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  • 33 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I like Adam Something as well… but his latest video unironically ran a 90 second sponsor segment for BetterHelp, the well known scam, ‘connects you to mental health specialists’ app that also illegally sells your confidential health data, and often connects you to ‘professionals’ with no actual qualifications.

    He removed the sponsor segment pretty quickly after people complained, but… that means he doesn’t actually vet his sponsors.

    But at least he did remove it.

    grumble grumble


  • A simplified explanation is:

    Bazzite itself is immutable, but then on top of that base layer, its a customized version of Fedora, via DistroBox, which itself mostly is mutable, and allows for you to set up other DistroBox instances pretty easily.

    Bazzite’s system updater utility updates both the underlying Bazzite core, and all of the DistroBox instances running on top of it.

    99.9 % of the time there is no reason to mess with the immutable core bazzite stuff, but the distrobox containers built on top of it? You can do whatever you want.

    Also if you do fuck up the Bazzite core, you can fairly easily roll it back and reset it without losing your existing files, without having to re-image the whole SteamDeck.

    As far as the non desktop mode, actual SteamDeck mode experience? Seems the same in terms of game performance, but it is easier to add things like DeckyLoader and EmuDeck and what not, as that base Fedora instance comes with a bunch of utilities that help you install and set them up.

    EDIT: I am almost certainly not 100% technically correct in some way here, but I think this is generally accurate.







  • Thats wildly optimistic.

    By the time the damage piles up, there will not be enough sociopolitical cohesion or spare resources to invest in meaningful mitigation.

    We are in a global civilizational death spiral, a mutually reinforcing polycrisis, a complex systems collapse.

    Some places and countries will fare relatively better than others, but they’re all looking at massive declines in absolute terms.

    I’d say we’d be lucky to hit 2100 with a total world human population above 3 billion.

    Here’s the most recent calibration of the World 3 model, from ‘The Limits to Growth’ in the 1960s:





  • If the depiction is that the rag is inserted into the bottle, as opposed to wrapped around/attached to a sealed bottle, then yes, that’s a bad idea, but I’ve seen it depicted ‘correctly’ in some movies.

    ‘Proper’ molotovs are sort of like very small, very shitty fuel air bombs: you spread a bunch of flammable material around, and then an ignition source lights the spread around fuel.

    You do not want the flame to come into contact with the ‘payload’ before the bottle breaks.

    Sticking the rag into the bottle and liquid is basically a bomb with a very unreliable fuse timer, could easily blow up in your hands, or leak flaming liquid on you when you angle the thing to throw it.

    Also, cooking oil is a terrible choice for a molotov, the ignition point temperature is significantly higher than gasoline/petrol, you probably couldn’t even get a lit piece of cloth to ignite contents of the bottle after it breaks… maybe a magnesium, survival style match would work?

    What you want is gasoline/petrol, stirred together with a bit of styrofoam to create a poor man’s napalm. Or the highest proof spirits you can find, gotta be higher than 100 proof or 50% alchohol for any realistic chance it’ll work, or lighter fluid or isopropyl alchohol or something.

    All of this general information (other than cooking oil ignition temps) can be fairly easily discerned from the wiki page on molotovs.


  • Well firstly, I appreciate your sympathy, truly.

    Secondly… I kind of feel bad for springing that on you, as seriously contemplating a summary of what I’ve been through does seem to be genuinely shocking and perhaps even traumatizing to many people…

    … but at the same time, it is what I’ve survived, it does provide an explanation of my … rather curt and extremely forward, no bullshit/no filter assessment, and it does seem to have prompted a perspective shift in yourself.

    Which leads me to: If you really do want to help me in another way, but you really can’t part with your particular cars…

    Then it isn’t just a trivial choice or lack thereof that prevents you from parting with them. You say they are over 10 years old, maybe you’re proud they’re still in decent running order, you’re sentimental about them in some way, proud of them in a …reliable, but graying mare that’s still got a few years left in her kind of way.

    They’re valuable to you in a way more serious than at least I initially gathered from what you wrote.

    I hadn’t seen the other comments you’d written in this thread until now, it seems that at bare minimum, at least some kind of car is an actual necessity and not a choice, that you don’t actually hate your snowy home that much, that you are actually particularly attached to your specific cars.

    So after saying all of that, I apologize for being too harsh… I could have been more inquisitive and less accusatory. I took your main post extremely literally… I should have been more charitable.

