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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)


  • “Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

    The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

    They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

    The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.



  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.





  • I’ve heard of Kotlin in the context of Android apps, but never actually used or learned it. I did one mobile app dev project with Java in Android Studio, but never had any formal classes on it either and just learned as I went (the result was shit, but we got a decent grade for being able to evaluate the difficulties and shortcomings and point out learnings).



  • I attended two different Bachelor’s courses, one with a very technical (2016-2018) and one with a more high level focus (2018-2023). The first did have a class where we learned how to go from logic gates to a full ALU as well as some actual EE classes, but I didn’t go far enough or memorise the list of classes to remember whether Assembly would have become a thing. We learned programming with first Processing, then C and C++.

    The second had C as an elective course, and that was as technical and low-level as it ever got.



  • I studied CompSci, so a very technical field, and with one exception (Power BI), everything I used ran on Linux just as well. For my Thesis, I used TeXStudio. For normal writing or presentations, I just used LibreOffice. For calculations, I used Python. For collaborative document editing, we used Google Docs.

    Word of caution: LibreOffice supports the various formats of MS Office, but I’ve had issues the other way around, where a presentation I created in LO wouldn’t work in MSO. If you need to collab on files together, I’d recommend Google Docs. If it’s just you, I recommend sending PDF versions along with (or instead of) the original file, just to be sure.



  • AFAIK there is support for EAC in Proton now, as that was required for Elden Ring. But there probably is some work to do still on the devs’ part, and if they’re not willing to invest that time for what so far is still a niche…

    It’s a bit of a self-perpetuating problem, like all cases of platform inertia: People are reluctant to switch, so unless the draw to the alternative becomes strong enough, they’re more likely to stay. But for the alternative to become appealing, more people would need to switch.

    It’s the same reason many people aren’t leaving Twatter: If you want to reach many people, you’ll want to be in the place with many people.




  • Fuck me, I guess - All the fun I’ve had the last two years wasn’t actually real? I only thought I was having a good time? Why didn’t you tell me back then so I could have been appropriately miserable!

    I’ve got an RTX 3060 with a Ryzen 5 5600X, running Nobara as my sole OS and I’m playing plenty of games just fine. I can’t say that I’ve ever had to do any tinkering to get BG3 to run, and when I recently decided to replay AC Odyssey, it ran smoothly out of the box.

    Granted, sound issues can be annoying, but it’s not like there are no guides for setting up 5.1 with pulseaudio or pipewire. Yes, it’s some tinkering, and I agree that it would be nice if it ran out of the box.

    But if plenty of people around you have theirs working fine, calling them all delusional because yours doesn’t is kinda stupid.

    “Could it be that I’m doing something wrong? No, it’s the linux gamers that are wrong!”


  • You haven’t provided any info about your partition scheme for either drive, but I assume you’ve got your bootloader installed in an EFI partition in the newer drive. You will still have an EFI partition on the old drive created by the Ubuntu installer, so just be sure you know which bootloader you’re using.

    Yes, the new drive has a boot partition mounted to /boot/efi, according to the Disks utility.

    It’s not clear what issues you’re worried about, but if you’re nervous about breaking the Ubuntu installation[…]

    Actually, that’s a good point. I’m expecting to get rid of the installation anyway, so I don’t need to worry about breaking anything there.

    It’s not clear to me what the goal of option 3 is

    Same as option 2, avoiding breaking a system I’m getting rid of anyway.

    Thanks for pointing out the errors in my line of thought!


  • I feel like you are overthinking this

    Yes, most certainly, but given my own inexperience I figured I’d rather overthink than fuck up because I didn’t know about some detail.

    Take special attention to the /boot partition. I don’t know which drive the bootloader for your nobora os is installed. It may have been automatically put together with your Ubuntu to your HDD.

    Fairly sure the boot partition is on the new SSD, but I’ll check and leave it untouched if I’m not sure.

    Thanks for your advice!