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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

    After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

    If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.


  • I have tried both and a bunch of others with a laptop with nVidia and Intel and have had a range of experiences.

    Anything Ubuntu based worked out of the box but any significant deviation from the exact current standard made things less stable. Changing WM/DE was not really possible and troubleshooting was opaque. Snap was also a nightmare of broken packages and bad update processes.

    Manjaro looked really nice and had that lovely Arch flavour, but it is not really Arch, more Arch adjacent. Lots of things work similarly but lots of things break in bad ways. They have had numerous issues with security, bad updates, and general poor practice.

    Pop is cool, I like it, but just not a good fit for me. Cosmic is a great environment but I like to tinker too much and while the team is great and do good work it is just not the same kind of defaults I like.

    EndeavourOS is my current pick. It is Arch with sane defaults. It comes prebuilt with a DE configured, backups using BTRFS snapshots, a handy updater and package management config, some cool apps built in, and it is very performant. The guides for hardware video acceleration worked first time for me which has never happened before, normally that is a major pain and takes a few days to get sorted on a fresh install. Graphics performance is awesome, same with built in OOM protection. That said, make sure you have enough RAM. I had 8gb in my laptop and ended upgrading to 32gb after a number of failed builds and messing around with swap to get things to finish. If you have less than 16gb RAM I would recommend upgrading.

    Whatever you choose, I would recommend trying a few things before settling down. The right fit is right for today and may change, so try things again in the future if you feel uncomfortable. Also do what works for you, not for anyone else. If you don’t like Arch you are not obligated to use it, same with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. Keep the fun of it and play around, maybe just boot up a few live environments and see if something tickles you. I hear good things about Hannah Montana Linux.


  • My understanding is you make fewer but more replicable mistakes. If you use a wire you have to trace it, keep the length consistent for timing reasons, use very consistent soldering technique, and ultimately you have a hard time tracing issues. With a homemade PCB you generally do get what you ask for in terms of circuitry. Traces are the right length, right thickness, right spacing, and if not then the whole board is similarly impacted, so it is obviously broken or not broken. If you mess up your design then you have a problem, but if you did the process right and you have a valid design then it works.

    That all said, homemade PCB is a large time sink and modern PCB manufacture is so cheap and fast it doesn’t make sense to do at home for the most part. You can literally get a complex board faster by ordering it from halfway around the world and having it posted than making it yourself. I would say it is a good learning exercise, not a good manufacturing or prototyping practice.


  • The payment of hush money would have counted as a campaign contribution regardless of the source. If he paid it personally it would have been reportable. If Cohen paid it it would have been reportable. If a third party paid it it would have been reportable.

    The reason it would have been reportable is because it provided benefit to the campaign. Covering up negative news is a benefit to the campaign, so if he paid it himself it would still have been a campaign contribution he would have to report.

    By covering up the payment he is taking or making a campaign contribution in violation of FEC rules. By suppressing the story of his affair with Stormy Daniels he is contributing to his campaign and failure to disclose makes this a crime.

    The fact that he committed a crime by failing to report a campaign contribution is what makes the payment itself part of a felony rather than a misdemeanor. In New York law they do not have to prove the specific electoral crime itself for this set of falsifications of business records to be related to a felony level crime and therefore felonious. The jury instructions approved by the judge specifically say that the jurors can find that he violated one of several options of law for raising this to a felony.



  • I agree with many of these points, but have two thoughts here. First, the same was true of many items being produced in China in the past, but quality control got better and honestly most of the products you can buy for a reasonable price are partly or wholly made in China. Second, Tesla is a good example of a US based company with many of the same issues. Loose panels, door handles that fall off, accelerators that get stuck, and so on. Bad engineering is not only available in Mandarin.

    I hope they can produce a good quality electric car and help accelerate the transition.



  • Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

    That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

    The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.



  • Have a look at this link

    https://linuxways.net/mint/setup-wine-linux-mint-21/

    It has steps for enabling 32 bit support, around step 2 enables and step 3 installs wine again after. You need to go through the wine install again after enabling 32 bit support (i386). If you don’t get all the packages with :i386 at the end remove wine and then install again.

