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MonkeMischief

@MonkeMischief@lemmy.today

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MonkeMischief ,

or yet another pet project no one asked for.

Here's a fun one. The entire city is just being treated as one big pump-and-dump stonk for predatory real estate investors at this point anyway.

https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2024/may/30/las-vegas-spaceport-seeks-to-build-space-economy/

MonkeMischief ,

That's a good point, most major conflict is caused by people who make/pay/coerce people to do their adult responsibilities for them. 🤔

Chores...really do build character? Dad was right?! (Of course he was.)

MonkeMischief ,

Google did what Google does

I remember wrapping my head around "Google Wave" and being like "Hey that sounds nea--oh it's gone already?"

MonkeMischief ,

"I'd just like to interject for a moment..."

MonkeMischief ,

WHY'S-YOUR-DESKTOP-A-3D-CUBE

I WANTED TO!

MonkeMischief ,

North American here. Funny how it's very much less "which is it?" And more "Yeah. Basically."

We've been culturally domesticated to not cause trouble for our bosses / schools / etc. If the State steps in after you cause trouble for enterprise, it's usually to kick you back into your place.

We might not live in a State dictatorship, but that only matters so far, because that State enables many tiny, petty dictatorships that more directly affect your life and run amok unopposed.

Somehow people accept petty tyranny in everything from corporations to universities to shifts at the burger joint. They'll get all riled up that some politician they never met is bawking about foreign policy, but their tail is tucked firmly when their company tells them they can't get sick days and arriving a minute late is a fireable offense.

Many have bought the lies of rugged individualism and competition.
"An insult to one is...well, that really sucks for you but I told you to just stay quiet. I'm just working hard doing what I'm told."

Like someone said before me: Even the most rebellious in us think twice about making our move, because many people simply think "That's how it is." And don't believe it can get any better.

There's not a lot of examples of collective action winning in recent history, so a lot of people don't even know how to begin to push back in the first place, besides writing an angry tweet or two.

MonkeMischief ,

[the crew is being told their sweded movies have to be destroyed]
Mr. Rooney: The FBI Warning is at the beginning of the tape.

Jerry: But we erased that!

--Be Kind, Rewind

MonkeMischief ,

That's an excellent point. It's amazing how fast it'll heat up a room!

I just learned there's a company that takes advantage of this by using render farm nodes to provide hot water or something?

https://www.heata.co/render

Genius idea. Render farm as space heater.
Don't see why compiling / transcoding would be any different. 😂

I'm definitely gonna have to wait until next winter. It's foolishness to be running the GPU that hard when it's 100⁰F+ outside!

MonkeMischief ,

🎵It grows in buuuunches!🎵

MonkeMischief , (edited )

Plasma "get new stuff" does need an overhaul though, after a poorly-coded theme could wipe a guy's drives. So careful what you install and always have backups, kids!

THAT BEING SAID:

I remember Win98 letting you customize wallpapers for individual folders.

I remember being a Win-ME kiddie that was thrilled with all the fun wallpaper/icon/sound/screensaver themes it came with. . .even though Windows ME lol.

Then XP was so bright and vibrant and fun I didn't care too bad that it let you choose from THREE dazzling color schemes. I also loved that StarDock cursor freeware that gave me a bunch of obnoxious animated cursors.

Vista's desktop applets seemed so neat except for the "massive security hole" part.

And here we are with 10 or 11:
[Pulsing blue light]
"We'Re sEtTiNg Up YoU'Re bLaNd DeSkToP...get hypnotized by spinny circles and forget you once had choices."

It's going so backwards, and they think they're so ahead of the curve by letting you tint your theme based on wallpaper color. Pffft.

Since I switched to Plasma I've had SO MUCH FUN setting up my desktop however I want it. I have a laptop install that feels like "Vaporwave XP", but my main rig is all efficient and sleek and pretty, and I get the urge to flip it all around every few months. It makes personal computing feel personal again!

Mimicking old themes is especially fun because you're still on a security-patched system that works the way you expect, but with improved nostalgic feelings!

I really want to learn to make my own splash screens and icons and cursors some time. The fact that I easily can do this and the community could enjoy them is SO COOL.

I miss when it was commonplace for people to customize and personalize their computers. It would say a lot about them. Now most normie folk don't even know how to change the wallpaper...

MonkeMischief ,

Lol sure, resilience and grit are great markers of success!...Provided you can afford enough resilience and grit until you succeed! Lol

MonkeMischief , (edited )

The light hitting the tree trunk had me thinking the smoker was just casually on fire behind him lmao.

MonkeMischief ,

Right?? No, there ideally shouldn't be gouts of flame spewing from the enclosed top of a grill like that. 😆 That optical illusion is near perfect lol.

