Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll have a play in the new year and see if it’ll work ^_

Feel free to replace it with the remote tool of your choice. Just keep in mind that it needs to be easy to use from the supportee’s end (double click, read a code).

It’s going to sound really silly but here goes:

1. Ensure their background is the same as it was (seriously, they often use it as an extra way to find things).

2. Where possible, use windows icons for desktop shortcuts and mask link names to match vocab they’re familiar with.

3. Have rustdesk set up with a link saying “Let <your name> help me”.

4. Make sure they have their password written down somewhere.

5. Make sure you have their password written down somewhere.

6. Where possible have background updating, where not possible have a .sh file to do it for them.

7. Add desktop links for things like downloads, documents and pictures.

These are tips for any distro when moving less tech savvy relatives over. For those that like to game, ensure your fs on their gaming drive is a Linux one as it stops weird behaviour. Also, you know, install the games for them!

And here we see an expert hacker at work, with just a few commands as a root user, they managed to gain root access.

It’s good in a way that isn’t really expected - the only thing I can say without spoiling is it did something really different with things that had been there a long time.

I need to put a vote in here for owlbears and owlcats, if only because of how excited they make my partner when encountered.

You just captured the daily life of a UK academic after the catastrophically low recruitment numbers this year.

Spherical geometry - good times…

Yep, it’s a triangle. You can also make one with three right angles on a sphere!

That’s an impressively designed bit of kit.

Guess I have to go barter with the architecture department to use their 3d printer…

Really neat post, I’d not heard of a few of these (never knew libre office draw could edit pdfs!).

Couple of extra ones:

Note taking and pdf annotation: Xournal++ is amazing, it’s also great to use on larger whiteboard screens. Plug and play support for scribe tablets on both windows and Linux.

Emulation (up to ps1): Mednafen is lightweight and comes with a gui. It also supports recording, though not netplay.

Ebook management/reading: Calibre - allows easy importing and exporting of ebooks to devices, also has a great built in search letting you find DRM free versions of a book.

Exactly - if you don’t want to date a trans person don’t. If someone conceals it, that’s not an issue with them being trans, that’s an issue with them being dishonest. It’s ok to dislike dishonest people.

The use of the word cis has its roots in an obscure Usenet group; it’s genesis (apparently) rooted in a desire for more inclusive language for trans folks (the notion that “gender” Vs “transgender” was too othering).

It hit Tumblr like a train in the 2010s, and became a symbolic phrase in trans counterculture. “Cisgender” was less than popular with non-trans people, as it robbed them of the illusion of normality and turned the word “gender” into a social trap.

It later found derogatory use in the phrase “cissy” (a counter for the popular derogatory term “tranny”).

It’s a fun word with an interesting history, and it has helped contribute to the wider acceptance of trans folks.

Yup, Google are launching their yearly attempt to convince folks YouTube premium is worth it.

Think of this time not as an annoyance, but as a time to reflect on how shitty Google has become.

Extra fact - in the USA almost all games use long weighted reels.

I believe this is by law, but may be misinformed.

Also, if you know the rng gen you can game machines: a very very clever group in Russia bought up old machines from defunct casinos, reverse engineered the games, and then developed an app that let a user photograph x number of spins to find out what the seed was for the next spin, and from there told them to bet high or low based on the upcoming game. They made millions, and farmed it out to make more. (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/)

Never really worked with them (we never made them).

I think they’re lower prize threshold cat Bs.

In the UK, slot machines fall into 4 main categories. Of particular interest are category C machines, as these can remember a fixed number of previous games. I.e. the “myth” that a machine is “about to pay out” because “someone lost a lot to it” can hold for these games.

Cat A and B machines are completely random, previous games can have no impact on probabilities of winning (though pots can climb).

Online games have different rules, not always fair ones!

Oh, and ALL games (in a physical location) must (by law) show “RTP” (return to player) somewhere. It usually gets stuck it in a block of text in the manual since no-one reads them. (If it’s below 97.3% just go play roulette as it offers better returns).

Boozy Bay, it has an export industry in adventuring parties due to the booming tavern industry.

What is life but a lottery?

A lot of the drive towards AI is people thinking to save a quick buck, but longer term that places them in a very unsteady position themselves.

All products end up being for “shareholder value”, and AI will be no different. Someone will find an enshittification vector and run with it.

Suddenly, that “quick buck” becomes a monthly subscription that costs more than the people fired. Company data is harvested and sold, customers are advertised out, the shittiness of the system becomes a company problem.

So we’re either going to see a stark change away from the current shareholder value model (about as likely as world peace), or we’re going to see a lot of CEO seppuku. Win win really.

I would say mathematics is a consequence of, or branch of philosophy in its own right. The name intuitionism derives from the source of this branch of mathematics - “2 primal intuitions”.

1. Twoity - we are able to perceived time, and are thus able to split the universe into two, three, four etc parts. Counting is not something we just learn, it is something built into us as humans.

2. Repetition - we can repeat operations and not stop, just as we can never stop counting.

From these two (heavily paraphrased) ideas we can derive all of mathematics.

The first is actually enough to give us everything up to the rationals, the second grants us the reals and beyond.

While we lose excluded middle, we gain things such as “all total real functions are uniformly continuous on the unit interval” (Brouwer), the removal of the information paradox in physics (someone used Posey’s take on intuitionism to rewrite all physics to see where it led), and the wonder of lawless sequences (objects we cannot predict entirely, but still work with).

The intuitionist is very very formal “you are either alive or not alive” is a very nice statement to make, but entirely worthless if one cannot tell which you are! Excluded middle is not universally false in intuitionism; it is true for decidable statements, of which having an apple or not does seem to fall within (though here we can question how “apple-like” must something be to be considered an apple if we wish to be peverse). However, to argue it is true for any statement means your disjunct (or) must be very weak indeed - the classical mathematician is happy with this, the intuitionist demands that a disjunct not only present two options, but provide a way of determining which if the two applies on a case to case basis (hence excluded middle applying for decidable things).

Simplifying your example of an apple, you can think of it as a Platonist just having the statement that everything is either and apple or not. Meanwhile, the Intuitionist also demands there be a guide on how to sort everything into “apple” or “not apple” before they make that statement.

Classical mathematics does also have a huge unintuitive step - mathematics must exist independently of humanity. Every theorem ever proved, and ever to be proved, exists somewhere. Where you ask? The platonic plane of ideal forms beckons, with all the madness it entails!