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I love movies with abstract imagery and themes. Usually I can piece things together and figure out what the film is trying to say, but not Megalopolis.

Like, what was Megalopolis (the in-film construction project) supposed to represent? It was one guy’s vision for a better future that he was going to build no-matter what. Fine! But then Adam Driver’s character makes a big speech at the ribbon ceremony about how we need to start a conversation about the future. What conversation? The guy never listened to anyone else during the film! Maybe his wife?

Why was everything wrapped up in the names and imagery of late Roman republic? To imply that American society is reaching an end of its current unsustainable phase. Ok, but then you name Adam Driver’s character after the guy who turned Rome into a militarist principate. So what better future should we be looking towards?

What was the whole deal with Carthage, the crumbling Soviet satellite which destroyed part of the city? The Megalopolis project only got underway when the destruction cleared out a chunk of New Rome, so are we to assume that our bold conversation about the futute can only happen when the once-forgotten ghost of Communism smashes America? But then the satellite’s crash has no impact on anything except some buildings. The mayor doesn’t face any problems as leader during or after this disaster, and the MAGA-coded villains don’t really change tactics either. Adam Driver’s plans are obviously helped by this, but he already had buy-in from the Mayor. It’s not like the disaster was some catalyst for change, but rather a convenience so we don’t have to watch Adam Driver finger-snap another building demolition.

Megalopolis threw a lot of ideas on the screen, but I kept waiting for a payoff that never arrived.

I know it’s late advice, since you already switched from Bazzite, but I’ve never understood why people have an aversion to adding a layered package to the immutable system.

My attitude has always been: If an update breaks something, the whole point is that I can roll back. I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue with many layered packages for several years, and the worst thing that ever happened was when I had to delay a system update by a few hours because the latest build of a layered package hadn’t hit the repos yet.

Plus, for anything like development work that requires build dependencies, I spin up a toolbox to compile it. The nice thing about the default toolbox is that it’s a base Fedora install, so all the system libs are compatible with my host machine. I’ve found it’s often simple to compile a project in the toolbox and then launch the executable from my host system without adding any new layered packages to it.

I think it was August or September. Issue is documented in this forum thread:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19928

I lile my pinenote a lot. I mostly use it for reading.

As long as I’m reading or doing any touch-screen-y things (taking notes, viewing images, etc) it’s great! For anything that involves writing/copying/pasting text, it’s not very usable with just the on-screen keyboard, you really need an external bluetooth interface. I find web browsing very tedious if I have to type anything in the url bar without a physical keyboard.

Also, it’s still very much a WIP. The version of Debian it shipped with had a bug where I couldn’t install any software updates without deleting some random lib64 directory. Once I did that, everything was fine. The device has no security by default, so I created a new user with an encrypted HOME.

With import tariffs to the US, I ended up paying $500 for it, which really got me down. As a $400 open hardware machine, it would have been easier to look past the rougher edges. And I wish it had more RAM.

But overall it’s worth it to me because I’ve wanted a more libre e-reader for a long time. It’s gotten me back into reading books, which has been a lot of fun. Plus, because it’s an actual computer, I set it up as a tablet-like interface to my home automations.

Man, I fuckin’ wish they directed me to the website. Every phone helpline I call these days tries to get me to install an app.

Seems like this system relies on defending from well-defined entrypoints to the network. I’m not sure how a group of enthusiasts could use this unless they centralize their systems.

From the original 404 article:

And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies. This is the same underlying AI that powers Grokipedia, which is the antithesis of Wikipedia and yet is being pitched by its creator as being somehow less biased than the collective, well-meaning efforts of human volunteers across the world.

You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don’t. They still think that a computer can’t have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.

I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.

The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?

What I’m getting at is that for people using FDE, any performance hit is worth it compared to worrying that you’ve covered every angle.

Suppose you’re in some hypothetical country where torrenting is illegal. The presence of /usr/bin/qbittorrent on your disk could be enough to face charges. Unencrypted /var/log? Maybe they can see you’ve been running a cryptocurrency miner. There could be plenty of data outside of $HOME on your computer which a cop might try to use against you.

In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencrypted /usr/bin and replace openssl with a compromised version.

I’ll just wait 15 years for the OpenMind project to release the first fully open source brain chip.

Then spend the remainder of my life in a coma because I flashed the wrong boot image.

OpenMW has been fully playable for years

The Elon-oi.

I’d be OK if my descendents got to eat them.

It looks like the evolutionary advantage is still debated. There’s a newer hyopethsis that, because psilocybin evolved during a period of heightened gastropod diversity, it could be defence against snails.

Reminds me a bit of a previous campaign (not DnD). We (the party) spent so much time and attention murdering and threatening our way into a coup against the sickly King that we stopped paying attention to anyone else in the story.

Then in our campaign finale, we flub every single roll to execute the coup, and our whole plan gets hijacked by a more competent NPC to seize power for herself. Queue TPK* while we all get hunted down as traitors.

* Except for the party poisoner. He was happy to spend his life in prison so long as the new government let him brew poisons for use against enemies of the state.

When I was a student, my school had analog clocks that were synced via some electric system.

Hey, not everyone was born to be a king.

I wouldn’t think so. Isn’t bottles just an easier way to manage wine prefixes? If so, it doesn’t do anything to hide your Linux system from the executable.

Wine prefixes are not sandboxes. They are a way to separate the windows-level configuration for different programs (eg env vars, or drivers, etc).

Wine is a translation layer between a compiled windows binary and your Linux syscalls/libraries/device drivers/etc, nothing more.