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captain_aggravated

@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works

Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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captain_aggravated ,
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Google shuts down projects so regularly that I just wouldn't adopt anything new they make because it's not going to be around in 5 years. The core products: search, email, youtube, chrome, android, are decades old now and I wonder if the company can survive shutting down any of them.

captain_aggravated ,
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Mostly it's a play on Disney's The Lion King, which has a scene where the king lion explains to his son the "circle of life" that while lion eat antelope, eventually lions die, "their bodies become the grass" and the antelope eat the grass. Perhaps there's some political commentary about a victimizer using school lessons as propaganda to make the prey class easier to subjugate for the predator class, ie force teachers to teach the correct curriculum and the antelope will thank the lion for eating it.

Also, it's Oglaf, so the main punchline is that the last panel somehow isn't "Oh well, anal sex!"

captain_aggravated ,
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It's been awhile since I've regularly read Oglaf, but my memory of it is SFW comics were the exception, rather than the rule, and after the initial plotline about the sex empress' apprentice abruptly ended, there were a LOT of issues made where the punchline was basically "they fuck in the last panel."

captain_aggravated ,
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Hey finally some good news.

captain_aggravated ,
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This is the second "meme" I've seen trying to make the point that Taylor Swift should be immune to criticism because she's female in the span of two minutes.

captain_aggravated ,
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Because she has recently been in the news for suing the plane tracker guy. She Streisanded herself.

captain_aggravated ,
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That book isn't thick enough for that title.

captain_aggravated ,
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In 'Murucan we say "He'd cut off his nose to spite his face."

captain_aggravated ,
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and not Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Win+T

captain_aggravated ,
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FreeCAD...is getting there. They're actually heading toward a 1.0 release, and bringing usability and convenience features. I'd say by 2025 it'll be a better value proposition than the "Free non-commerical use drawbackware" tier offerings from Onshape or Fusion360.

captain_aggravated ,
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Like it's kid's bubblegum grapetastic flavor purple. It's "look what it's done to the camera's white balance" purple.

captain_aggravated ,
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What's the ACTUAL anti-porn motivation the right has? It's not protecting children, the right HATE children. How does banning porn make old people richer? Somebody follow the money for me.

captain_aggravated ,
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I could probably do that in LibreOffice. Like, how hard is it to print out a thing that says "BACHELOR'S OF SCIENCE" in that stupid old school font.

Passkeys might really kill passwords (www.theverge.com)

Passkeys: how do they work? No, like, seriously. It’s clear that the industry is increasingly betting on passkeys as a replacement for passwords, a way to use the internet that is both more secure and more user-friendly. But for all that upside, it’s not always clear how we, the normal human users, are supposed to use...

captain_aggravated ,
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Yeah security questions like that are the dumbest goddamn thing. "Create a super secure password that no one can guess, and enter the answers of five trivia questions about yourself that are likely in the public record about you or that you'll happily reveal in small talk with strangers just in case you forget that super secure password."

captain_aggravated ,
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Pull the software down and give it a look. Set up a database with no real passwords in it just to play with the various features.

captain_aggravated ,
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Yeah that effect is fire.

captain_aggravated ,
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One use case that I think is going to make more people able to adopt Linux in the next couple years is mechanical CAD. FreeCAD is approaching a 1.0 release that is going to be actually adoptable, which I think may free up some folks to switch from Fusion360's drawbackware tier.

captain_aggravated ,
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Post a picture of shit on your carpet, get mad when people say "You should clean that up." The big brain am winning again.

captain_aggravated ,
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A problem I have with the GPL is it allows corporations and shareholders to use software for free. I would be interested in licensing software I make for commercial use by sole proprietors and other small businesses for free, but charge truly offensive prices to entities that have "investors." Like, Bob's wood shop, where Bob, his son Rob, and Rob's friend from high school Jimmy make butcher block counter tops? They can use my software for free. Microsoft? $600 trillion per seat per minute.

captain_aggravated ,
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I would probably list out a series of symptoms of large businesses that don't qualify for my non-corporate license.

