Yeah, I keep my Windows PC purely for League of Legends due to their anti cheat (read rootkit) and it’s a pre-2017 chip, so it’s not Win 11 eligible (which I’ve always counted my blessings for). And also the Spotify web page doesn’t work well for me on Linux. Other than that, I do pretty much everything on my newer Linux machine.

Plus Sized Lobsters

Yeah, if I were you I’d cut my losses and try to find another place. If you’re lucky enough to know this place has bugs while very little of your stuff has been exposed, I’d get out before the problem has taken hold in your life.

That said, there are ways to deal with infestations. Likely if it’s been a problem dating back years, there’s some place they retreat to that kick starts the population each time they’re exterminated. But in typical homes, steam treatments from professionals can eradicate the pests. Mark Rober made a pretty good video pushing back on some of the stigma:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8

Good luck to you. I hope you end up in a good place after all this. Sucks to get this close to a stable living space only to be thwarted by invertebrates.

Same here. I’ve been building a bootstrap script, and each time I test it, it tears down the whole cluster and starts from scratch, pulling all of the images again. Every time I hit the Docker pull limit after 10 - 12 hours of work, I treat that as my “that’s enough work for today” signal. I’m going to need to set up a caching system ASAP or the hours I work on this project are about to suddenly get a lot shorter.

Yeah, there is a lot to miss about those days. Seems naive looking back to not have known that those early-net vibes could not last.

I subscribed to a writing magazine in the late 90s or so and they had a web forum. It was amazing to be able to post my writing online and get feedback from a community of people who were virtually always friendly (if sometimes blunt) and dedicated to the craft. I miss that genuine feeling of community, seeing the same pool of people around you so often that you notice when someone’s been gone a while.

It can’t be the same now for a lot of reasons, but I agree that Lemmy and its Fediverse counterparts (I’ve only been on Lemmy) are the closest thing we have now. And having recently looked in on the alternative, I just notice reddit getting worse and worse and Lemmy getting better and better.

We should enjoy this time when this world is small. And welcome the refugees as they arrive. Would love for the people to own the means of production, but at this point I will be thrilled if the people can at least come together and seize control of the means of meme production.

I am maybe misplaced in this conversation. I was born in 1990. I do feel a deep nostalgia for early chat rooms and IRC. So much so that I’m trying to build up a chat platform of my own.

In comparison to the time of asking people their A/S/L and just hanging out talking about how our lives are different, there are now maybe four (or five?) categories of potentially society-ending threats hanging around our cultural zeitgeist. All of them addressable, but it just hangs around every internet thread like a miasma now.

But I do think we’ll find ourselves nostalgic for this time in a similar way that we look back on the 80’s. In the same way it became possible in the mid 70’s to just buy some off-the-shelf components and assemble them into personal computers that can be sold en masse, it is every year more and more possible for a relative novice (such as myself) to do something like create their own chat room app. With some prior experience and the help of AI, I’ve got the bare bones of a shift-left style DevSecOps stack, and it feels really exciting. It feels like I’m a guy in the 70’s in his garage putting a prototype personal computer together, the way you can abstract your requirements from deployed resources in CI/CD. I envision a near future where corporate capitalistic social media becomes stale and increasingly awful (status quo) and the average consumer can have an idea for an app and have a fully hardened back end system to support it in the span of an afternoon. I’m looking forward to a new crop of communication technologies that we collectively develop as a people to tackle the overarching issues which affect us all. Imagine if we could all organize to efficiently locate ideal candidates for public office and democratically work out our differences in environments where peaceful debate and separate chill zones are both encouraged, rather than profit-driven systems where outrage is king. We can do so much better, and we are just now on the cusp of having all the tools to enable the average person to finally be able to help themselves.

I’m sorry for the tangent, and for polluting this thread with all of this. I know it’s not really on topic, I’m just waiting for tests to process and really pumped up about starting a revolution later, idk, maybe, I mean, like only if you feel like revolting.

