theneverfox

theneverfox, 24 days ago

I received a call to adventure this week. Unfortunately, I can live my life remotely, so I’ll barely miss a beat. Just in a different place for a while, and grinding a quest that could insulate me from the horrors of capitalism (if we succeed)

theneverfox, 24 days ago

Military-aged thing?

theneverfox, 24 days ago

Well I just learned the term today, but it seems to have the implication "these are men who could be military. They could be hidden insurgents

theneverfox, 25 days ago

Personally, I love having a ton of them - I wish there were more

I don’t mind standard progression ones, they at least give me a rough idea how far through the storyline I am

But the high end ones are way too few - I like having an unlockable goal to work towards if I’m not done with a game by the time I finish the in game progression. I want them to be hard, maybe even require multiple playthroughs with a severe handicap. Not tedious collecting… But like in Prey when you had to play through with only human, typhoid, or no abilities unlocked. Then you had to save everyone and murder everyone - I had fun trying to combine as many as possible into a playthrough

My problem is that people get upset when 100% is a long and hard road, and a lot of games have lowered the bar to keep them from getting upset. Might as well make prestige achievements that put the total over 100% at this point… Hell if I launch something on steam I might do free DLC just for that

theneverfox, 25 days ago

I’d be careful about that friend

With the aggressively anti-user and poorly thought out moves tech companies have been making lately, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to start using little discrepancies like that to go after people

It would be dumb, way more effort than it’s worth, and likely extremely invasiv… Probably not likely, but I would’ve said the same about a lot that’s happened in the last couple years.

But all the same, in your shoes I’d look into blocking that on the off chance it puts a target on your back

theneverfox, 25 days ago

Exactly! I left two achievements in Prey because while I loved it, a fourth playthrough was too much - years later I still remember the map intimately

But then there’s games like saints row 4…I loved it, it was just pure fun. I was having such a great power fantasy I even got all the collectables. I tried to keep going, but I ended up just mindlessly jumping around until I faced reality

Or for a more recent example, satisfactory. It was great fun - I restarted just before the endgame to extend the experience. Then I did everything… There was so much more map left and I could’ve built so much more if I just had a reason. They get a partial pass because it’s still in development and mods could give me a second, longer, playthrough but I wanted to enjoy the updates before I burned up all my desire to play

Give me some stat scaled enemies, maybe a bit more basic progression, and a flimsy reason so I can have my fill of the gam

theneverfox, 25 days ago

As long as you’re not doing it now I wouldn’t worry, you’d need very detailed information to tell you apart from steam. Privileged information I’d never have considered Microsoft yanking a year ago, but a year from now? Unlikely, but not unbelievable anymore

Shooting yourself in the foot trying to punish users seems to be the new SOP for tech giants these days…I no longer would put anything past them

theneverfox, 25 days ago

I always wondered… So in theory trackers are harmless. But for a bird? They’re freaking huge. Birds fold their legs up tight to sleep. It’s a small fraction of their body weight on one side, all the time, for months or years… That can’t just be a minor inconvenience

It’s got to be like wearing a work boot on one foot and a tennis shoe on the other every day

theneverfox, 25 days ago

This is exactly why HR departments exist. Had OP collected evidence, told management with a paper trail, and they failed to stop it? Or worse, told off OP because they don’t want to deal with it?

The jerk could maybe get charged with a misdemeanor related to harassment or misuse of technology… Maybe the UK has something harsher or more specific, but at the end of the day it’s a bit extreme to put someone in jail or pay OPs wages if they were forced out of work

The company on the other hand? They have a legal obligation to maintain a safe work environment. They also have deeper, easier to access pockets. A lot easier to get a lawyer to pursue that, which is expensive even if they win in the end

If they’re clearly shown to have not taken reasonable action, they’d at least be on the hook for any lost wages or medical costs (not sure what decent therapy runs over there, less than the US I’m sure but I’m guessing not cheap). Even if OP quits or decides not to show up, it could be until they get a new job at similar pay with some extra thrown on top

HR’s job is to cut this off before OP needs to be paid off, or much worse finds a lawyer. They don’t care about the employees, so safest could be to fire the guy - the least they’re going to do is officially reprimand the guy and follow up with OP to make sure it’s not worsening and OP isn’t feeling litigious

theneverfox, 27 days ago

My first thought would be “maybe we can be friends”

With the bear, obviously

theneverfox, 27 days ago

A couple of my friends, a girl and gay guy, once brought me into a hobby of theirs. Several days a week, they sat at the college food court and went boob watching.