    With the upload, if it isn’t bittorrent it may be corrupted without being checked. Maybe look for an md5sum and confirm you have the file as expected. If the md5sum checks out you are sorted, if not you will at least know. That said it is as you say very unlikely to be the file, much more likely the libraries. Let me know how you go.


  • OK, so a few possible starting points. It looks like you are running a 32 bit programming but may not have all the 32 bit libraries installed. This may be referred to as multilib or similar, but you need the 32 bit versions to run 32 bit software properly.

    Second, if the above doesn’t solve it you may be having the same issue I had with Arcanum. I had taken a rip many years back and it had been corrupted so it would segfault like yours is. The solution was to find an alternate image of the disk which was clean and using that.

    Good luck


  • I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn’t know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it’s own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.


  • Working for a VoIP company in the early 2010s I rm -rf’d the /bin/ directory. As root. On a production server. On site.

    I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting) then manually coppied over the files from another machine. Chrooted and some stuff was broken but rebuilding from the package manager reinstalled everything that was missing. Got the system back up in around 40 mins after that colossal screw up. Good fun and a great learning experience. Honestly, my manager should not have had me doing anything on a root shell with no training.


  • In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

    If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

    So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.


  • UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

    When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

    When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

    When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

    Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

    A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

    If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can’t access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

    If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won’t require policing, they won’t get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don’t pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.



  • I have some experience with mental health in Australia and it is pretty dire honestly. There is a constant sense that the staff are concerned first with making sure you don’t hurt yourself because that would be a breach of their duty of care. This unfortunaty made much of the interaction between staff and patients adversarial.

    I am currently entering the individual suppory industry and we have a concept called dignity of risk. You have to remember that people are entitled to take risks that they consider worthwhile regardless of what you think. This means if someone wants to smoke weed that is their choice, I can’t stop them. If they want to drink that is their choice and I have to respect that. This is because they are their own people and have their own autonomy.


  • In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.

    The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.

    Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.


  • Yes, it is possible, though fairly prohibitive. You can get modules for connecting a Sim card to your laptop to make and receive calls and SMS, so all the third party authentication messages and calls can be done. Apps can often be run through an emulation layer for Android, not so much for iOS, but yeah, it can mostly be done.

    That said, there are devices like the Pinephone which run a mainline Linux distribution like Arch or Alpine and can also do calls, SMS, and if you are brave use some android apps. If you can use a Pinephone for it then you can use another Linux laptop with a phone module to handle everything else.

    I am much more worried about things like banking now. A bank that allows use of an app on your phone with NFC is great but when they take away using anything else I would become a little more worried. If they can keep an option open, say having standard cards along side phone NFC, then the lock in is much less profound. If we get to a point where they cannot operate without Google or Apple giving the go ahead then they cannot move away if things get bad, so those monopolistic companies can extract more value from those banks and that gets passed down. This applies to tonnes of other services like taxis, food delivery, booking doctors appointments, and so on.


  • Option 1, the vast majority of STI transmission is between m/f sexual partners.

    Option 2, plenty of m/f couples have anal sex so it is either immoral for both or for neither.

    Option 3, not all gay couples have anal sex, plenty just do oral and some don’t even have sex, plenty of ace people out there.

    Option 4, condoms work well and really do prevent the spread of STIs.

    Option 5, what about lesbian sex? They are also homosexual but don’t have penises, so is anal sex not an option for them?

    Option 6, what right do we have to judge other people’s sexual preferences and activities? You are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat unhealthy foods, not to mention people refusing the vaccines for covid and influenza, so even with things that kill a lot of people every year we let you do it, so what makes anal sex for men different?

    Option 7, what about pegging? Can anal in an m/f relationship involve penetration of the male? Is that the same or different to the gay men situation?

    And lastly, option 8, if they get to say gay anal sex is immoral then what stops gay men from saying exercising power over a community based on unsupported claims is immoral? If their specific religion is correct then all others must be someone scamming or lying, so that must be immoral, right? If not, how and why?