baltakatei
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social
- 166 Posts
- 301 Comments
111·1 day agoMost problems people have with Linux, I think, come from trying to be Linux power users from the start by performing very advanced techniques beyond their time and patience: dual booting multiple operating systems (so they don’t have to buy Linux-dedicated hardware), using any graphics card (the latest and greatest GPUs are all closed source and developers who work on Linux do so because they despise closed source), using the least expensive hardware (which are typically closed source and buggy with anything except Windows), and emulating Windows apps so they don’t have to learn new workflows or abandon their favorite games (technically, Proton with Steam allows Windows games like FFXIV to be played, but it’s a neverending journey to get it working and keeping it working.
If you switch to Linux, accept that for a smooth experience you’ll have to pay more than you would for a Windows machine (e.g. System76, Framework) And if you want graphics card support for your emulated Windows games on Steam, you’re going to have to use the specific flavor of Linux the manufacturer supports.
That said, if you value free/libre open source software, then making the switch from Windows is totally worth it.
12·2 days agoReminds me of a quote from Hogfather (1996):
Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bastard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose.
The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.
The convoy stops when it encounters a vehicle that had veered onto the side of the road — one ambulance had been sent earlier to aid wounded civilians and had come under attack. The new rescue vehicles detour to the side of the road.
Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side.
Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out.
…
The Palestine Red Crescent Society spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, said in an interview from the West Bank city of Ramallah that the paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a bullet in his head in the mass grave. His name has not been disclosed yet because he has relatives living in Gaza concerned about Israeli retaliation, the U.N. diplomat said.
7·5 days agoHere is a relevant excerpt from The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson. The context is a meeting between experts of a fictional UN agency looking for weak points in capitalist governments in order to implement carbon capture laws to reverse climate change that has already killed millions in a heat wave in India.
from chapter 15
Jurgen: Insurance companies in a panic at last year’s reports. Pay-outs at about one hundred billion USD a year now, going higher fast, as in hockey stick graph. Insurance companies insured by re-insurance. These now holding short end of stick (tall end of stick?). Can’t charge premiums high enough to cover pay-outs, nor could anyone afford to pay that much. Lack of predictability means re-insurance companies simply refusing to cover environmental catastrophes, the way they don’t insure war or political unrest etc. So, end of insurance, basically. Everyone hanging out there uninsured. Governments therefore payer of last resort, but most governments already deep in debt to finance, meaning also re-insurance companies. Nothing left to give without endangering belief in money. Entire system therefore on brink of collapse.
Mary: What mean collapse?
Jurgen: Mean, money no longer working as money.
Silence in room. Jurgen adds, So you can see why re-insurance hoping for some climate mitigation! We can’t afford for world to end! No one laughs.
Long story short, central bankers of all nations force governments to adopt China-style capitalism-subject-to-socialism so insurance companies can continue to exist. The socialist components tie the issuance of money to provable carbon capture such as by pumping supercritical carbon dioxide underground. Also, billionaires eventually realize civilization is ending though persistent assassination attempts by survivors of worsening climate disasters; they find the assassination attempts don’t occur when they fund projects to mitigate sea level rise by halting glacier movement and promoting ice formation through massive pumping of water. It’s science fiction, yes, but one of the more hopeful kinds.
Which website gave you those instructions? Name and shame.
What a macabre rhythm game.
3·9 days agoPromise him eternal life if they let us freeze him in a cryonics facility and then let his loyalists maintain the freezer with his disembodied head in a jar figure out how to make him their God emperor or whatever.
As a member of the Navajo Nation, I prefer leaders who believe in rule of law. They’re the ones least likely to try and nullify peace treaties on a whim.
11·9 days agoIt only takes one person to make 1 cubic meter of black hole to destroy the biosphere by ripping Earth into an acretion disc.
Sounds like phishing tests are just the company outsourcing spam filtering to their own employees instead of paying for a spam filtering service of their own.
The direct counter to enshittification is interoperability: the ability to pack up your content (likes, followers, messages, uploads) and import it into another service provider.
Since Signal is open source and mostly FOSS, you can theoretically create a Signal fork that can import Signal backups. I know because this program can read such backups and convert them into other formats. Ideally, the Atlantic reporter could have exported a Signal backup with the offending group chat messages before they expired.
46·13 days agoDonate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.
Oh Lordy.
Metaphorically, the US does this every election cycle, hot swapping elected officials peacefully, usually without replacing incumbents. However, the problem is that your kid brother insists on trying the same corroded cartridges again and again because he loves seeing you squirm in frustration more than actually having a functioning system. Also, you don’t get to play until he gets a game over while you, in contrast, are on a set time limit.
Will Smith: “Can a dog compose a symphony or paint a great work of art?”
Incarcerated robot: “Can you?”
In a few centuries, provided we don’t nuke ourselves into squiggles in sandstone, I look forward to personhood being extended to our canine, feline, bovine, equine, avian, reptilian, marsupial slaves and neighbors. It seems absurd that homo Sapiens is the only species with interesting stories to tell.
Human, human, human, HUMANTAUR, human, human, …
Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth
Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics’s consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.
from Chapter 1
If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses.
But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants.
Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy.
If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so.
Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world.
Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance.
Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.
These facts are related.
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
If the operating system is FOSS, I’d be willing to pay 50% the cost of a Windows license but to the FOSS maintainers and the upstream distros they rely on. Gotta close the causal loop.