Fucks left to give.

Basically, how many spoons someone has left, or how much bad and/or taxing stuff they’re capable of bearing today.

This would serve two purposes. One. It’d allow me to communicate more carefully or gently with those who require it, two, it’d give me real time feedback on shit I might’ve doing that’s causing a disproportionate amount of harm to someone else.

Ex: I can be in a wonderful mood and capable of taking all kinds of bad news, but asking me to go out of my way to do an act of service for someone else as a show of affection while I’m in the middle of some self-care after I’ve spent all day working in a service industry will tank my remaining fucks immediately. I’m absolutely certain that others around me have similar reactions to things that I do, and if I could see what they were, I could stop doing them inadvertently.

The vast majority of computer users with those kinds of issues are

1. probably using windows home
2. On a big box store computer with a platter drive
3. an i3 cpu
4. and 8gb of ram

windows 10 couldn’t reliably run it’s own bundled software (Mail), by itself, with nothing else open, without that one app going “not responding” every few minutes on a computer with those specs.

Last time i checked, Walmart, best buy, costco, etc were still selling those specs with win11 which is notably bulkier and slower than 10, especially without an ssd, so things have only gotten worse for the average non-power-user.

That’s a perfectly servicible spec for basic operations on a mint install, you could probably even watch netflix or youtube on it with linux, but i wouldn’t want to run windows newer than xp on it.

Really funny to actively hate FOSS on ideological grounds because you just love corporations and markets so much.

Yeah, especially when there are so many legitimate ideological grounds you could use to hate on FOSS, like: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116851056980506739

Are you familiar with ultrasonic cross-device tracking?

It’s an actual technology that’s in use in some places we know of and likely a lot more that we don’t, because who in marketing/advertising WOULDN’T leverage that power if it was an easily accomplished thing?

I wonder who made the list of “don’t touch these repos, they’re propping up our proprietary software sans attribution” for the LLM injectabots to avoid.

I realize that the end game here is SUPPOSED to be “erode all trust in free software” but the ineptitude of those profiting off of proprietary software is such that they WILL fuck this up in such a way that it hurts themselves too, it’s just a matter of when.

TREK: Total Interface

It’s Total Launcher with an LCARS theme.

I’ve been using it for 4 or 5 years now across two different phones.

I absolutely despise the entire smartphone menu paradigm so this is as close as I can get to departing from it and sticking with something static that doesn’t move about or spontaneously change behaviors every third update.

That’s a static menu system sorted, now if I could just get my pixel 8 pro to stick to 30 minutes screen timeout after I set it once, that’d be great. It flips back to 30 seconds nearly every time I put it down and sometimes while I’m holding it.

Why isn’t there a developer option for “never let the phone change settings on its own”?

I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?

If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they’ll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?

I would be shocked if that wasn’t on some AI company’s brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.

terraria for minecraft + metroidvania

This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.

I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.

There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.

In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.

Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.

I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.

Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.

A site that started as a forum for one particular class in one old (pre-dates WoW) MMO.

The population dipped a little when Facebook took off then nosedived again 6+ years later when reddit started getting super popular, but there are still a handful and change of us around with old friends dropping in to visit here and there.

I don’t know what this is.

Yank special brew is called malt liquor, sits between 5% and 12% abv, and is typically sold in 40oz bottles.

Also called a fotie (FOE-dee) or a lando (because Billy Dee williams, the actor who played lando calrissian also did ads for colt45 malt liquor)

This is 42 ounces?

Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

If it works, make sure you understand why.

If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

Keep going until you have a working new feature.

Then try a more complicated feature.

After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.

What’s the thing Elon does where he keeps his head lower, but looks up at the most extreme angle-of-eyeballs he can?

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

Well

You don’t know what

We can find

Why don’t you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.