But there's a ton that's just a bit unsettling about this picture. Like the super bloodshot wide eyes for instance. For some reason "and also the smoker's on fire" seems mundane.

MonkeMischief ,

I keep hearing stories like this but all I see in thrift stores are like busted DVD players and other grimey old stuff that was second-rate even when released. In that awkward valley where it's not vintage, and newer stuff is objectively better.

I think people caught on and the good finds are pushed to their auction sites and stuff now. =\

I'm happy with my X230 I got for $200 off eBay though, like 5 years back.¯_(ツ)_/¯

MonkeMischief ,

If you, like me, enjoyed enabling mouse trails in Windows because wooo particles...

Wiggly windows and the cube desktop switcher were like a huge step up LOL.

MonkeMischief ,

sudo umount -a

|| ISS catastrophically disconnects all modules ||

SurprisedPikachu.jpeg

MonkeMischief ,

I would suggest if you want some up-to-date awesomeness, try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed!

Rolling release sounds scary, but even aside from enabling BTRFS snapshots by default, it's surprisingly stable, and has proprietary NVIDIA drivers!

Granted, I don't game (that's all my Win10 partition is for right now lol), but I do Blender and other creative tasks snd it's amazingly snappy and fun.

Wayland is "getting there" on a user experience level, but as for buttery smooth frame rates and stuff, it feels like a new machine on my 144hz / 60hz dual monitor setup.

I'm running a single 3090, but I'm sure it could handle dual-GPU!

MonkeMischief ,

I'm actually excited at how great Linux gaming has become. I might keep my Win10 install around solely for VR games MAYBE. (I have a WMR headset. Womp womp...)

But I'm not worried at all, for when they "drop support" and I can just continue on doing all the important stuff on Linux with hardly a passing thought. Thanks for the extra disk space, Microsoft!

MonkeMischief ,

That's the big clincher with laptops. The dang funky-shaped terminal-soldered batteries. Argh.

I just put Mint on my X230, it even has one of those nicer big capacity batteries! But it definitely doesn't last like it.

I wish there were better ways to fit newer battery arrangements into these discontinued proprietary slots without risking the fakes market. 😬

MonkeMischief ,

Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn't planning on booting it up too often and didn't want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!

Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it's because it's always "rollin' rollin' rollin'". Constantly in motion!

I'd caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it's good. I update pretty much every day. It's kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p

So that's one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they've been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a "snapshot" and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.

But I haven't had to roll back in ages. :)

I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it's improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)

MonkeMischief ,

I'm surprised and impressed it made it to the bin outlet!

I keep trying to keep an ear out for these fabled "IT cycles" where companies will just dump Dells and Thinkpads once in a while, but have never been privvy to one myself.

Maybe indystry caught on and switched procedure, realizing they weren't creating enough e-waste /s lol.

(To be fair, the last place I worked donated their laptops for tax breaks, which is good I guess. But wouldn't let me even buy one off them, so I'm salty lol.)

MonkeMischief ,

Well the war in the USA would be so unpopular with the USA they'd be pressured to withdraw from the USA...but they'd stick around for another decade because defense contractors' stonks were still doing great.

MonkeMischief ,

You already had me at "144hz on one monitor and 60hz on the other so I can enjoy the nice monitor without having to buy a new secondary one."

MonkeMischief OP ,

Also, I can't even imagine how many resources image-generating AIs take up, especially when it's all based around "refining prompts" over and over and over....

MonkeMischief OP ,

I don't forsee it becoming "sentient" so much as "Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context."

There's that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

See "paperclip maximizer" under "hypothetical examples"
Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

MonkeMischief OP ,

EXACTLY. High-five!

That's what I worry about. Right now we can ignore social media somewhat, but if Ai gets wedged into contracts with government/infrastructure and other unavoidable daily life, I imagine that's where a plausible threat could come from.

I've no doubt such things are already in the works. Ai controlled traffic lights or something, for instance. Obviously the military and law enforcement are already giddy about it, of course.

Giving a stupid machine a seemingly simple goal to pursue and the wrong set of keys could lead to disasterous consequences, I think. We also have the whole "Do Ai cars protect the driver or all human life even if it risks the driver?" Debate.

"But it's trendy, it's the future! And there's so much venture capital involved, how lucrative!" Seems to be how major decisions are made these days.

I don't see it some day "waking up" and thinking "I feel like humans are unnecessary." It's scarier than that...it will see us as just another variable to control and "maximize" us out of the picture.

MonkeMischief ,

I still love the concept of floppy diskettes. Sure, some of this is nostalgia, but what if you had something like super fast solid state memory encased in a nice solid shell like that? Sure, sure, like a USB drive...but the contacts could be protected with the little slidy-shield bit and nobody could accidentally snag the USB sticking out and damage it and the port.

