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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).

    Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.

    If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).

    The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.



  • Behind the Bastards did a show on him. My memory is fuzzy on the specifics, and holy shit was it complicated trying to find out the information without listening to the episode(s) again, but no, he wasn’t just a silly self-parody and stepped over the line to be a piece of shit.

    Allegations against him:

    • Person of interest in the murder of his neighbour (that he was known to be hostile with) in Belize. He eventually fled the country when he became a person of interest.
    • Another time when his compound was raided on suspicion of manufacturing meth, he answered the door armed and naked (ok, that goes along with the parody bit) and authorities found a terrified 17-year-old in his bed.
    • This wasn’t a one off thing, based on what other visitors have said was going on when they were there.
    • Nanette Burnstein made a documentary about him. She was in contact with him and visited his compound at one point. When she told him she wanted to leave, he raped her before allowing her to go.

    So yeah, it wasn’t all just silly running for president while living on a boat he frequently searched for stowaway spies due to deep paranoia (combined with knowing that he’d done things to make it realistic that authorities might really be trying to get him) and making shirtless videos while heavily armed. But I did think the same as you before hearing that episode.


  • I wonder what this timeline would be like if he had accepted that his submarine idea was naive despite the good intentions and just paid to have a nice setup with comfortable tents and catered food for the divers and kids as they got out of the cave (plus their families). Instead of attacking the guy and showing the world who he was, kicking off a cycle of him lashing out at his falling popularity, resulting in it falling even more, then more lashing out, etc.

    Even if he was like that the whole time, he might have kept his mask on instead of leaning into it, probably would have never made that offer for Twitter, might have tried to appear neutral instead of joining Trump’s campaign.

    Though hard to say because the self-driving bs and cybertruck would have still happened and might have kicked off that cycle anyways.





  • To add on to what the other comments said, when the screwdriver slipped and the shell closed completely briefly, making the ball go critical, they all knew what happened and he immediately asked everyone in the room to note their position and calculated the approximate radiation dose they each got up figure out who was going to slowly melt into goo over the next few days and who was going to die of cancer over the years.

    He knew right away that he was one of the goo ones.

    So I’m not sure I’d call that heroic discovery because they already knew what would happen and were just showing off how much balls they had fucking with something so deadly.


  • They might have set up the user agreement for it. Stackexchange did and their whole business model was about catching businesses where some worker copy/pasted code from a stackexchange answer and getting a settlement out of it.

    I agree with you in principle (hell, I’d even take it further and think only trademarks should be protected, other than maybe a short period for copyright and patent protection, like a few years), but the legal system might disagree.

    Edit: I’d also make trademarks non-transferrable and apply to individuals rather than corporations, so they can go back to representing quality rather than business decisions. Especially when some new entity that never had any relation to the original trademark user just throws some money at them or their estate to buy the trust associated with the trademark.



  • Oh yeah, I understand the sentiment entirely. With so many dark patterns dominating the world we live in because we live in a society that decided to embrace greed instead of seeing it as a primary motivator of evil, I can’t blame anyone that looks at the state of things with suspicion anytime there are downsides. And while it isn’t realistic to expect as good audio from a built-in system as a separate dedicated audio system, I do think it’s ridiculous that the standard is so dysfunctional that you either can’t understand what people are saying or explosions are way too loud. Especially in this digital world where mixing separate audio channels isn’t a difficult task. Streaming services should just have a stereo and mono version of the audio that is mixed well for that format if it is actually a harder problem than I think it is.

    Some of it is practicality, but I don’t doubt that greed also plays into it. I mean, even on the modularity side, I don’t have the option of easily finding a TV without any speakers at all, or a TV without smart features that a) aren’t as good as other options I have to access those features and b) were actually thrown in to spy on data, as your previous comment mentioned.

    So yeah, I don’t blame you at all for being suspicious of the companies that absolutely are trying to fuck their users because their real customers are data buyers, even if I do prefer my soundbar.



  • I appreciate TVs not wasting resources on putting decent speakers in it that I’ll never use because I did buy a soundbar over a decade ago that has decent sound and has outlasted the TV I bought it for. Plus TVs are so thin these days that they probably can’t even drive decent bass, and the speakers they do have are rear facing, so they don’t even drive the sound towards you.

    Modularity isn’t a bad thing IMO.




  • They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

    Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

    That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

    Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.



  • Running another uarch is a whole new level of complexity vs just running on a different OS but with the same uarch, especially if concurrency is involved because translating from one instruction set to another can break atomicity assumptions that concurrency depends on to maintain coherency. You’d need to do thorough analysis of the code to determine where special care is needed, and even then, it won’t be trivial setting it up in a way that avoids deadlock because you have to understand what the threads are doing before you can say if it’s safe for one thread to wait for another (since they could end up waiting for each other).

    Whereas running code meant for a different OS just requires implementing that OS’ API (and behaviour, possibly including undocumented behaviour some code relies on, which can vary from application to application, hence windows compatibility modes where they add a translation layer themselves). Not saying this is trivial, but compared to the above problem, it kinda is.

    Not that ARM support is impossible, just if they manage that, it will be proclaimed loudly, not something that requires digging. If they don’t say it supports ARM, just assume it doesn’t.