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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • For me, the worst part of setting up some new distro or service is when it’s done and everything works. Then it just… Sits there. Working. Usually at some task I don’t need very often. Very anticlimactic and boring. Then I have to find some other new thing to try, which is why my HTPC has been through like 4 distros in the past year.


  • There’s a lot of hypocrisy around. The issue isn’t pronouns, the issue is: Does a child have a right to keep secrets from their parents?

    The ones saying “no” are probably keeping or kept a fair amount from their own parents. I mean, the ones who say “yes” probably did too, it’s pretty universal, but they’re not being hypocrites about it.

    I wonder, if you changed this question to some other hypothetical secret, how would the responses change? What about… “Does a teacher have an obligation to report if a student is dating someone?” Or maybe, “Does a teacher have an obligation to report every book a student reads (on their own time) in case it’s a book the parents don’t like?”

    I get it, too. I’m a parent. The idea that my kids might have secrets kind of bothers me. I want to be a part of their lives, I want to help them with any problem they have. But they have a right to their own lives, and the only way I could even try to prevent it would be immensely damaging to them in the long run. I can only do my best and hope they’ll see that and be comfortable talking to me about the important stuff.


  • Video games. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

    • The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
    • Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
    • Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
    • Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland… If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don’t want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

    The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don’t want to downplay those. I’m just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.




  • I think it’s more about manager capability. A person who manages IT, for example, but has little idea what that entails will want people in the office. They have no idea if a given ticket should take 3 hours or 3 days to resolve, so it’s easier to just have their people in the office where they can look at them and verify that they are, in fact, sitting at a computer.

    The ideal work environment for me, and I think most people, is one where you’re judged based on what you do and how well you do it, while details like when you do it and where you are when you do it get left to your discretion. Managing someone like that requires skill and knowledge in what they’re doing though.





  • There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

    I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.



  • I just switched my gaming PC to Linux yesterday. Well, switch is strong, I still have Windows in case I need to go back.

    It’s come a long way, though. I started using Linux desktop around 2000, and it was not a fun experience. I tried again in 2019 with a System76 laptop, and it’s been just fine. My home theater/gaming PC was the last holdout.

    So far, it works great. Steam Link works, my games all seem to work, RetroArch is going strong. The only downside is Oculus support doesn’t seem to exist at all, so I might need to keep my Windows drive a bit longer just for VR.


  • I’m not sure what you’re talking about. One result affirms that you should feel safe and provides a hotline, the other starts with outright victim-blaming. The second result under “Maybe it’s your fault for not listening?” is not a hotline, at least for me.

    My point is that if they just made the result the same then it would not detract from women, nor would it hurt the men who don’t need the advice. You’re going out of your way to defend an unnecessary bias by claiming it’s more relevant, but that’s not the point. They could choose to just not have the bias, and it would be a win while hurting no one.


  • The true mildly infuriating is the comments. Whether this is rage bait or not, we should all be about to agree on some basic things:

    • Domestic violence sucks regardless of who the victim is and who the perpetrator is.

    • Helping one group of victims, like males, does not have to and should not take away from helping another group.

    • The number of victims should not be the deciding factor on whether victims deserve empathy and support.

    People in here are going out of their way to defend what is clearly a biased oversight, treating women like an automatic victim and treating men like an automatic perpetrator. Why? Just acknowledge that it’s dumb, shows bias, and move on.



  • The truly wild thing about subscription pricing to me is how viscerally I’m against it. I’m not shitting on this business model, I think it makes perfect sense and is probably the only logical way to run a business like this. I’m just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.

    Alright, so the amount of data I’d need for pictures is probably the 500GB tier, so $9.99/mo. My first thought is that’s way too expensive, my second thought is that I’m not doing another subscription. My subscription-trauma addled brain will happily justify buying a little server, and a 1TB hard drive, and spending hours configuring them. By the time I’m done, I’ll have spent the equivalent of at least 3 years of the cost of this service, plus tons of my free time, and it will never work exactly right because there’s always going to need to be updates, and sometimes those will break something, and I’ll need to fix it myself.

    Anyway, it looks cool though.



  • It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

    When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

    Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.


  • I’m a solid thousandaire who bought a used Model 3 in 2019. I’m one of those fuck cars people, but living without one is not currently possible for me, so I went with one with a high safety rating, low maintenance, and no need for gas. Since then, I’ve bought one set of tires, refilled the windshield wiper fluid, and had a few car washes. It’s been pretty great, as a car.

    The only problem is… random pickup trucks and Dodge Chargers act crazy around me because the existence of EVs apparently threatens their masculinity. My mom sends me random articles where someone who has no idea what they’re talking about complains about the car being a death trap. And now that Elon Musk won’t shut the fuck up, I get to read the random ramblings of petulant children online who can’t fathom that people might like something they don’t.

    Fuck me, though, I guess I’m a member of the bourgeoisie now.