I think I just really miss the "kaCHUNK" of inserting physical solid media, and flipping through stacks of them...maybe not so much the capacity or read speeds :)

MonkeMischief ,

But in general, you would use specially rated components and materials if you need them to last decades - not the cheapest most basic parts you can find.

Keep in mind this is modern tech and an Elon-helmed corpo we're talking about lol. Do decades-lasting components bump stock shares THIS quarter? I point to all the bits falling off of Teslas lately.

lol God help us all...

MonkeMischief ,

That's the 1984 version, perhaps.

I'd posit the Brave New World version is

"It keeps buzzing your brain into doing your stupid task until the 30 hour shift is up, but don't worry, you get sweet dopamine hits and painkillers the whole time and aren't sure why this is so enjoyable! The pleasure-task curve is perfectly computed. You're not even sure how long it's been. There's a momentary sadness when you witness a fellow worker just convulse and drop like a sack of rocks. This work feels so important though! You can understand their dedication."

MonkeMischief ,

I'm personally thinking of just plugging a decently capable little media PC into the display, using KDE's "big screen" interface with KDE Connect as a remote. I'm pretty sure I could train my family on that...

Roku is so scummy.

MonkeMischief ,

As a whole, we tend to be garbage and materialistic…

This might be one way to see it. I think a lot of people WANT to resist, but resistance costs a lot of mental and sometimes tangible energy.
If you can smooth out a lifestyle that naturally excludes stupid brands like Roku, great.

But there's a point when you want to participate in the rest of society, and people will break down for that. I do my best to avoid walmart, amazon, and other abusive tech companies, and educate others to do the same.

But someone still gifted my mom-in-law one of those stupid "alexa" spheres that I immediately put on its own V-LAN, and the family wanted a TV so they brought home a TCL/Roku because it's what they could afford. (It was a good value at the time, years ago.) PiHole showed me exactly why it was so cheap.

Companies know after all the stresses you already encounter in your adult life, you're gonna run out of bandwidth and cave eventually, because you're human, and the path of least resistance becomes more tantalizing. That's why they bombard you relentlessly, and evil tech is the most immediately accessible and familiar.

MonkeMischief , (edited )

The power of Jésus really brightens up the room... With a fresh coat!

MonkeMischief ,

Good gosh even when it's not DNS....

.... IT'S DNS

MonkeMischief ,

Woo! RedSn0w got me a sweet animated wallpaper on my 3GS! ...That killed my battery fast! Lol

It was neat though.

MonkeMischief ,

Alright this wasn't supposed to be a TED talk but turns out I'm passionate about this and the Adderall kicked in...

I don't think it's on older gens on a user level for the most part.
I try to teach the kids in my life computer stuff all the time. I know lots of "my dad's in IT" kids that grew up understanding how computers work even on a basic level.

We who care, do so fervently, and are often drowned out by the noise.

Let's point the finger more accurately: It's 99% on how tech companies forced the evolution of computing to their benefit. They decided what "the future" would be, and sold us out to it.

Instead of fully functioning computers, "Kids these days" have grown up with flat little content-consumption devices that make sure you literally can't understand how they work. Everything is framed as some esoteric black box service brought to you by a cabal of qualified wizards. (Look at Windows' whole "We're doing things for you behind this pulsing blue screen" schtick. Funny how opaque an OS called "Windows" has become.)

The entire design motif of modern devices seems to scream:

"Don't ask questions. You're too stupid for that. Know your place. Just put a payment method on file and tap whatever you could want for just 99¢ more!"

They're black-box appliances that were aggressively marketed to families at home, and these companies shelled out tablets and chromebooks as "grants" to schools, to secure a mind-share of future customers who were "raised on it" and know nothing else.

The Silicon Valley titans have normalized addiction algorithms, invisible data mining, zero privacy, planned obsolescence of entire devices with non-replacable parts, browser-based-everything, subscription-tiers for everything, no ownership over purchases, and consumption-first design.

Computing knowledge has become a "magic box" to the point that colleges need to spend valuable time explaining file types and folders. Before college?

Hah! We're back to the 80's again: Only real nerds have a desktop in the house.

Elementary schools have replaced their computer labs with cheap e-waste-quality chromebooks where students do everything through a browser. Computing education went the way of arts, history, and music. Gone, unless it's a fancy private school.

They're stretched thin as it is, and the curriculum is increasingly based on standardized testing on "STEM" over everything else. Why?

Because employers want a large pool of punctual test-passers to choose from, and corporations want generationally vendor-locked customers to secure future earnings.

This is why, despite how the world runs on computers, to the majority, emails are space magic. Nobody knows nor cares about their privacy being sold off, and nobody bothers to learn about computers in the first place.

