cecilkorik

Welcome to fascism! Enjoy your stay!

All billionaires too.

It is so frustrating that people don’t realize the democrats are the good cop in the good cop/bad cop act. They’re both cops, they’re not your friends, they’re not helping you, neither of them give a fuck about you. ACAB.

The same reason ghosts and vampires and mummies often similarly reform, reanimate or reappear soon after being banished or defeated. All are undead, protected or animated by powerful magics, and you generally can’t just “kill” something that’s already supposed to be dead. Death no longer has meaning to it, its mere existence proves that it is beyond what we would normally consider death. At least not without exploiting some kind of specific weakness, using some elaborate ritual or calling ghostbusters.

Zombies are sometimes considered undead too, and originally they pretty much were, but more recently they’ve mostly been modernized and adopted into a more pseudo-science existence where they’re simply dead-ish, but with bodies still animated by some kind of infection in the nervous system and brain that allows basic biological activity to continue. The biological activity, then, can still be stopped using most or all of our conventional methods of stopping unwanted biological activity.

True undead are much more difficult to permanently end, and a skeleton is very clearly not using any traditional biological activity to exist, so whatever does allow it to exist isn’t likely to be stopped by our traditional methods of ending life.

At first glance, there may not appear to be anything unusual about the social media posts that are part of the ongoing recruitment drive by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

I am SO sick of this passive, milquetoast, normalized, way of reframing the obvious neo-Nazi fascism behind all this. The time for gentle warnings was like 20 years ago. Anyone who at this point still thinks there may not be “anything unusual about the social media posts” needs to have this knowledge urgently beaten into their head with an informational sledgehammer. This kind of gentle, mild, both-sides-ing concern farming is such a waste of breath it’s hard to believe it’s not intentional sandbagging.

“I think ICE is headed in the wrong direction in that they’re attracting the wrong type of individual to be involved in a very serious mission that they have,” he said.

You think so, David Lapan? So you think that’s the “wrong type” of individual for their “very serious mission”, huh… for fuck’s sake you blithering idiot. The violent fascist brutality against people unprepared to fight back IS THE WHOLE POINT. That IS their mission and purpose now. Stop living in your idealistic outdated dreamland of what you always imagined these agencies are supposed to be for and start accepting the reality of what they are RIGHT NOW. You can’t afford to keep delaying everyone’s understanding of what is really going on here. And the people who ARE irresponsibly delaying it and softening it and dragging their feet about it, I think, maybe actually want it to succeed.

Companies involved in large infrastructure build-outs are notoriously safe investments and never, ever, EVER end up with mountains of unservicable debt and a huge surplus of worthless, underutilized infrastructure that doesn’t fulfill any of its promises that inevitably gets sold off for fractions of a penny on the dollar. Except literally almost every fucking large infrastructure build-out anywhere in the world in all of human history.

It doesn’t matter what infrastructure or investments you look at: highways, train tracks, communications, real estate, skyscrapers, power generation, power transmission, oil extraction there are countless examples of greed-blinded companies JUST LIKE HIS doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING and eventually getting absolutely destroyed over it. The larger the infrastructure investment is, the worse it gets. There are only a handful of well-known success stories (which are well known because they are notable, not because they are common), and enough failures to pave a road to the moon and back.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I’m pretty sure Jensen Huang was too busy shopping for new leather jackets during history class to be paying any attention.

“Cheap?” Depends on your definition, but go for Prusa. Open specs, open ecosystem, open software, open upgrades. Tinkering is still completely possible (in some ways even easier) but unlike Ender 3 it is never actually necessary. The damn things just work, all the time, every time. They’re workhorses. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.

I’ll endure a little price gouging now if it leads to cheap memory in the future.

…but we know it never works like that. Price gouging now, more price gouging in the future while finding creative new ways for shoving overstock down your throat whether you like it or not.

At the end of the day everyone’s got to do their own risk analysis, but ICE is also pretty reactionary and stupid in their gestapo tactics, and people aren’t regularly shooting ICE with 3d printed guns at this point. The whistles probably (hopefully) irritate them though, and they tend to aggressively lash out at things that irritate them.

Counterpoint: Flock cameras also exist. Surveillance police state dystopia is already here and it’s spreading much faster than I think most people are prepared for, we have to take it seriously.

Sadly it’s not just a question of expensive anymore, it’s also a question of whether they can track your purchases (they can) and whether those purchase records will eventually have ICE banging down your door in the middle of the night to have you disappeared for your seditious act of buying justice-obstructing terrorist whistles.

