will bounce back up for CS graduates are they been delusion? People seem to have this religious concept that the tech sector always bounces back. It this copium?

    Jump

  • I imagine that the amount of useful activities which can be performed on a computer remaining which haven't been implemented in some form of application or digital service is virtually zero. The tech industry boomed in the 90s because consumer access to PC hardware and the Internet was skyrocketing. It boomed again in the 00s-10s because smartphones filled a niche which computers couldn't, and consumer access skyrocketed further. Today, the market is saturated and there are no meaningful hardware innovations left to make, no new apps to write.

    Of course, all this existing software and IT infrastructure requires maintenance, but the era of "upstart" VC-backed apps/websites becoming multi-billion dollar firms is finished. With "AI," we've reached the mountaintop removal phase of a dying industry.

    In hindsight, the writing was already on the wall when they started introducing shit like smart ovens and washing machines. They already ran out of runway.

  • There's been enough cop procedurals, lawyer shows, and medical dramas. What profession do you think should have a formulaic TV show made about them?

    Jump

  • Return to COPS: the pioneer of the reality television format. But instead of doing ride-alongs with sadistic crew cut dog killers, we're riding out to a geyser of effluent, a pothole with an entire bus inside of it, and a strip of highway with a two foot river running across it while somebody tries to rake an underwater pile of leaves away from the storm drain. It still has a lot of footage captured running with a handheld camera for some reason, as if it were a video game with a run button that is always taped down.

  • There's been enough cop procedurals, lawyer shows, and medical dramas. What profession do you think should have a formulaic TV show made about them?

    Jump

  • A very depressing subject for sure, but a good lens to do meta-analysis of a number of failing social systems in the mold of The Wire. With the magic of screenwriting there could be a handful of good outcomes, moments of catharsis, and Hamsterdams while showing how fucked up everything is.

  • Linux Beginner (trying it for the 20th time in as many years) here. Are there any downsides to Linux?

    Jump

  • Off the top of my head:

    • Pirated software is more scarce.

    Most of it is unnecessary, but if you must use a specific application for professional reasons, it can be more difficult to find pirated copies even if they officially support Linux. This doesn't apply to games for the most part, where WINE/Proton will run the Windows versions quite well, but in my case I need to use Creo Parametric occasionally (to work with other people's models) and it does not work well in WINE. If I were designing something myself, I'd use FreeCAD obviously.

    • The state of technical support is getting worse every day.

    This is mostly due to the general degradation of search engines along with the proliferation of SEO AI slop tech support articles designed to capture ad revenue. The official documentation is still generally great (for anything load-bearing), but this requires you to know which software component you're dealing with and thumb around in manuals. A Google / DDG search for a question about Python will NEVER take you to the relevant page in the Python manual, for instance. This really blows.

    • Fragmentation of everything.

    There are hundreds of Linux distributions. We have two major display server systems (X11 and Wayland) with several toolkits (GTK, Qt, Wx, etc). We have (at least) 5 major audio subsystems (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Jack, PipeWire). We have dozens of desktop environments / window managers (Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Cinnamon, LXDE, etc. etc.). Dozens of package managers (Apt, RPM, Pacman, Portage, Nix, etc). A dozen shells, a dozen terminal emulators, a dozen text editors, a dozen filesystems, a dozen compression formats. There are three major competing "all in one, portable" package formats (FlatPak, AppImage, Snap).

    I think this is mostly a good thing, but it can be quite overwhelming, and a lot of this shit is technical debt. Tech like X11 is obsolete but must be supported for eternity. Even as things like PulseAudio and Jack are made redundant by PipeWire, the vast majority of software is implemented with either the PulseAudio or ALSA APIs and these too must be supported for eternity. etc.

