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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.

    Like, hypothetically, let’s split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.

    Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?

    If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn’t financially beneficial, and your grandfather could’ve just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.

    If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It’s likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.

    Landlords are middlemen. They’re used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren’t shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.

    Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.

    That margin didn’t come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could’ve paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could’ve worked 1 job instead of 2.

    Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don’t need.







  • Depending on the specific game itself, we can boil down the multiple-stat problem in a few ways. If the goal is to get all the stats as high as possible evenly, then we can assign each stat a multiplier based on how low it is. Fixing lower stats becomes worth more than buffing higher stats. That multiplier would depend on the game, on how much it punishes the low stat. The multiplier itself might end up being a whole new problem to solve, but for now I’ll just say its not my problem and call it X.

    Whatever X is though, every stat can then be reduced to a single value using it. Super-low fortitude should be buffed over already-high mana according to X, so all of the numerical values in the game become directly comparable at any stage in this problem. Then I expect it will be equivalent to the knapsack problem. Each item in the game will boost several stats in certain ways, and all of those boosts can be combined using X to become our item value in the knapsack problem.

    So I consider it to be the knapsack problem + figuring out X (which might be NP-complete on its own, depending on the game).


  • Typewriters.

    They had bars that needed to physically move, and so staggering them helped them not collide and get jammed.

    If you imagine a bar coming from the center of each key towards your screen, you can see how the staggering was helpful. For instance, M misses J and K above it, naturally, but it also slightly misses I and the 8 above that.

    It’s a great solution for a nonexistent problem in keyboards.


  • Completely agree.

    The only reason the relative had it at all was because of those old fears. As soon as I learned that they had it bundled with the computer (hate that. Malware’s gotta get in somewhere though I guess), I knew why it was being slow.

    I hold this up as an example because even their own troubleshooting website and a program dedicated to the purpose above and beyond the usual uninstaller couldn’t do it though. Avast doesn’t even know its own malware.

    Also this nonsense got me the chance to put mint on their computer, but the “switch to Linux” argument isn’t constructive in this particular spot. They didn’t end up sticking to it because a required-for-school piece of software for tests just doesn’t do Linux at all. Couldn’t get it to run in wine or even a virtual machine either, and they’re not great at the whole computer thing so I didn’t wanna be tech support for dual booting.


  • Here’s an example. I removed avast via the uninstaller on a relatives computer, it made it laggy as hell. I restart after as the uninstaller demands, but it was still there.

    Searching, I find this official support option. https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/10

    The official Avast Uninstall Tool, the tool to use when the included uninstaller didn’t work.

    The official uninstall tool didn’t work either. I ran it in safe mode, like it said. Didn’t work, either, but it removed some stuff, and finally let me delete some things manually. Ran it again in safe mode after that, finally seems to have removed everything.

    Anyway it’s a great example of if a company doesn’t know what they’re about, windows has no process to recover from that. Window’s process is identical to a Walmart employee saying. “I dunno, man, contact the manufacturer.” Genuinely, its usually enough, but when its not, there’s absolutely no recourse.


  • Another vote for “well-written”. I have read both, and both are good if they’re done well. Besides, I don’t usually have the option when I find a book, the summaries rarely tell me and I’m not gonna dig through the middle of the book for the answer to this question.

    What I care about is being able to connect with the characters. If I can connect to someone in a realistic relationship, great. If I can connect to someone and they get that idealist treatment, great. If I can connect to someone and it seems like a romance but it’s abusive and the book becomes a realistic horror novel, that’s also great, I’ll feel the fear and desperation.

    I never have wanted to read a book to have a specific experience, is my point. If your experience was well-written, it would be good.



  • The right app could make it into a security camera or a WiFi remote. A quick search suggests you could jailbreak it, although I’m not up to date on what that would offer you.

    I’m not sure what prevented Delta from working, since it says it supports iOS 14 or later on an iPod touch. Maybe a factory restore or similar would let you take that route anyway?


  • It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.

    Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.

    While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.

    This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.

    Time will tell. I could also have missed something


  • A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.

    You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

    When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

    Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.


  • Seems solid.

    It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”

    If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse



  • Well if i double-click a file I’ve made executable, it will ask if I’d like to run it, and most software will have a github or downloads page that will give you direct downloads to the software.

    In other words, I can successfully install things like a windows user, I just have to go the extra step to open the file’s properties and make it executable with the GUI first.

    Apt is faster, and it’s also faster to do a direct download, make it executable, then execute it in the terminal, too. But I CAN do it.

    Config files can be edited in the GUI text editor, it’s just slower.

    To test my claim and prove your third point, this link is the repository for a samba GUI, found at https://www.samba.org/samba/GUI/. Specifically, it’s SMB4K, the first one.

    Convenient? No. Would it update automatically? No. Do I want to do it this way, or recommend it? Still no. But it does function.