That day I learned something truly profound about the human condition. Everyone appreciates boobs - we might wrap them up in sexuality or envy or stranger complexes, but beneath it all there’s a universal aesthetic appreciation

theneverfox, 28 days ago

They also lay the eggs from needlessly higher than necessary, so that they might crack one of existing eggs while their at it

theneverfox, 1 month ago

I feel like the key is consistency and not confusing the message

This is me, except these are all different levels of small chance I might want to go when the time comes. If it falls through or there’s not a slot for me at that point I won’t be offended because I didn’t commit, and once I commit I follow through

Maybe it’s a source of friction with some people, but I’m not big on planning. It’s just a constant weight around my neck, even if I want to go and know I’ll enjoy it

I’ve got three weddings this year, and the first has been weighing on me since the Xmas before last (it’s at the end of the summer), the second since I heard about the engagement this Xmas and started dreading immediately, and the last is this winter and had me locking up for days. And these are all ones I said yes to immediately, but still every time someone brings them up my heart races

If your friends are actually being honest with you about their feelings, don’t plan around them. Give them a casual heads up, and another one when they need to make a decision and start planning.

If they say “I’ll think about it” when they mean “I want to keep my options open, I might get FOMO if y’all do something without me”, let them scramble to catch up… Draw a clear boundary that sucks less for everyone

If they actually mean it how I do, the relief when it comes down to the last minute to act and someone says “you don’t have to go, it’s totally fine, we’ll hang out when we get back” is so real. It makes me want to meet them halfway, because if I know it’s not a let down to back out on a warmer “ask me in a couple weeks”, the stress goes down.

I get to think about it stress free for a bit and sit with the idea. I get to decide how much I want to go vs how much I don’t want to do the things necessary to go

theneverfox, 28 days ago

She invented the foundation of the technology

We call Alan Turing the father of modern computing, because he invented the foundation of the technology

Women more directly involved wouldn’t be the “mother” of the technology, they would be the “creator”

theneverfox, 28 days ago

Time splitting is just lazy frequency hopping, change my mind

theneverfox, 28 days ago

802.11: am I a joke to you

theneverfox, 28 days ago

From a human perspective, yes, that’s exactly what it does

If you want to get pedantic about the technical details, it’s not time splitting if you’re not splitting the time…

theneverfox, 28 days ago

What I mean is if you don’t slice time into slots, you’re not using time slicing. It doesn’t make sense to talk about time slicing at all anymore

Two devices can transmit at the same time with all sorts of setups, even on the same frequency. And it’s not inaccurate to describe time slicing as “a method to allow multiple devices to transmit and receive simultaneously”

The question isn’t valid. Being truly pedantic would be pointing out that any number of devices can transmit at the same time, you didn’t say the messages would be received

theneverfox, 28 days ago

Einstein didn’t lay the foundation for the technology, he laid the foundation for the standard model. We call him the father of modern physics. He made the math work, the bomb was already being developed by the Germans. He didn’t come up with the idea, he didn’t come up with the technology, he just consulted.

Oppenheimer built and led the team that built the bomb. The theories weren’t complete, the technology didn’t exist, no one had laid out an equation that enabled the technology - they did all that in the Manhattan project.

Every person called the father or mother of <field of science> is a hero, in both the literary and personal sense. They represent looking at something in a new way - their name is an embodiment of a certain way of thinking.