  • The company itself, its owners, executives, board members, employees or any other persons associated with the company has spent more than $100 on lobbying since the invention of the written word. To include a middle manager that worked for the company for 2 weeks, quit, and then later went on to become involved in lobbying.
  • Any executive, board member, manager or such person currently or has ever had a contract that features any clauses that could be described as a "golden parachute."
  • The company has ever engaged in anti-union activity.
  • The company has ever outsourced jobs overseas because labor in developing countries is cheaper. Hiring outside one's home country seeking better expertise ie "We contracted with a German machine shop because the sample work they turned in was of better quality" is okay; "We only have to pay Vietnamese teenagers 40 cents a day" isn't.
  • The company publicly trades stock. That is to say random people mostly stock brokers and banks that don't actually generate any value for society pays a little money and then expects dividents in perpetuity like ticks getting fat and bloated with the blood of higher life forms. These people may not financially benefit from my work more than I do.
  • The highest paid person who is in any way on the payroll of the company is paid more than 20 times the lowest paid employee.

That's probably a good start.

captain_aggravated ,
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A "golden parachute" is basically a clause in the contract of a CEO or other higher up where the company agrees to pay severance benefits. I don't have a problem with severance pay in general but some of these things are basically "No matter how much I embezzle and defraud, no matter how many people I kill, no matter how much damage I do, I get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, to the degree of actually incentivizing getting hired and fired as much as possible.

captain_aggravated ,
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Exactly.

captain_aggravated ,
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It's not stupid, it's advanced!

captain_aggravated ,
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The place is being run by 3 bearded lumbersexuals in flannel and ball caps having the time of their lives and a chick in overalls and her hair in a bandanna who could not be more over it.

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes (www.businessinsider.com)

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden's AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is "in the works."

captain_aggravated ,
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I just mentioned this in another comment tonight; cryptographic verification has existed for years but basically no one has adopted it for anything. Some people still seem to think pasting an image of your handwriting on a document is "signing" a document somehow.

captain_aggravated ,
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Relying on trademark law to combat deepfake disinformation campaigns has the same energy as "Murder is already illegal, we don't need gun control."

captain_aggravated ,
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I mean, part of it is PGP is the exact opposite of streamlined and you've got to be NSA levels of paranoid to bother with it.

captain_aggravated ,
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Yeah it's not going to change the mind of the folks making the deepfakes.

captain_aggravated ,
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Plus that's email. What about... Literally everything else?

captain_aggravated ,
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Look at Gen Z, killing some of the industries us millennials missed. The kids are turning out alright.

captain_aggravated ,
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I spent a lot of nights in, often talking to friends on MSN and exploring the internet, and a lot of nights hanging out with friends, often just at someone's house watching movies.

captain_aggravated ,
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You have my permission to get up and go to the bathroom when he starts talking about a toothache.

captain_aggravated ,
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If I recall the "Linus killed Pop!_OS in minutes just trying to install Steam" fiasco, the forensics shook out something like this:

  1. Pop!_OS's onboarding experience doesn't (or didn't at the time) walk users through a software update. At least at the time, I haven't used Pop!_OS recently so this may have changed, but the way you would use their GUI to run the equivalent of an apt-get update was to open the Pop!_Shop to the Installed tab and...wait. So the apt cache (the local copy of the catalog of packages available in the repository) is whatever it was when the install media was created.

  2. It just so happened that the exact version of the steam.deb package that apt cache pointed to had an error in its dependencies--it claimed that it was incompatible with Pop!_OS' desktop environment, and thus to install Steam, it would have to remove the GUI and all its dependencies right on down to Xorg. This issue was discovered and a patched version was pushed to the repository, but because of the way repositories work, you can still request an older version of software.

  3. Linus picked Steam and clicked the install button in the Pop!_Shop. It attempted the install, saw the dependency error, and bombed out, kicking up an error message "Failed to install Steam" with a bit more text.