    Spending a good while on the street has left me suspicious and critical… probably doesn’t help that that is on top of myself being a hyperliteral Autist.

    As for dming you, give me a bit of time. I use Thunder on a shit tier gas station phone to interact with lemmy, and it doesn’t seem to really … do DMs properly.

    Lemme aee if Voyager or Jerboa or something else actually does DMs correctly.


  • I choose not to do those things then get annoyed about it.

    … Then you are either procrastinating, at best, or simply perpetuating situations that allow you to be annoyed purely for the sake of preferring to be constantly annoyed, at worst.

    Here let me try something, and this isn’t hypothetical, this is completely serious:

    I used to have a career as a data analyst and database administrator.

    Two years ago I was assaulted and held hostage in my own apartment for a week, starved and beaten.

    I survived, but came out of it absurdly injured, couldn’t work, ended up evicted, homeless, car got stolen, I would have died if I didn’t manage to qualify for SSDI.

    I’ve just been doing my own Physical Therapy for a bit more than a year now, due to being too poor to afford professional PT, and besides, I’d have to walk, on my crippled legs, to get to the PT, as I have no car, and there is very poor bus service where I eventually ended up, a literal roach motel that I can just barely qualify to rent with my SSDI payment.

    Would you give me one of your cars?

    Or would you rather continue to be annoyed by its uneccessary existence?


  • I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

    1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

    …in the same vein…

    2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

    … If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

    And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.


  • A contrarian, at least in the general, interpersonal social context, is someone who simply defaults toward taking the opposite viewpoint of whatever they believe is the most popular or most widely accepted.

    Oh you like blue?

    Well I like red!

    Oh you like chocolate?

    Well I like vanilla!

    It can also mean that you don’t always do this as a kneejerk reaction or instinct regardless of the situation or topic or idea, but that have a single, or number of views which go against the broad consensus of some kind of academic or profeasional field.

    You are not describing contrarianism.

    You are describing hypocrisy and duplicity.

    You have sets of standards or preferences which you apply to everyone other than yourself, you have preformed negative judgements (stereotypes) about people who fall into the same categories you do, you own possessions which you state you own entirely by choice and not out of necessity, yet you despise these possesions.

    Hypocrisy.

    You hide your own activites from others so that others cannot easily call you out as a hypocrite.

    Duplicity.

    If you are trolling anyone, you are trolling yourself.

    EDIT: Possibly a more charitable interpretation for at least some of this is that you are very anti-social and simply don’t enjoy talking to people, and that could stem from trauma. Nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be left alone and not interact with people.

    But if you truly do not actually need two cars, you truly could just move somewhere it doesn’t snow so often, I don’t see why you don’t just do that, move somewhere else, sell either or both of your cars.



  • That’s an insanely bad analogy.

    For starters, children are legally barred from entering casinos, unlike many, many video games which include mtx, dark patterns such as layered currency obfuscation, pricing schemes that encourage you to buy that next tier amount of video game currency that always leave you with a bit left over, constantly asking the user if they want to buy something, designing the UI such that you always see what you’d be getting extra if you were levelling up the premium battle pass instead of the default one, etc etc… which are either directly targeted at, or allow children to play them.

    Why are children banned from casinos?

    Because their brains aren’t developed enough to properly understand risk vs reward.

    Secondly, the social dynamics at play in both a casino and games with even only mtx cosmetics… both of these settings massively peer pressure the customer/consumer/mark into engaging with the gambling/mtx spending mechanics.

    Its not just that whales are a thing that somehow exist prior to and outside of mtx games or casinos, its that the entire system is designed to pressure everyone who interacts with it in any capacity into breaking down and spending more and more.

    These systems are designed to produce more, whales, more dolphins, to push everyone toward a higher class of spending irresponsibility regardless of the propensity upon entering.

    Empirically, this works. Insanely well.

    Saying ‘its all the whales fault’ is a cop out.

    Its the fault of game execs and studios that hire psychologists to figure out how to design the most exploitative games possible, and lawyers to figure out how to legally justify this.

    Its the fault of regulators being asleep at the wheel and allowing nearly the entire industry to get away with this shady bullshit for so long, usually with only slaps on the wrist.

    You’re blaming the drug addicts in a society that’s normalized addiction.

    I’m blaming the drug manufacturers, the pushers and the cops that look the other way because they or their boss gets a kick back.