LouisIngenthron

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to random

The #FAA requires a 70% to pass #pilot licensing tests.

This appears to be, in large part, because the tests are absolute garbage. They are ambiguously-worded, they have questions about ratings you're not even trying to get, and the charts they provide have larger margins of error than the gap between answers.

If this test weren't so incompetently assembled, they could require 90% to pass and have more qualified pilots as a result.

LouisIngenthron, 7 months ago to random

A clip from a 50-year-old show set 70 years ago, and it's still as relevant as ever.

Margaret Houlihan, on MASH: "I have a mind, Frank. A mind and a brain." Frank Burns, reassuring and condescending, with only one thing on his mind: "Of course you do. Let me kiss your brain."

LouisIngenthron, 7 days ago to linux

Okay, I'm doing it. I'm giving #Linux a fair shot for the first time in about a decade. You fediverse people convinced me.

LouisIngenthron, 1 year ago to random

So, over the last week or two, I've been working on building a physical #Cessna #C172 #skyhawk #simulator

Only now did I think it might be a good idea to start a thread documenting the design and construction, so here we go!

LouisIngenthron, 11 months ago to queer

I'm seeing a lot of differing opinions from the #LGBTQ Mastodon community about Pat Robertson dying.

While I certainly have no sympathy for the man, I find it absolutely grotesque how many people are going out of their way to celebrate his death.

Relief and indifference are acceptable responses. But if a human being dying elates you, you might be due for some serious introspection, because that seems to me to be the first step down a very dark path.

To dehumanize our enemies is to become them.

LouisIngenthron, 9 months ago to linux

Why I don't like #Linux:

Oh, you want to host HTTPS? Install a self-signed certificate into Apache with certbot and Let's Encrypt. (That mumbo jumbo is the easy part, and is the same as Windows. But here's where it takes a turn...)

Oh, you want to install certbot? First, install snapd, a whole other framework for installing dependencies because apparently the one built into the OS isn't good enough.

Oh, snapd is mysteriously failing? Get to google, son.

Oh, Google has enshittified and there are no relevant results? Ahahaha 💩

So, anyway, apparently the answer was that at one obscure point in the process, I was supposed to type the word "socket" where every other service I've ever installed needed the word "service" and I didn't notice the difference. That's two hours of my life I'm never getting back.

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to unity

So, #unity is essentially going to start charging developers for even pirated copies of their games?

They did not think this through at all. Officially going to start recommending to my clients that they abandon Unity with due haste.

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to random

Once again, affiliation with #cryptocurrencies is a tell that a company is shady as hell. The pattern just keeps repeating.

https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser

LouisIngenthron, 1 month ago to random

Just had an idea for a thought experiment. I'd like to hear anyone's answers, but I'm especially interested in how @freemo answers:

Let's say the presidential election was framed as a stock market. The market itself (equivalent to NYSE or NASDAQ) is America. The stocks are the presidential candidates.

In this experiment, each American has a net worth of $1000 and they have to spend it "voting" for presidential stocks during the election year. They can vote early in the year, or wait and see how others invest and vote later. They can split the $1000 between as many candidates as they want, or put it all on one.

After the election happens, they receive 10% of what they invested in the winning candidate each month (so if they put it all on the winner, they're made whole in 10 months). After the election, the winner's stock becomes the premier stock of the entire market and drives the market valuation based on the President's performance, paying dividends to every American when it does well.

In this scenario, you have two (potentially) competing motivations: enriching yourself and enriching the market (America).

So, the two questions that arise are:

1. Do you invest early, based on just your morals/politics, or do you wait and see how others invest first?
2. How do you divide up your $1,000?

LouisIngenthron, 9 months ago to random

1. Social media is created. Traditional media excitedly jump aboard because they're thrilled about the opportunity to drive revenue with free advertising.

2. Traditional media rework their entire business model around social media. "Share on Facebook!" they cry to their customers, as they let their direct-to-consumer infrastructure crumble.

3. Traditional media loses revenue share and spends money they can't afford on lobbying the government.

4. The government passes a law that says social media has to pay traditional media for hosting the very links that traditional media was so eager to have on social media.

5. Social media bans news rather than pay the extortion.

6. Traditional media blames social media for not providing the news during dangerous events, like the #Yellowknife fire. They run clickbait stories about how many people don't know there's an evacuation order because they get their news from social media.

LouisIngenthron, 7 months ago to foss

The absolute worst thing about #foss is that when I run into a bug, I have no one to be justifiably mad at.