  4. Linus Sebastian, then CEO of a technology media company, comprehensively failed to google the words in the error it gave him and find several independent forum posts, Reddit threads, and Steam community discussions saying "Run apt-get update and try it again." Instead, he got up on his high horse about Linux GUI's not working, started fussing about how you have to do everything in the terminal, and he instead looked up how to use the terminal to install Steam.

  5. I don't think he recorded his screen thoroughly enough to be sure, but either the page he found was strange or he skimmed a bit too quickly. Almost all of the time, web pages containing instructions for how to install software in a Debian-based Linux system (with the apt package manager) will instruct you to run the command sudo apt-get update and probably sudo apt-get upgrade first, then probably a sudo apt-get install [packagename] None of that happened, he just found the install command and ran it.

  6. The terminal spat out it's usual litany of "doing stuff..." before spitting out a long list of things it was going to uninstall, followed by a warning in bold allcaps to the effect "WARNING! This operation is likely to permanently damage your operating system. You should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. To continue, type "Yes, do as I say." Most of the time, a Linux system requires a y or n, and might even default to y if you just hit enter. Sometimes, in order to wake people up and kind of ask "are you sure?" it will reject a simple y and tell you to type out the word yes. Asking you to type out a complete sentence is a severe warning.

  7. Linus typed "Yes, do as I say."

  8. APT uninstalled the entire GUI and dropped into a Bash shell.

In aviation, we talk about the accident chain. Few aviation accidents can be traced to a single brief action; instead a series of adverse events and mistakes lead up to an accident, and correcting any of them will avert disaster. Well, I count this accident chain as 8 links long. Contributing factors range from Linus's bad attitudes and poor troubleshooting skills to the Steam package's flawed dependencies to Pop!_OS' flawed package manager which doesn't refresh the apt cache on launch. The result was a crash and burn on international television.

captain_aggravated ,
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Actually, I think the opposite would be warranted. That Linux challenge was structured as "We're going home, pulling the SSDs out of our computers, and with only Windows skills and knowledge we're charging in unassisted and chin-first into using only Linux!"

What if they did a series of videos where Anthony teaches Linus or one of their other personalities how to use Linux as a gaming/productivity/creativity machine?

captain_aggravated ,
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Anthony is now Emily

Oh really? Must have announced that since I stopped watching LMG. She (they?) are still on the show?

I built my gaming rig with Linux in mind, and I went with an extremely average PC, Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080, and everything is working pretty well. It's not hard to build a computer that works well with Linux, just aim for "very normal."

As for the "digitally sign a document" chapter of the saga...1. I seem to recall that the challenge was badly designed in several ways. Like, "digitally sign a document" could mean copy-paste a .png of your handwriting, or do PGP encryption stuff, which is a topic society desperately needs to have a conversation about because we're 30 years into the internet and we're still faxing medical records but that's beside the point. That "challenge" also "required" something like uploading a 3GB video file to Slack, and "Watch HDR video" which just outright wasn't supported and was basically put there as a bad faith fuck you.

I think a series where someone prominent in the gaming/pc enthusiast space who learns Linux with the help of someone from the FOSS enthusiast space would be a worthwhile exercise. I'd love to see more PC gamers trying and successfully adopting Linux, and I'd like to see more Linux veterans excited to offer a friendly and helpful hand. I'd like to see those two communities come together in perhaps a friendlier and more constructive way.

captain_aggravated ,
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Pilot, flight instructor, and reader of many NTSB accident reports. NTSB accident reports often end with a list of recommendations, which in this case would look something like this:

To the maintainers of steam.deb: use safer dependency management practices to prevent issues with less mainstream desktop environments.

To System76, maintainers of Pop!_OS: Improve the new user onboarding experience to include a software update. Improve the Pop!_Shop such that checking for updates and thus updating the apt cache is a positive action whose function is obvious to the user. In the case the Pop!_Shop fails to install a package due to a dependency management error, have the error message suggest running the update process.