You took a shot at that for no reason

theneverfox, 1 month ago

That sounds like a mix of public transportation sucking and people needing to travel too far to me

Driving sucks… But compared to not having a reliable way to get around? It’s total freedom

But better yet is being able to have a nice walk where you need to go, and frequent/plentiful options to go further. You just have to mix everything up and cut down on the parking lots. Low cost housing with full homes tucked here and there, smaller grocery and hardware stores every few blocks, gyms and parks a few blocks away - and all centered around a main street with offices and lower cost housing a few blocks away, so the main street can have a bus running by every 5 minutes

My time working in Paris for a bit really blew my mind - only one guy at my office wasn’t walking distance to work. I passed several grocery stores and bakeries on my 20 minute walk back if I wanted to grab something, there was a big park a couple blocks up if I wanted a scenic walk back.

And if I was feeling lazy, you could just start walking until you saw a bus coming up behind you - there was a bus stop like every quarter mile just going up and down that main street

Almost as good as all that is the fact that if you did have to drive, there was so much less traffic. You could park on side streets, but those spots were limited and needed specific permits. They had parking garages at the edge of the suburb area near the highway entrance and near the metro station, so while you could drive up to wherever to load/unload, it discouraged it and kept the cars mostly on the bigger roads in between areas.

Granted, it’s only amazing when the pieces all fit together like that - a lot of the designed communities in the US are nowhere close to as good because they don’t commit far with. I later moved to a designed community in the States which had most of the same aspects, but I never walked to the grocery store. It was across the street from the town center and a 10 minute walk, but it involved crossing 2 much higher speed/busy roads and walking across a huge parking lot. It was just a little island in a world still built for cars

But when it works, it’s amazing

theneverfox, 1 month ago

They may choose a job nearby to avoid having to deal with shitty transports every day.

It’s more just the option - a short commute is amazing. It makes an enormous difference in work and life satisfaction. They have the mixed zoning so you could find a cheap apartment or a three story house with a big yard without paying for it with 2 hours of your life every day

Their public transportation is great too… Even with a car, it’s just so much faster and more convenient most of the time. You just hop on and off with very little waiting. It’s cheap too, it was like 25 Euros a month for unlimited metro and bus rides, and even in the center of the city on a weekend it’s less crowded than DC is in the middle of a weekday

But I think the French culture is about enjoying life as much as possible.

This is just a tangent, but I don’t think that’s quite right… They actually say “c’est la vie” like they’re trying to convince themselves they can accept things

They have plenty of problems, there were two or three murders within my walking distance in a couple months… Not like it was an unsafe area, people just flipped out on family members and co-workers. One just (mostly) decapitated someone with a katana in an office over a fine or something. They’re constantly fighting over politics and culture, they share public spaces but you’ll see tons of people sitting alone carefully not interacting with each other - they’re very closed off in a lot of ways. Work-life balance is really what they’ve got going for them. That certainly leaves a lot more time for family and hobbies (which is huge), but I wouldn’t describe them as happy exactly… Some definitely do make the most of it, but a lot of people don’t

It’s more that they draw a very hard line between “acceptable” and “not acceptable”, but it’s a constant fight. They take their time eating good food and enjoy their outdoor time, but a lot of them are isolated and/or bitter. They’re going through the same stuff we are, but they’ve had more to lose

But that’s just my take away, and it’s not like I saw much of the county

theneverfox, 1 month ago

You guys really are the forgotten generation… My dad claimed to be a millennial the other day, because he forgot there was something in between us and boomers

Millennials were told “put in your time, and eventually it’ll be your turn”, but we learned early on that “doing everything right” wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

I feel like a lot of gen X are hanging onto that like a lifeline (not nearly all of course, there’s plenty who don’t drink the Kool aid, and took me aside to lay out the truth early). Like despite how only the lucky ones came out ahead, it seems like there’s this fear of any change, like it’d tear away what little they’ve managed to hang on to

Maybe it’s because it wasn’t entirely a lie for the first half of gen x’s career, maybe it’s because most of the changes did tear more and more out of reach… Or maybe it’s just bias since most of my older family did come out ahead and that led me to find friends with similar life experiences

Granted, I’ve found older millennials tend to be just as dogmatic if they got ahead, generations are just such broad ranges

What’s your take?

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)

Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun

theneverfox, 1 month ago

Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading

Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip

Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker

But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol

But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time

You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.

I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable

So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse

Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?

theneverfox, 29 days ago

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more