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to random

Maybe it's just me, but I think open-carrying while "protesting" automatically upgrades you to terrorist.
Legitimate free speech doesn't need to be backed with a threat of violence.
QT: https://journa.host/@w7voa/111081408709622409

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to IT

Hey #IT and #InfoSec folks, can you recommend a password manager for organizations that's secure enough to not have a major data breach scandal recently (ideally #FOSS)?

LouisIngenthron, 7 months ago to random

Isn't it weird how "yesterday" means "exactly one day ago" but "yesteryear" means "an indeterminate number of years ago" and there's no such thing as yestermonth, yesterweek, or yesterhour?

LouisIngenthron, 2 months ago to random

Ladies and Gentleman, we've just entered a constitutional crisis.

Please make sure your seatbelts are on and your tray tables are up.
QT: https://c.im/@cdarwin/112038108659297435

LouisIngenthron, 2 months ago to MIguns

#SCOTUS essentially just ruled that any #President is free to commit #insurrection without reprisal so long as their party controls #congress.

It's clear that they don't have any more regard left for #democracy or the #constitution.

I'm concerned that there's a decent chance future history books will point to this as the start of the second civil war. Without any accountability imposed, the chance of #Trump attempting a more violent version of #J6 when he loses again is damn near 100%.

LouisIngenthron, 10 months ago to random

Anyone who believes Elon has some grand master plan is falling prey to very basic human biases.

We want our billionaires to be competent at what they do so their obscene wealth doesn't seem so unfair.

But they're not. They're idiots stumbling around in the dark, and pretending they're geniuses is about as accurate as anthropomorphizing your cat.
QT: https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/110769481774666858

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to random

It would appear that the center-right folks have fled the GOP entirely and all that's left are the lunatic-supporters.

LouisIngenthron, 10 months ago to gay

I gotta say, although this puts me at odds with most of the community, but from what I've read, I don't really see that much of a problem with the #SCOTUS decision about the marriage websites.

In the issue at question, the business owner was rejecting a message, not a class of people. If a #gay person wanted to buy a wedding website for their straight couple friend, it would have presumably been no problem.

That's a right that owners of expressive businesses should have, and it should apply equally to everyone.

For example, an #LGBTQ designer should be free to reject any clients who want them to build religion-aligned anti-gay websites.

So long as we can apply the jurisprudence equally (I know, I know), this seems like the right decision for everyone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/30/303-creative-elenis-supreme-court-decision-lgbtq-rights/

LouisIngenthron, 7 months ago to random

It occurs to me that a rough way to measure a person's financial privilege is to ask them if they know what "passive income" is.

Those without financial privilege tend to lose something for every monetary gain (time, effort, property, etc).

Whereas those with financial privilege are more likely to gain additional money for essentially just having money.

LouisIngenthron, 6 months ago to random

Remember: political polls only measure the opinions of people too dumb to reject calls from unknown numbers.

LouisIngenthron, 5 months ago to ChatGPT

You know one thing that #ChatGPT is going to be huge for?

Background dialog in video games.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write dialog for guards and civilians in open world games? If you've ever taken an arrow to the knee, then you might have some sense of it.

But #AI can blow that out of the water, generating dozens of dialogue variations that say the same thing (or nothing at all) just a little bit differently for each voice actor, adding easy variety to a notoriously tedious and shitty writing job in #GameDev.

Of course, eventually it'll probably replace the voice actors too, which is far less ideal.

LouisIngenthron, 8 months ago to linux_gaming

I'm seeing a lot of #gamers on mastodon claim that they will stop buying games that are #madewithunity because of #unity's recent pricing announcement.

To those folks, I'd like to say: Please don't #boycott. We game developers appreciate the sentiment. We appreciate the solidarity. But there is currently no way for consumers to vote with their wallets against #unity without hurting game developers more.

So, please. Keep buying #games. Keep installing them. Keep playing them.

Give us the sales revenue we need to retrain our people to use new engines for our next release.

LouisIngenthron, 1 month ago to random

In the past two weeks, I drove over 2,000 miles (in two 15-hour marathons) across the southeastern United States.

Here are some notable things I saw:

LouisIngenthron, 7 months ago to unity

For those of you trying to move off #unity, if #godot's weak C# is a deal-breaker, check out #Stride. I've only just started trying it out, but so far it's very promising. It's tightly linked with .NET, so the dev-env is Windows only, but the output is multiplatform, and the integration with C# is outstanding.

It's also got an editor layout and general scene framework that are very similar to unity, which makes transitioning easier.