Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

"Literally" literally means "as written", or "in the literature".

To use the word "literally" to mean "in reality" or "in fact" is not that original meaning, but is literally - in fact, as well as a written thing - a figurative meaning.

Language changes. There are plenty of words that are their own antonyms. It's not sad, it's inevitable, and the sooner you can accept that the sooner you can avert the fate of becoming an old man yelling at clouds.

Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people's lives.

It's legislated that only "secure" hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.

Just a glimpse of where all this "trusted", "secure" computing might lead.

As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: "trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?"

Edit: holy shit, it's 15 years old, and "anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over" (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:

https://www.lafkon.net/work/trustedcomputing/

Assume, he says, that the distribution of holdings in a given society is just according to some theory based on patterns or historical circumstances—e.g., the egalitarian theory, according to which only a strictly equal distribution of holdings is just.

Okay well this is immediately a false premise because nobody seriously makes this argument. This is a strawman of the notion of egalitarianism.

Also, we don't need Wilt Chamberlain to create an unequal society, we just need money. It's easy enough to show that simply keeping an account of wealth and then randomly shuffling money around creates the unequal distribution that we see in the real world:

https://charlie-xiao.github.io/assets/pdf/projects/inequality-process-simulation.pdf

And every actor there began with the impossible strictly eqalitarian beginning. No actor was privileged in any way nor had any merit whatsoever, but some wound up on top of an extremely unequal system.

So Noszick just needs to look a little deeper at his own economic system to see the problem. There is no reason why we need to have a strict numerical accounting of wealth.

People should look into tab groups. Firefox has a tab grouping feature built-in now but this is a plugin that is a bit more feature-full.

So I have tab groups for different dev projects, games, podcasts, shows, music, etc. It reduces the size of each tab group which makes it easier to actually return to the important stuff and close the stuff that doesn't matter.

Also though these are RC size, 5mm screws, so much easier to kill. Apparently the issue is most hex drivers are slightly undersized, and ARRMA like to loctite their axle grub screws to hell.

I've done it. It was a grub screw - so the hex was entirely within the shaft - that was surrounded by loctite, and frankly I never had a chance to get it out. It went circular immediately, just with hand pressure. I ended up having to use a screw extractor.

I was told this was a common problem on ARRMA vehicles and that I should get a more precise type of hex driver. They were expensive but I haven't had the problem since.

Faster to apply and much harder to remove.

Your funeral, don't say I didn't warn you.

Your gnomes shouldn't be dead, they're technically immortal and a stint in the dishwasher is their ticket out of the salt mines. If you've got dead gnomes the last thing you want is to keep their bodies on the premises. If you leave them in the cartridge they can be revived when you exchange it for the new cartridge. If you put them in the ground they will find... other ways back to their realm, and they will remember what you did.

And please remember to buy gnomane dishwashing tablets, I cannot stress enough how much they should not be dead.

Also don't ask me why the gnome salt mine slavery exists, I didn't create it, I just benefit from it.

You can get anti fungal liquid that you add to one of the secondary dispensers which should keep that at bay while also keeping mould off your clothes, and also you can leave the door open between cycles to dry it out. I've been told it's important to leave the door open when it's not in use.

You don't replace your dish gnome cartridge every 3 years? I was told it was a feature. They get tired.

In my experience that is not a true defence against disappointment.

My expectations weren't low enough to guard against my boss's husband getting drunk, shoving his kid around in front of me then driving like a lunatic with us both in the car. When I quit over it I didn't get my last paycheck or even an email back.

There had been red flags in the hiring process which these days I would absolutely bounce over, especially since they'd taken so long to get my contract in order, but you just don't expect people to be complete monsters.

When I emailed again a week later to ask what was taking so long the second business partner's email bounced. Apparently she'd left in that time. The business is still somehow running because you don't need to be competent to get startup capital and run a business, you just need to talk fast enough to get the bag.

I tried to get a refund on WRC after they added anti-cheat that stopped it running on linux even though it did previously. Anti-cheat on a primarily single player game.

Steam rejected it because it "didn't count as non-functional under consumer protection laws".

I mean they deliberately rendered it non-functional for certain users.

Anyway, the dirt series will be mourned but I'm excited to see if anyone else will take up the mantle. BeamNG's rally mode is getting really good and they have a very detailed simulation, and VR. In fact a detailed damage model is key to a realistic rally simulation, and obviously theirs is second to none.

...well my biggest question now is why I didn't even notice that.

Well sure, psychos with nukes are scary and there may be an element of the US losing control of their attack dog, but the idea that the Israelis are calling the shots is not really accurate. It cuts dangerously close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel through AIPAC controls the US government, which also conveniently lets the US off the hook for sponsoring them.

I just think it's important to remember that for all their brutality, Israel is not charge, and they are not the military superpower that has dominated much of global politics for the past century. They are a vassal state and they would listen if anyone in power had the will to tell them no, they are far too dependent on US support.

It's probably more like institutional inertia. It takes a long time to stop a ship that big.

Israel is of strategic importance to project US power in the middle east to secure oil.

That's also the reason they were allowed to continue with their nuclear program.

It's not fear, it's power politics. Western powers actively support them. They are not uniquely evil, they are just what happens when fascism is sponsored and allowed to run unchecked.

This is Joe Biden making it perfectly clear: https://youtu.be/A-Ky3dPEnOE

Everyone should read the words of one of Nixon's top aides regarding why they started the war on drugs:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Source

And yet the wikipedia entry for the war on drugs starts like this:

The war on drugs is a global anti-narcotics campaign led by the United States federal government, including drug prohibition, foreign assistance, military intervention, and counterterrorism, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the US.

Emphasis added. I would say that is flat out false. It may be the openly stated aim, but it is not the true aim, and they've admitted it. Just another reminder that these fascists know exactly what the fuck they're doing and that wikipedia is subject to propaganda influences.

Got them working, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them had flatpak installers! Manual saving is still a pain but the engines running smoothly does make a big difference.

Although the dark forces installer doesn't work with the steam install so you have to copy the game data to the data folder to make it work.

Honestly anything to deal with the horrendous friction and instability of the original would be welcome. Even modded I think I had to stick with 4:3 which even with black bars was still not quite right on my modern system. It would have to be a better experience, even if I have to re-learn manual quicksaves.