Random Dent

I’ve done that before too! Last year I was having a very specific issue and I was googling it, found someone who had the exact problem I had like 5 years ago, and it turned out to be me from my old account back when I used to use reddit lol.

Yeah when you’re in the middle you kind of know enough to be able to get around the safeguards and properly break things, but not always how to fix them again necessarily.

Yeah I always turn off multihop and DAITA on my Mullvad thing, I know it’s less secure but they absolutely murder my connection speed.

I’m somewhat trusting of Mullvad, since they’ve actually been raided by police who walked away empty-handed which IMO demonstrates that they’re not bullshitting about not logging anything. But yeah as you say, that could always change in the future.

I’ve not really used a wide variety of LLMs, but I’ve found that the one that comes up when you use Brave search is actually pretty good at giving solutions to tech support problems. It’s not perfect, but if you give it an error code it sort of collates all the solutions it finds into a list and gives sources for each one, and I’d say probably 8/10 times it’s at least in the right general area. If nothing else, it’s saving me a ton of wasted time searching through forums and finding those threads where someone has the exact problem you’re looking for and then just posts “nm I fixed it” without explaining what they did.

I think historically Canonical has always been a bit or a weird company. I ended up ditching Ubuntu because they seem to have this weird penchant for picking some new shiny feature (Unity, the convergent Desktop/Phone OS thing, Mir, currently Snaps) and just going all-in on it whether people want it or not, working on it until it’s almost good, then ditching it for the next shiny thing.

Also their hiring process is apparently bonkers.

Chat, please write an apology that clarifies Diversity Policy 15 and assures the reader that as a company we are not homophobic. Please use a professional, courteous tone and limit the response to 500 characters or less.

Given that until 2024 their Executive Director was a professional shaman, I’m starting to suspect that they might not have what you’d call standard vetting practices.

I’ve gotten exactly one thing to ever run properly in Bottles, and that was an accident lol. Which is weird because I can get things to run in Wine no problem, and I assumed that Bottles would be easier since it’s essentially just Wine with a GUI. But for reasons that elude me, everything I throw at Bottles just doesn’t work. I’ve even taken things that work perfectly well in Wine and setting them up in Bottles with the exact same settings (as far as I can tell) and they just don’t. work. I assume it’s something I’m doing wrong, but there’s no real reason to spend the time to figure it out when Wine is right there getting the job done.

I consider myself to be pretty okay at Linux - I’m no pro but I’ve been daily driving Linux for 10+ years, can troubleshoot most things, I’ve installed Arch from scratch without the installer script, I can setup and maintain NixOS without much trouble, I can automate stuff with Bash etc. But I still don’t understand Docker even a little bit. I don’t know why but I just can’t get my head around it. I’ve even searched for the “Explain Docker to me as if I’m five years old” type of guides and I still just bounce of it.

Yeah I have two without noses now, but I finally got Flesh Shaping unlocked so soon I can start pumping out replacements. Also the leader got a bionic spine, then immediately got both legs blown off in the next fight. She is costing me a lot in advanced components lol.

I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.

Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.

Yeah I’ve tried it and bounced off it a couple of times, but I get the sense that it’s one of those games where eventually I’ll push past the beginning part and then become obsessed with it for a while lol. Alien: Isolation was one of those too.

Also worth noting that they own Github, which puts them in a position to disrupt a huge amount of Linux infrastructure if they ever feel like it. They might also pull some weird move like trying to buy Canonical or something like that.

I stopped using Youtube a few years ago when one of my videos that wasn’t monetized and had a very clearly public domain piece of music in it got flagged by some bot for copyright infringement (on the public domain music) and Youtube monetized my video without my permission and put ads in it so that they could send the money to the bot that falsely flagged my video.

The thing that annoys me the most about it (well, aside from the massive invasion of civil liberties and general dystopian behaviour) is that we don’t even get any of the fringe benefits of it. By that I mean, if I contact the government because I need some information about myself (recent examples: vaccine history, polling information, National Insurance query etc.) they act as if they’ve never been contacted by a person before and seem to immediately go into a panic and send you in a big loop of Other People Who Might Have It, with the end goal seeming to be “nobody knows where it is, let’s just hope they give up and stop asking.”

Like if the government must insist on tracking every single thing I do and say and look at and place I go to, the least they could do is actually have that info to hand so I can use it too. It seems the more they track us, the less capable they are of actually doing anything useful with that information.

I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.

Half-baked bullshit. You can get around it with a VPN or a copy of Death Stranding 2

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