3d printing is not impossible to track either but it’s certainly a lot harder to track when you are using basic internet hygiene and money isn’t changing hands.

I agree it’s not a win-win, it’s more of a win-lose tradeoff, but it will certainly drive customers away from those shitty companies, and towards the indie developers who don’t do microtransactions and unoptimized PC-crushing graphics-fests with 16-billion-K textures and Nvidia’s latest 600x FSXLAA running on every pixel 3 million times per second.

Indie developers may not prioritize optimization, but if there’s a need to, they will, and most of the time, they simply don’t have to. Balatro and Vampire Survivors are going to be doing just fine on any hardware.

There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.

A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.

Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.

“iT’s pRoBaBlY a qUiP mEaNt To bE HuMoRoUS” says ignorant man unwilling to believe his own lying eyes.

Haha I just noticed your name, that’s a funny coincidence. But yeah I’m a big fan of Debian in general. The problem, as you noticed, is often it doesn’t have great support for the latest hardware. On the other hand, it often has great support for older hardware, and PikaOS refuses to install at all on some of my older, less capable systems, so those are running Debian right now. So it’s kind of a “right tool for the job” sort of situation. They have their purposes, it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.

I think that’s a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a “long hard process” of hardworking participants that takes decades.

I’m concerned it’s going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it’s sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don’t necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we’re on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don’t see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it’s never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it’s just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it’s so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it’s been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don’t have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there’s no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming “now”.

This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that’s commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don’t think we’re prepared for how bad it’s going to be. For how bad we can be.

Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am. I hope there’s some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that’s realistic.

This is a common misconception I think. “Stable” from a development point of view (which is what Debian is) is not the same as “Stable” from a user point of view. It can be, as long as no other variables are changing. But a typical desktop user IS a variable, and they change other variables all the time. “Stable” makes sense on a server, where the server has a defined role and a specific purpose that basically never changes. It’s “stable” and if the OS is also “stable” that gives you assurance that nothing is going to break unexpectedly… ONCE you have it tested and set up properly to be stable in the first place.

But installing on a fresh system where you’ve never run this OS before is the antithesis of stable. You are initially in an “experimental” state, and you may need the latest updates and patches to even be compatible with the hardware you’re running. Then you’re going to use this system daily, downloading stuff, installing new apps and tools regularly, changing configurations when you feel like it. None of this is stable. And that’s fine, it’s not wrong, it’s just the reality of being a user with a desktop system. It’s not stable, it’s not supposed to be. It’s your daily driver.

To paraphrase George Carlin, a bad driver, driving a safe car doesn’t really make you safe, at all. First, learn to drive THEN get your safe car. A stable distribution like Debian is for people who already know how to find all the compatible-by-default hardware and do the configuration necessary to make things safe and stable and using Debian assures them that once they have got it into that state, Debian isn’t going to undo their work and make unexpected changes.

For users, especially on the desktop, you often want bleeding edge latest updates to fix these kind of compatibility issues as soon as they’re identified, even without absolutely rigorous testing and validation that it won’t mess up someone’s “stable” configuration. You really do want the opposite of “stable” development, in order to make your own system more stable as quickly and reliably as possible in the circumstances. It will never be as stable as Debian running on a server, but that’s normal, and expected. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Debian is a good OS, but as a desktop user, on your main system, it might be counterproductive. For what it’s worth, I run PikaOS, which is a gaming-focused distro derived from Debian (Debian’s stable foundation is a huge asset for people building distros on top of it) but provides prompt access to all the latest updates and patches needed for gaming and includes configurations and drivers for supporting the latest consumer level hardware and all the common tools and things that power users want, that are becoming popular day by day. This is the opposite of “stable development” but it’s perfect for a desktop system in my opinion and they do a great job.

Sometimes I’m able to get around it by tweaking some ublock permissions, but once I was surprised to discover that changing my user-agent with user-agent switcher seemed to do the trick. It’s really strange. Cloudflare’s captcha loops are inscrutable.

Misleading title. A “U.S. ban on Bambu Labs 3d printers” is not nearly the same thing as a “U.S. ban on 3d printers”, yes there’s a plausible interpretation where the title makes sense but I guarantee they knew exactly what they were doing with the more obvious misleading clickbait interpretation.

So, Tiananmen Square it is, then?