To the maintainers of the APT package manager: No notes. This body finds that the warning offered by the terminal is human readable, clear and concise, and carries the appropriate gravity to the risk involved, and by requiring such a non-standard prompt, prevents users who aren't paying attention and used to APT's normal operations from confirming the action accidentally.

To teachers and creators of Linux tutorials: Include in your Transitioning From Windows To Linux curricula a lesson on Linux warnings. The Microsoft Windows ecosystem presents warning messages to the effect of 'this action may harm your PC" on a frequent basis, such as when installing or removing software, changing certain settings, performing updates, or using certain external hardware. Windows users become accustomed to ignoring these warnings as nothing bad ever happens. The GNU/Linux ecosystem is not in the habit of over-using warning messages, so when one is encountered, it genuinely signposts a potential problem.

To Linus Sebastian: When a computer gives you an error message, the first step in troubleshooting is to google the exact text of the error. Especially when doing something routine, such as installing popular software on a popular distribution of Linux, you probably are not the first person to have this problem. It has likely already been reported, discussed and solved.

captain_aggravated ,
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So from reading the article, it seems that it wasn't just the tower taken, but also the transmitter. Which makes a little more sense; you don't want to be the thing that detaches an AM broadcast antenna from its feed line while it's on the air. They often transmit with kilowatts or megawatts of power, and often the tower structure itself IS the antenna, or half of it.

I'd be curious if there was a political motivation. This happening in Alabama, was someone scheduled to say some things that aren't extremely racist or something?

The article states that the missing property has a value of ~$200,000, but I imagine that's in the form of an intact radio transmitter and tower; as scrap metal it's probably worth a small fraction of that, and what scrapyard is going to accept a broadcast tower without any questions?

Also:

While the tower remains MIA, WJLX remains off the air. The radio station asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow it to keep broadcasting its FM station even though its AM station is off the air, but the FCC denied the request on Thursday, the station said, since the FCC doesn't allow FM translators to run without the AM station also being on air. The FM station is now only available online.

What? Why?

captain_aggravated ,
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Lots of electric cars outrun their dinosaur juice powered counterparts, but do feel free to go off about how they don't go vroom so you can't be as obnoxious with them.

captain_aggravated ,
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I would be curious if this technology would be viable in other devices as well. I'd like 40% more energy density in my cordless drill and/or laptop please.

captain_aggravated ,
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It's only illegal if you can't afford the fines. As businesses routinely prove, if your company is big enough they just budget for fines.

captain_aggravated ,
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The other option is "It's too expensive to go after them." See: Taxes.

captain_aggravated ,
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Cinnamon is one of four DEs whose reason for being is to be Not Gnome 3. Mate, a fork of Gnome 2, Cinnamon, a fork of Gnome 3 that isn't dumb and bad, Unity, from Ubuntu's "Not Developed Here" period, and more recently Cosmic or whatever Pop!_OS is calling their thing.

captain_aggravated ,
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I was struggling to get an OS installed on my cousin's dell at one point. This machine came with that Intel Optane...shit with a spinning rust hard drive, I was replacing it with a straight-up NVMe SSD. Windows would get well into the install process, and then bomb out with an error that was something like 0x123a039f34798cd76eb1 UNDEFINED ERROR. This of course was in the Windows installer, which isn't a functioning desktop environment, so I had to type that manually into my laptop to google it, and got very few results.