I’m glad you’ve broken that dating barrier as well! It certainly is difficult to invite people in when life is cluttered, and I can imagine the added complication of the clutter not being your own made things especially tricky. I’m personally on the opposite end of the cannabis spectrum at the moment - I used it for many years, mainly to break down my emotions and get at the root causes of my anxieties. I’m at the point now where I’ve done a lot of self improvement, but the cannabis has become more of a hindrance. I was dependent on it and definitely seeing some side effects from long term usage. I think it did serve a purpose, but it’s become time for me to stop using it as a crutch. Just a minor heads up to use with moderation if possible. I’m happy you’ve found someone though, and that your life is heading in a good direction. Wishing you all kinds of success in your relationship and life!

Well, the best thing that happened to me was meeting my girlfriend. Just happened a month ago, but we already feel like we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together and this is after me not dating at all for almost fifteen years.

So, the second best thing has to be several months ago when my family caught on to the fact that I was depressed and overwhelmed with clutter from stuff I was hoarding because I felt too guilty about throwing things away. They helped me sort through it all so it wasn’t so overwhelming. My living space is nice and tidy now and that’s what allowed me the confidence to go meet a partner who is perfect for me in almost every way.

Hell, I might be a CFO now and I’ve failed to notice! Hold on, let me check… No… No, I’ve just managed to burn a microwave dinner again.

Yeah, it’s specifically the not talking to a kid version that bothers me.

I pick up a subtext of self-importance and I think that’s what I find irksome. A mom is a parent. A momma is a special parent who will do anything for their baby, you’d better watch out. A kid is a child. A kiddo is a specific child who has a close bond with their momma or teacher that you wouldn’t understand. That’s the vibe I get.

Similarly, not a fan of when teachers and parents talk about their “kiddos.”

Feels like they’re needlessly using a more playful childish term to make themselves part of a separate “in group” who “gets it.”

Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won’t run on VM.

Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can’t eject because it’s in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that’s super comforting.

I went to a small concert while on a road trip a couple months ago and the artists had CDs for sale. I figured cool, I’ll have some music to listen to if I hit no cell service areas. But it turned out that my CD changer in my car hadn’t been used in so long that the motor wasn’t strong enough to ingest the CD. I was sad.

Makes sense. Thanks for the info!

I finally got fed up with my Windows machine and upon seeing symptoms of motherboard failure, I’ve ordered all the parts for a new rig and intend on installing Linux as my primary OS.

Haven’t decided on a distro yet. I’m a DevOps engineer with a few passion projects, so I plan on setting up a couple of kubernetes clusters where I can play. I do all the usual things (word processing, gaming, web browsing, multimedia, etc), plus some AI stuff (stable diffusion, local LLMs, OpenCV). Ideally don’t want to have to fuss with drivers too much, but I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then.

Is Chimera the kind of distro I should be looking at, or should I pick something else for my first go at full-time Linux?

Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.

As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.

Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.

If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.

Yeah. Been trying to find a non-boring way to visualize the start of the universe for a long time. Most of the time I reach for binary which in retrospect is way less fun than trains 🚂

A lot of people describe the first moment of the big bang as infinitely small, dense, and hot. These descriptions may approximate that first moment of existence, but they slightly miss the mark because in the very first moment of existence, size, density, and temperature didn’t exist. There was nothing to compare anything else against.

Instead, let’s visualize that moment as infinitely same. Erase all thoughts of violent explosions happening very quickly and instead just imagine a single point of light. Not big, because size requires multiple things. Not small because it encompasses everything. Just one infinite same.

Now, since it’s hard for us to visualize change in an infinite void that is simultaneously nothing and everything, imagine that point of light as a magical tank engine at the front of a never-ending train. And our job as conductors of that train is to get to the caboose at the end.

The train cars could theoretically go in any order, but because we conductors are beings of time who need them to arrive on a schedule, we must visit each car in a precise order. And before we can access a car, we must make it unique by showing it something that has never been seen before.

For the first car, this is easy. We simply show it the tank engine at the front of the train. So, the inside of the first car transforms its interior into a copy of the tank engine it’s attached to.