    Things are generally better than Windows in terms of maintenance and malfunctions. Usually when something is broken, everything stops working (this sounds bad, but wait!). The problem and solution exist in one place. Compared to the situation on Windows where every application ships layers and layers of its own middle-ware and if something stops working it can be anything. This is slipping though. Particularly when bundling is involved (Snaps, AppImages, software which requires programming language package managers such as NPM/PIP/Cargo/CPAN/etc to build). Especially when it comes to less-common use cases (like accessible workflows for vision impaired users).

    • Everything is always your responsibility.

    Due to the fact that very few hardware manufacturers ship and support GNU+Linux systems. There is no guaranteed out-of-the-box experience. There are many people who are happy to help when they can, but there's a big gap between that and an actual "or your money back" warranty (though honestly you're not getting that kind of service from Microsoft either unless you are a big corporate client).

    In light of all that, I've been running Linux for about 20 years now and for the past two years or so I haven't had any Windows machines at all. It is worth it.

  • Linux beginner here. Are there any real downsides to dualbooting ?

    Jump

  • They shouldn't fight as long as you're using UEFI to boot, which has been required by Microsoft at least since Windows 8. You should not be installing any boot loaders via the MBR method in 2025.

    Linux distro installers typically support booting via both BIOS and UEFI (from the same disk image), and will usually install using the mechanism that they were booted with. BIOS boot compatibility should be disabled in the UEFI settings first to ensure the installer and resulting OS boot with UEFI.

    I dual-booted for a long time (stopped recently). Since Windows XP. The main downsides are partiton clutter, needing to do updates on two OSes, needing to do peculiar configurations to keep the system clock correct, preventing hibernation, and limiting your filesystem choices to ensure cross-compatibility. Otherwise, it can be useful, but I found myself booting Windows once every 3 months.

  • Sunday Is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread

    Jump

  • Continuing my game of Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. I grabbed a map of Cuba from the Steam workshop a couple weeks ago and have been chipping away at it. Playing on "Realistic Mode" with all systems enabled, but medium money / happiness / fire / disaster / world events difficulty settings.

    The population has reached 5000 and is growing faster than I can put buildings up. I'm long overdue for starting a second city, but overcoming problems with the first continues to be a priority. These problems have included a fire at the main power transformer causing a total power outage, a lack of pressure at the water treatment plant threatening the supply of drinking water, and a looming financial crisis as imports continued to exceed exports into the eighth year of the republic. The financial crisis was solved moments before being forced to take out loans by the completion of a coal mine, ore processing facility, and the rail infrastructure necessary to export it at volume - a project several years in the making.

    While this put the republic's finances on a sustainable trajectory, the facilities generated so much waste that a new crisis emerged. While a waste processing facility, incinerator, and construction waste recycling plant had been built along the way, the volume of waste was so great that the logistics of trucking it several kilometers were tremendously strained. With multiple technical offices, distribution offices, and waste transfer facilities set up in strategic locations, it is barely enough to keep the trash moving. Over 1000 tons of ash have been produced at the incinerator already (there's a Steam acheivement for this). Then, the "carpocolypse" struck, as a large portion of the original fleet of vehicles began reaching levels of wear that could not be managed by a vehicle repair station. A bunch of old buses needed to be moved into storage, but it was a good opportunity to replace them with newer, faster models and consolidate a bunch of redundant lines into higher capacity buses - reflecting the large increase in population. There are still a bunch of incredibly rusty trucks driving around though.

    Anyway, with the finances sorted out, railroad tracks are gradually being laid down to allow construction materials to be carried many kilometers away to a less mountainous part of the island suitable for a second city, port, and agricultural industries.

  • Saudi's The Line futuristic city project is now dead.

    Jump

  • Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic moment.

  • Othello - Novo General Megathread for the 1st-4th of November 2025

    Jump

  • Well, tomorrow is election day in New York and New Jersey. My coworkers are complaining about how unfairly Zorhan Mamdani is going to treat the landlords. This irredeemable nation must perish.

    About to write a crank essay titled "Are quality inspectors cops?"