I tried Linux Mint, and it apparently had the same problem. It said something like "BIOS Storage config error. Unable to mount file system. It may be that such and such setting is incorrect in the BIOS. See this page for further details." The last sentence was a hyperlink to a wiki that discussed the problem, which opened in Firefox because this installer runs in a live environment, AND IT HAD A QR CODE LINK IN THE ERROR MESSAGE to the same page so you could easily copy the link to an external device. Y'all that was a white glove concierge deep tissue massage of an error message.

captain_aggravated ,
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No, I installed Windows on the machine I built for her to replace that one. THAT was the last time I've installed Windows on anything.

captain_aggravated ,
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Man they really are trying to wear Apple's turtleneck, aren't they?

captain_aggravated ,
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Hi. 10-year Linux user here. Here is my concise guide to making the switch from Windows to Linux:

Step 1: Start trying out open source software on your Windows machine. A lot of my first year of using Linux full-time was googling "linux equivalent for [software name]." See what you think of LibreOffice, Blender, FreeCAD, Shotcut, Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, whatever programs you would use for your workflows.

Step 2: Try out Linux in a VM. You'll probably use a package called Virtualbox, which lets you install Linux in a file on your computer, and run it in a window. This is a great way to just...try out Linux distros without doing any permanent changes to your computer. Speaking of distros, yes there are thousands of them, yes that choice can be paralyzing. I recommend trying Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and Pop!_OS. These are designed with good out-of-box experiences and beginner friendliness in mind and are designed as daily drivers rather than as tinkering projects.

Step 3: Live USB. If you've ever installed Windows, you're probably familiar with the "you put the disc/USB stick in, boot to it, and it dumps you straight into the installer which runs at like 800x600 and you have to fully install Windows to get to the desktop" process. Not Linux; most Linux distros use what they call a Live environment, where from the disc/USB stick it boots to a fully functional version of the desktop. Nothing gets written to your machine's internal hard drive, but now you're running the OS on bare metal and not in a virtual machine, you can now genuinely test it for compatibility with your hardware.

Step 4: Run the installer. I'm not going to cover this process, you can find guides easily on the internet, including how to dual boot with Windows if you're not ready to fully burn that bridge. But now you're actually moving in.

Answers to some FAQs:

  • Do I need to use the terminal? Probably on occasion. Microsoft has trained a few generations of computer users to hate and fear the CLI by making theirs horrible. Think about the kind of things you need to edit the registry or dive into configuration files on Windows, and that's the kind of thing you'll need to use the terminal for on Linux. If you ask for technical help on a Linux forum or Lemmy community, you will likely be asked to run a terminal command, for the simple reason that "run lsblk and copy-paste the return" is way easier to do in a text forum. There are several "Linux terminal basics" videos out there that take around an hour and show you how do do things like make folders, create and delete files, install software etc. from the terminal, which is worth learning how to do, it will help your understanding of the Linux desktop. It's a good way to learn how the Linux file system works.

  • Do I need to know how to program? No. Scripting and programming tools will fall to hand easier on a Linux system, but if you create art in GIMP and play games in Steam and whatnot you won't need to write any code.

  • Will my [weird program or esoteric hardware work] Maybe, maybe not. I have seen it go both ways, I have hardware that works in Linux better than in Windows, I have seen things that don't work in Linux at all. If you have a gaming mouse or keyboard, it may be that the vendor's software for configuring the RGB lighting or remapping the buttons doesn't work. On the other hand I use a Spacemouse in CAD software and it works fine. Ultimately you will have to test this.

Good luck, and Welcome to the Linux community!

captain_aggravated ,
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At this point I know of two Ubuntu features that would make a difference to end users: PPA support, and the Device Manager.

PPAs are/were Ubuntu's answer to the question "What if the software I want isn't in the repository?" "Well the vendor will host a personal package archive, you can just add it and then still use APT." From where I'm sitting, Flatpak and/or Appimage have completely invalidated any use case for PPAs, I haven't installed a package from a PPA in years.

The Device Manager is handy if you have an Nvidia GPU, open Device Manager and click the one that says "Recommended." IIRC this is an Ubuntu-derived feature not available in LMDE and as soon as I own an AMD GPU I'd have less reason to not use Debian Edition.

captain_aggravated ,
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Right on down to calling their versions "OS8" and the like. They're not just trying to be familiar to Apple users, they're waiting to see what Apple orders for lunch and then they order the same thing.

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