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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Calling people stupid and lazy in nicer words is still calling people stupid and lazy.

    I think that’s a bit unfair here. What I’m saying is that expectations often seems to be that “Linux should be effortless, but it isn’t, so Linux sucks”, and then we quickly talk past each other on which aspects we are referring to. Let me make up three categories:

    For users transitioning to Linux from Windows, and …

    1. … it shouldn’t be an effort, but unfortunately sometimes is frustrating or annoying
    • Hardware control, e.g. drivers. More often than not it works with less effort than on Windows, except for very new hardware, and hardware that actually requires specific software (RGB led patterns, Gaming mouse profiles, all that stuff)
    • NVidia drivers can be a pain
    • When dual booting and Windows manages to fuck up something in Linux, and it looks like Linux is the culprit. (E.g. restart the computer from Windows, but it doesn’t release claim on hardware, which doesn’t let Linux claim it, so stuff like the WiFi adapter might not work.)
    • Specific software not available, like Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
    1. .… is something you can get someone else to do for you, but it’s just how things are, unrelated to Windows -> Linux or the other way around.
    • Installing the OS – downloading ISO, burning a bootable USB, BIOS, etc…
    1. … it’s expected that you figure out / learn, and if unwilling, Linux isn’t for you
    • Using the OS, which at the very least, cursory knowledge of the software/package manager, and roughly how this works.
    • Familiarizing yourself with KDE / Gnome, etc.

    So, I assume people who just thought I was calling people lazy and dumb thought I meant categories 1. and 2. I just mean category 3. If you expect everything to be the same as Windows, and the effort required to understand the differences is too much, then only Windows will fit your needs. The impression I get is a general unwillingness to “figure stuff out”. Not knowing shit is fine, complaining and not wanting to put in the effort to know stuff… how is that not being lazy?

    It was intended as kind advice without any the implied judgement of calling people dumb or lazy. If you don’t want to have to figure stuff out related to the third category, Linux will likely not be a good experience, or even a productive or good change. If you move to another country, you should make the effort to learn the culture. It’s not a good look to complain that things are different.

    If I were to try to suggest “a point” with all of this: Don’t suggest to people that Linux is effortless for Windows users. Linux is immensely better, in almost every way (though mind examples in first category). But, it requires learning the basics of how shit works. It’s not hard… the information is well put together and available.








  • Urbanisation and deforestation are not the same as enshitification tho.

    It’s a bit unfortunate that “increased degree in which something is shit” sounds like what the word should mean, and I suppose it then sort of does.

    It’s nice to have a word that describes the investor-driven incentives to worsen a service/product to milk out more short-term revenue. The larger a market capture is, the more that can be pushed without an alternative being a threat.

    It’s the cycle of “provide a good quality service that makes everybody happy” -> market capture -> shareholders push for increase revenue at the expense of quality as there is no competition.


  • I find this question very interesting. What does it mean to “know” a programming language. They map to certain paradigms for how to solve problems, in various degrees, with different tradeoffs there for surrounding tooling, libs, and what not.

    A bunch of the most familiar ones are procedural with different sprinkles on top, and they pretty much do the same things when it comes to the “language” side. So, “knowing” one, or another, IMO, has little to do with the syntax, parsing and keywords, and is much more if you have suffered through cryptic compile errors, figured out good debugging tooling, etc.

    Which is to say, if we compare these two list

    • C++, Haskell, Prolog
    • C++, Java, Python, Rust, Kotlin, Objective-C, Dart, etc

    I’d consider the first one much more impressive in terms of diversity in “knowing programming languages”. And, I say that as someone belonging squarely in the latter.


  • The image of USA is not good, at all, if that’s what you’re asking. I used to care, but some time around 2016 I simply gave up. Something about an obvious grifter and professional fuckwit, seriously considered to lead anything other than a burger to his fat face. The alternative, although infinitely better, is clearly suffering from some dementia. It’s just a shit show.

    And that’s just the politics. But it mirrors most other fucked up things in the US. The obvious and effective approaches are not considered. So… best to not spend too much effort and hope the impact of it reaching critical mass isn’t too bad.



  • But… have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.

    I’m not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?

    A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.

    A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.


    Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn’t placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.



  • To anyone who tries watching the first one, just skip ahead to 6:50 where he actually starts explaining his reasoning. I can summarizer them here

    • “Volume is visible”
    • “You gotta scoop your stuff out with something, so it might as well be by something that measures volume”

    The third one was too dumb for me to follow. Something about if you measure stuff by weight, you end up with large portions.

    The fourth one was just absurd. No one measures spices by weight… So not being able to measure 1.2g of cinnamon or what not, just isn’t a thing.

    Alright. I’ll stop there. The arguments presented go from fairly bad, to dumb, to made up stuff no one does. The arguments against them are so easy to express:

    • “Amounts” of cooking ingredients is mass, so if you want to measure that, you… might as well just measure that, ie weight.
    • Amounts that make sense to measure by weight, you measure by weight.
    • Spices, and stuff that makes sense to measure by volume, you measure by teaspoon, pinches, or what not. Rarely is the accuracy there all that important, tbh.


  • Joke aside, scales on earth measure force and show mass on the assumption of the gravitational pull on earth. On a moon colony, you’d use measuring scales with a different value for the gravitational pull, and get the same values for mass as on earth.

    Edit: Also, if anyone finds this stuff interesting to think about. You can measure mass without any force of gravity, but having the measuring device accelerate (e.g. shake) the stuff you want to measure. From “F=ma”, knowing F and a, you get m.


  • There are two common types of laser printers. Those that have special paper that react to heat, such as receipt printers, would fit the description.

    The other laser printers… Hm, I don’t think your description is accurate either. It’s more that the laser electrically charges ink particles so that they jump on to a separate roller that gets rolled on to the paper.

    I’m no expert though.