But when we arrive at the second car, things are more complicated. The cars have already seen the tank engine. So, instead, we show the second car the first car. And the second car transforms into a copy of the first car and the tank engine attached to that. And inside the copy of the first car is another copy of the tank engine.

As you can imagine, the further down we get on this train, the more this starts to get out of hand. Copies of copies of copies abound. The magic train is powerful, but as mortal conductors of time, we worry our own powers may have limits. So, to reduce the burden on ourselves, we take some shortcuts. Instead of trying to visualize increasingly long nested copies of trains inside each new car we visit, we start to conceptualize these copies as amounts, or amplitudes. When we open the door to a new car, all of the amplitudes inside resonate and interact, becoming maybe more abstract than they are in reality. They form spatial dimensions and physical properties, as mediated by fundamental forces.

These aren’t set in stone, but determined by the lens through which we view them. And when we look through specific lenses, we see these forces causing certain repeated amplitudes to intermingle and stabilize to the point that even though all of the train copies are further nested when we step into the next car, we can recognize and identify some of the same structures, just shifted slightly in their spatial relationships since we last witnessed them in the previous car. We call these persistent formations matter. And as their shared spatial relationships cause them to cluster and coalesce, we refer to that as gravity.

While in the early cars, this continuum of space and matter is not impossible to conceptualize, the more cars we travel through, the more apparent it becomes that these increasingly complex objects are becoming more and more isolated from each other. At every scale of amplitude, each nested car is attached to its own tank engine. While these engines can interact with each other virtually, at the end of the day, they are all just virtual copies of the train we are on. It is entirely impossible for any one of these tank engines to travel so far that it reaches the edge of its bounding box. Because that bounding box is just a lens through which we imagine overlapping traits of increasingly many very similar objects. And the more of them we imagine, the more space is required to provide the virtual framework of this lens.

So, when we feel like we are experiencing random events in our small subsection of the universe, those events are not truly random, but instead the result of our precise position in the the universal train we’ve been virtually sliding through for over 13 billion years. The universe has become so large that it contains every possible event that could have happened in this span of time. The events are not random but calculated, and duplicated every moment so that every time we enter a new train car, two copies of our observable universe exist at a distance so far apart it’s impossible to comprehend.

And when we observe celestial objects apparently propelled away from each other at increasing speed, they are not really being pushed or pulled anywhere. It is simply an artifact of trying to keep track of the “same” object in rapidly advancing train cars, while each car doubles in size to contain everything the previous car had, as well as everything new that might emerge from the duplication event. The celestial objects year by year, and indeed ourselves from moment to moment, are never the same thing twice. It’s an illusion brought forth by our brains being born into a cosmic flipbook.

Even something as simple as seeing multicolored pixels on this screen is not real, but the result of virtual “tank engines” moving into the same spatial zones occupied by our retinas, which are themselves constructed of virtual trains of varying size. The reason photons move at a set maximum speed which makes them exempt from experiencing time is because they are all just virtual copies of the real locomotive which is driving the whole train. Every photon in our universe is just a make-believe copy of the very first moment of the big bang. A specter of infinite sameness.

So, objects in our universe aren’t moving apart as much as the space between them is increasing to account for the overhead of a universe with constantly growing entropy and uniqueness. The extra space represents a boundary which limits how far light can travel and affect matter in its realm of influence. If you’re still reading this, somewhere out there, in a part of our universe so far away that light from our known universe will never even remotely reach, there is an opposite you made of antimatter reading the exact same thing as written by an opposite me. But we are only made of matter because of a virtual compression of sameness, so that antiverse may be the exact place where the curvature of the entire universe loops back around and is overlaid upon itself. And the uncertainty of photons may arise from the fact that there are two identical universes overlapped and constantly exchanging probabilities. And this may be the compressive property which allows the fundamental forces to exist in the first place. So, say hi to yourself. You’re the reason you’re here.

I’d call it a success, in that as I was scrolling, before I saw the title, I thought, “Is that meant to be Danny Pudi?”

Good shout. Been at least a decade since I tried emulating Dreamcast. Just need to make sure I buy a USB adapter for the controller, for the complete experience.