A "technical user" is super intimidating to "normies" because they know things like "There are multiple browsers" and "You can copy and paste". I'm not even kidding.

It's depressing as hell. Maybe some of it is on our generation, for not fighting harder for user rights.

This is why Linux has such a cult following: it flies in the face of this hypercapitalist customer-farm nonsense, and people find that refreshing. I'm happy to hear of more kids using it, and messing with things like Pis.

In some places there's hope.

Thanks for hearing me out.

MonkeMischief ,

Thank you for reading it, and for your appreciation. It means a lot. :)

MonkeMischief ,

22“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’

Matthew 7:22-23

I shudder to think of how these types have deluded themselves. To think they'd meet their Creator and say something like:

"Look, Lord, I know we locked the homeless out during a blizzard and used desperate peoples' resources to buy a private jet, and undermined the Gospel's perception across the entire world at every turn....but we raised so much money...for YOU!"

MonkeMischief ,

They probably figure if they treat a camel like they've been treating the rest of the world and the people in it, it might prove they've got a chance! Lol

MonkeMischief ,

Delta-P: "When it's got you, it's got you."

MonkeMischief ,

Precisely.

The easiest thought experiment here is asking "But how do you get rich?"

Well, it's certainly not by putting others first and being fair and equitable in all your dealings. That's against the "game" (oh sorry, "best practices") of business.

A ton of capitalist co-opting of Christianity makes all kinds of excuses for why a Godly person could work 1,000,000x harder than everyone else and be "blessed" with the burdens of wealth, but it's all propaganda.

Inheritance maybe? Okay, the question still becomes: What did you do with your resources?

Being honest with these questions makes the truth rather apparent, in my humble opinion.

MonkeMischief ,

Well, that's the rub.

If you sincerely make the choice to follow Jesus, you would feel immense empathy and guilt about bringing calamity on your fellow human beings. If you had already done so, you'd be moved to repent and atone with those you afflicted, with whatever life you had left.

That's the power of Christ's love.

If you were an evil mustache twirling villain who thinks "I can just say some words and act real sad and I get zero consequences for all the evil stuff I enjoyed doing", you're fooling yourself. As if God would be some kind of mall cop and not see the evil heart right through it lol.

You know someone's heart by their works and their nature. They aren't saved by good deeds, but good will towards their neighbors is a side effect of being saved.

This is why it's so heartbreaking seeing how people abuse the name of Christ to get people's guards down, before dragging both through the mud. Evil's best footsoldiers are hateful "Christians in name only".

People always ask about a certain funny-mustached dictator's final thoughts alone in a bunker. "What if he really meant it? Would Jesus forgive him?"

Yep! But I imagine if we're honest with ourselves and he was actually leaning that way, he would have put a stop to his atrocities much sooner. A confession only out of the sudden realization of impending consequences is seldom a change of heart.

I hope this helps.

MonkeMischief ,

Dank and based Christian memes calling out hypocrisy from religious political factions?

Thoughtful discussions on faith in the comments without immediately devolving into a bashing-all-faiths circlejerk?! On LEMMY?

And that's how we made Reddit obsolete.

There's still some bitterness around here, but I'm glad there's room for talk and respect. Love you all. ❤️

(Christian Anarchist here, if anyone cares)

MonkeMischief ,

99% of self proclaimed Christians hate megachurches.

If the figure is that high, it gives me hope. I wonder if there's data on this somewhere.

Megachurches are definitely among the "principalities and powers" we struggle against.

If they're not outright thieving, they're just self-help seminars preaching about how "Jesus and Americanism are actually totally compatible for realsies."

MonkeMischief ,

I'm so happy you made it out, friend, and I hope things are better for you now, and others follow in your footsteps.

Thank you for caring. :)

MonkeMischief ,

I worked with the public. I was constantly stressed out and kept away from my coworkers I actually got along with. I always felt "alone in a crowd."

I'd lie if I said thoughts of self-termination never crossed my mind. Only one or two of those coworkers actually kept up with me when I left, too.

I get a little lonely at home now, but I'm with people I love, and I make time to talk to people by choice.

Quality over quantity, I'd say.

MonkeMischief ,

Sure thing!

What I've heard about the Pi 5 specifically is that they dropped hardware acceleration support for video encoding. Which is kinda weird, but admittedly I'm a bit out of the Pi loop to really weigh in.

I believe I heard this on the "Self Hosted Podcast" a while back. (Edit: oh I mentioned them already lol)

I imagine that might hurt for someone trying to use it for streaming Jellyfin or something like that 🤔.

I found a forum link here:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2139082#p2139126

MonkeMischief ,

Definitely. Ask anybody who finally evacuated the last thing they ate from Olive Garden!

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