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.>
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- 5 yr. ago
- Posts
- 37
- Comments
- 600
- Joined
- 5 yr. ago
- JumpRemoved
No music for you commies [fake]
I'm pretty sure the NYPD does have their own antiaircraft weapons (not an S-300 though, obviously).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic moment.
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?"
I keep restarting in WR:SR. Trying a map of Cuba I grabbed from the Steam Workshop this time. Without the need to worry about heat plants, a lot of opportunities open up. I skipped the indoor pool to build a soccer field for once.
Accidentally had about 70 people move in early, but I was able to manage water/sewage by truck until the plumbing was finished.
With SLI you are limited to the amount of video memory present on one card. Because the 970 is already bottle-necked by memory, there is no point of trying this.
There might be some applications where you can put both cards to use. A second card can be "passed through" to a virtual machine (assuming the CPU / motherboard has the required features). This has the drawback that you need a second physical display to see the VM output though, and configuring the whole thing is not easy. There are also provisions in the Vulkan API for applications to make use of multiple GPUs, but this is pretty advanced functionality which the vast majority of applications don't touch at all. It is not the kind of thing which unlocks extra performance for free. You won't see any benefit unless someone wrote a few thousand lines of low level Vulkan API code to use this to implement a specific algorithm. Something where paying the round-trip cost of getting data from system RAM onto the GPU, then back into system RAM from the GPU for further processing is worth it. Useless for games, but possibly useful in off-line simulations or bulk video processing.
My brother still uses a 970 on Fedora. Anything Nvidia has made since 2014 is supported by the modern driver.
The idea of harnessing the power of monopoly social media algorithms is not much different from the idea of harnessing the power of the bourgeois state itself. We are talking about a set of rules which can be changed arbitrarily whenever they start losing. Whenever the corporation starts catching flak from advertisers or lobby groups. Whenever Congress threatens to impose regulations or issue subpoenas to humiliate their executives to force them to cooperate. We have witnessed several rounds of this now.
The purpose of a system is what it does. There is a reason the monopoly platforms pipeline people towards fascism. It isn't because the Left is negligent when it comes to propaganda. It is because these platforms were designed from the very first brick for the purpose of advertising and surveillance. The right does not have to worry about surveillance the way the left does. They also have all the profits they reap from exploitation to invest in culturally reinforcing their ideological project. They have the funds to boost any mediocre streamer, video essayist, and debate lord. They have the funds to point a couple hundred thousands fake subs at Ben Shapiro so he shows up on the Apple Podcasts landing page every day. They will land their books on the NYT best-seller list simply by ghost-writing them for a politician and buying crates of them as a legally justified form of bribery.
It is important to agitate wherever there are people we can reach, but any structure we build on these platforms will never have a solid foundation. The important thing is to establish collectives capable of producing high quality media in appropriate formats for platforms like this and try to plug them in wherever we can. Something which can outlive the arbitrary censorship they are going to face.
You're in luck. For the meantime, a lot of these embedded systems are still running operating systems like Windows XP, or Windows NT 4.0.
Let's assume they would have their phone on me as well. Would a VPN protect them?
VPNs operate on layer 3 of the OSI model. The "physical" connection between your... friend's phone and the service provider is layers 1 (radio) and 2 (4G/5G/LTE/whatever). The phone company knows who's phone is connected and sending traffic to which tower (and how much traffic, when). They know the traffic is going to a VPN service (based on the protocol + publicly known address of the destination). They just don't know the contents or the final destination of the traffic beyond the VPN service.
The information they have from layer 2 (signal strength at multiple towers, IMEI, SIM) is enough to identify the device, the subscriber and triangulate the source of the signal to a neighborhood. It may not be as precise as GPS, but it is enough to blow up an alibi or strengthen the case for a warrant.
If a phone is within 2000 feet of a crime scene, that might not be enough (under liberal democracy rules), but if a phone is always within 2000 feet of a series of intermittant crimes over the span of months, the police are going to seize it.
Everyone in this thread is wrong. Double space is good practice. Modern typesetting makes it unnecessary? Who cares? The layout engine can just ignore the space and function semantically. If it doesn't, its broken and should be fixed. On the other hand, text editors designed for adults with functions that operate on sentences as a unit use the double space to distinguish between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence. Emacs users are a powerful enemy.
This is what they would do if they were smart, but a significant portion of the Dems still regard their constituents as serfs, wholly undeserving of any sort of concessions or relief even if it were in the best interests of preserving the Empire. They are mercenaries who do whatever their short-sighted donors pay them to do, and if their constituents don't like it, well, I hope they like Trump!
The ultimate shortcoming of social democratic reformism is that it is a project driven by the desire to add creature comforts to the Death Star. Get some lower rents, better wages, better education and transit infrastructure and it doesn't matter which governments we overthrow or which people we genocide. The billionaires still get to organize society and decide any significant matters of state policy. In truth, Bernie Sanders was their golden fucking ticket to reform the Empire, cut out a lot of the obscene waste and inefficiency, and position the US to remain competitive through the 21st century. They didn't even consider it for a second. Not in 2016, not in 2020, and nothing is different today. They would rather accumulate the titles to empty luxury condos built with foam-clad particle board in a country full of illiterate peasants.
In the best case, Mamdani won't be a revolutionary figure, but even in the apparent case, leading the biggest city in the US as a figure in the mold of Sanders, the amount of ire he draws from institutional power for basic policies like rent control and free transit is utterly discrediting to all of these institutions. They would be much better served by embracing and cooping him wholeheartedly, making the financial speculators take a haircut, and building a workforce of educated, LOYAL, and healthy subjects who aren't living under conditions of debt peonage. Nothing would do more to take the wind out of the sails of revolutionary communism than putting the Millennials in houses and guaranteeing some plausible form of retirement that they won't get sick and die before reaching, or see their 401Ks gambled away by the world's most obvious charlatans and perverts if they suffer long enough. Across the board, they could buy themselves another generation or two by doing this, yet they are utterly incapable. Every day they fire up a brand new think tank to try to market doing absolutely fucking nothing as "Abundance," or to frame the absolute failure of Liberalism as the aftermath of implementing socially progressive policies they never even entertained.
As much as these social democrats won't save us, they do a tremendous job of showing us how few allies we have. How essential it is to plant the seeds of the social organizations which will replace these decrepit liberal civic institutions. How quickly "our sacred values" like truth, democracy, and the rule of law disappear the second the rent-seeking parasites are forced to consider running a tighter ship.
Not many people know this, but Kid Rock is the reason why most paper shredders come with a dedicated slot for CD ROMs.