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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Weirdly enough, the only game I tried to play that didn’t run was this random Indy game. Didn’t even have fancy graphics, it was one step up from macromedia flash games

    The AAA games I’ve played are fine on Linux. Baulders Gate, No Mans Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Crusader Kings III.





  • I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

    There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

    It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

    I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

    I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .



  • It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

    Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren’t false, heh.


  • The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.

    Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.


  • I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

    I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

    The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.

    I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)



  • I’ve been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.

    Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can’t even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.

    LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this–probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn’t self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.

    Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts’ sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn’t exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn’t exactly conscious like you or I.



  • Yeah, I treated Twitter as a RSS platform where I could follow subject matter experts like scientists and writers and artists I liked.

    I also used it to follow people and groups that weren’t like me so i could learn. Like, “disability twitter” opened my eyes to some things I took for granted, because you had regular people dealing with those things just talking back and forth about it. If I shut my mouth and just listened, it opened up a whole new world.

    For small-time creators making either art or science, Twitter was a good platform to get little chunks of info out to your followers. I don’t know that Mastodon fills those shoes yet, but I hope it will.


  • really you have to make everyone disembark during rush hour so you can cram your obesity scooter on there so you can go to Tim Hortons so nobody else can sit down?

    Has it…occurred to you that some disabled people have mobility issues or pain disorders that limit mobility to begin with, and that weight gain is a byproduct of not being able to walk or move or stand for very long without trouble?

    I had a boss who had dwarfism and used a wheelchair 80% of the time. 20% of the time he slowly, painfully did hobble about–but it was clear as day WHY he was higher weight than he should’ve been. My own blood pressure would spike hearing the tiny sounds of pain he made when got out of his wheelchair and moved.

    I have a friend with POTS–and if you’re unfamiliar with that, basically she stands up and her blood pressure and heart rate is malfunctioning so her heart acts like she’s running a marathon, the beats per minute go insane…but blood is pooling in her feet and they’re turning purple where you can’t see it because things are out of whack and despite her heart going haywaire, there’s not enough pressure to get the blood out of her feet and elsewhere. This condition happened prior to any weight gain.

    I can hear her breath start to go wobbly just doing simple things because her body doesn’t regulate her blood pressure and heart rate normally. She’s gained weight because she’s at risk of passing the fuck out if she is on her feet for very long–she has to literally plan out doing simple things like going to the grocery store because if she pushes herself she might end up downed on the sidewalk relying on the helpfulness of strangers to get back up. It’s taken her many years to accept she really shouldn’t be pushing herself into a collapse because she’s worried that people will judge her for being “lazy and fat”. Comments like yours about “obesity scooters” only act to tear down all the people who ARE trying their hardest and still having their body fail them.

    I have a different friend who has thyroid problems, she inherited them from her mom (and her bro has them too), and weight is a bitch for her to manage because her thyroid is fried.

    I just broke my foot in July, and watched my weight inch up because it’s really fucking hard to get up stairs when you can’t put weight on one foot. I was semi bedbound for like 2 months. I’m LUCKY in that my foot will heal, but I don’t even snack and I gained 15lbs because of that one little temporary mobility issue. I’m LUCKY in that once it heals, I will be able to move normally and lose what I gained.

    You could’ve made your point about transit without taking pot-shots at disabled people, who often are stuck in a terrible situation of their body failing them medically, and society often forcing them into poverty to be able to access the care they need.

    Seriously, why isn’t it possible to champion mass public transit for all without shitting on the people who use it by necessity currently?



  • The problem is that leadership doesn’t interpret it that way and just sees “minimizing inventory increases profit!”

    Yep. Managers prioritize short-term gains (often personal gains, too) over the overall health of a business.

    There’s also industries where the “lean” strategy is inappropriate because the given industry is one that booms in times of crisis when logistics to get “just in time” supplies go kaput due to the same catastrophe that’s causing the industry to boom. Hospitals and clinics can end up in trouble like this.

    But there’s other industries too–I haven’t looked for it, but I’m sure there’s a plethora of analysis already on what Covid did to companies and their supply chains.


  • Wow. I read the article and the guy doing it also did to other women, including the stalker’s own underage relative. Luckily, the sisters were able to get him sent to prison.

    But one of the things that really pisses me off is that the ex-boyfriend of one of the sisters sent MORE images to the stalker.

    Like, the stalker already had some, and this fuckwad sent him MORE.

    And he got off the hook because he said he was sorry and was only doing it to “gain the stalker’s trust”.

    Basically, he supposedly didn’t do it out of malice (just overwhelming monumental stupidity…which I don’t believe, I think he just got lucky by saying sorry and by the laws in the books worded in such a way that BAD intent was necessary for it to be a crime). They settled with him in court later on, but the idea that someone could send a stalker nudes of their GF/ex-gf and get out of it by acting like it wasn’t a malicious act but “only trying to help” is infuriating. That loophole definitely needs to be closed.


  • Are you familiar with Atlassian in particular? They are a software company whose customers are generally other software companies.

    So yeah, sure, Australia has cities and overinflated property market. But the point is more the geographic distance from other English-speaking nations. Or so I assume.

    Atlassian specifically does a HUGE chunk of their business with clients and companies in the US. And if they started forcing their US-based people (or Europe, or wherever) to return to office, it could result in a clusterfuck of losing their overseas employees to places that do still allow remote work, which would be a big headache to fix because if it got bad enough they’d have to start flying people from Australia (presumably where corporate headquarters are) to start figuring out how the hell to recover from that. And I’ve worked for software places that had to abruptly send people to their offices in other nations because shit went wrong on the ground and phone calls weren’t fixing it.

    (I’ve had aussie co-workers and clients…inevitably, one side or the other has to stay late or come in early to get a live phone call done. The time zones are so far apart between Australia and the US time zones. It’s REALLY easy to struggle with that if something is going wrong on one side or another.)

    When you’re separated geographically so far from a BIG chunk of your market, it’s downright dumb to rock the boat by forcing employees to choose “you, or remote work”. Especially when Atlassian is a “known” name and looks good in a resume. So the CEO probably recognizes that and has no interest in being dumb like that. There’d be a risk of losing your current employees with all their knowledge and replacing them employees who aren’t skilled/good enough to get a remote job.

    So, sure, Australia I’m sure does have cities and markets just as big and messy as anywhere. But Atlassian in particular is a software company that does a LOT of remote overseas work–it makes a lot of sense they would not want to push employees back into the office. The geographic distance between their Australian offices and their employees in Europe and America could make things get messy if things went out of control. There’s a vested interest here that is probably different than other corporations.