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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Sorry, no.

    I mean, you’re right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.

    Not sure if you’ve somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.

    Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software… mandated their employees return to office.

    There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:

    1. Middle managers and up basically realize that their lifestyle suffers if they don’t have the ability to micromanage people in person.

    Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.

    1. Commercial real estate.

    If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.

    This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.

    Can’t have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash… in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.

    … We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.

    It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.

    Those things don’t make C Suite see line go up next quarter.


  • I just set up Nobara.

    Shockingly straightforward.

    Entire install process was very simple, with a GUI, then a neat little post install app that gives you another very straightforward GUI for running your first batch of system updates.

    ... Oh, and I was able to do this on a SteamDeck, without an external mouse or keyboard.

    Nobara has a SteamDeck edition now.

    The install process has a bit of Deck specific jank, basically i just had to change the screen UI scaling level from 175% to 100%, it defaulted to 175% when booting from the SD card i wrote the ISO to…

    And then there’s a bit of jank doing initial updates off the ‘bare metal’ install, because the SteamKeyboard overlay thingy will prompt your admin password for a system access prompt… which will disable most of the SteamDeck inputs for everything other than Steam untill you input your password to allow it to work.

    The work around I figured for this is… when that prompt comes up, you push the steam button and hamburger menu button on the physical deck until you get Steam in big picture mode.

    Then your controls all work in Steam.

    Then you close Steam.

    Then your mouse works via trackpad on the desktop, but the X button to bring up the SteamKeyboard does not.

    So then you open Steam again.

    Now the SteamKeyboard does work, and you can type in your admin pass to the system access prompt.

    I had to do this silly process a number of times through the initial set up 0.o

    I eventually set Steam to not automatically launch itself, and now that all the updates have gone through, I just have to mouse (trackpad) over to manually open Steam when I am in desktop mode and then give Steam the admin pw for the keyboard to work… just once per desktop session now that its all set up.

    Probably I also could have gone back into gaming mode and just bound a button to whatever button combo Nobara/Fedora uses as a shortcut to open the actual Nobara/Fedora virtual keyboard, but I could not figure out what this key combo actually is lol.

    But uh if you’re just looking for an OS for a standard desktop PC, everything I’ve outlined in the above spoiler is not gonna be a problem, and you’ll likely have a very straightforward install process.

    I’m also a fan of Nobara’s default UI… kind of a gnomeified KDE?

    As well as its default apps, built in DeckyLoader and plugins for the Deck, ProtonPlus for runtime environments, and of course its built in kernel customizations/optimizations for to play vidya gaem.

    Oh, and I went with Nobara over the default SteamOS because SteamOS on a Deck is a read only OS by default…

    You can install flatpaks, but if you want to actually install new core packages, those will get wiped with a SteamOS update… or you have to use DistroBox… which may also get wiped on an update?

    Not sure, but Nobara allowse to use the deck as both a Deck and a more standard desktop linux PC with more customizability… and not having to rely on the AUR, which I find incredibly frustrating.



  • Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep ‘joking’ about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.

    We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government… because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media… our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.

    We also do not have lots and lots of time.

    Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response… which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.

    We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure … that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.


  • Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?

    I don’t think so.

    That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.

    We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…

    …but we are not.

    So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.

    Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…

    But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…

    All vehicles become more expensive.

    If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…

    The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.

    So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.

    So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.

    No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.

    They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.

    Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.


  • In the US and Canada?

    Car dependency / Car centrism.

    Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.

    But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.

    The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.

    Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.

    Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.



  • Here’s the quote, for people allergic to reading the update in the article.

    Update: Nvidia sent us a statement: “We are aware of a reported performance issue related to Game Filters and are actively looking into it. You can turn off Game Filters from the NVIDIA App Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode, and then relaunch your game.”

    We have tested this and confirmed that disabling the Game Filters and Photo Mode does indeed work. The problem appears to stem from the filters causing a performance loss, even when they’re not being actively used. (With GeForce Experience, if you didn’t have any game filters enabled, it didn’t affect performance.) So, if you’re only after the video capture features or game optimizations offered by the Nvidia App, you can get ‘normal’ performance by disabling the filters and photo modes.

    So, TomsHW (is at least claiming that they) did indeed test this, and found that its the filters and photo mode causing the performance hit.

    Still a pretty stupid problem to have, considering the old filters did not cause this problem, but at least there’s a workaround.

    … I’m curious if this new settings app even exists, or has been tested on linux.



  • Short version:

    Basically, the roof of your mouth presents skull bones which are much thinner than many other parts of your skull.

    Longer Version:

    If you hold the gun with the grip facing downward, as others have said, I guess the hope is you get a shot straight through your medulla oblingata.

    If you obliterate that, bam, instant brain death basically.

    But if your angle is off, you may only sever your spinal cord, now you get to be mostly conscious, in extreme pain, as you collapse and asphyxiate.

    Or you may just blow part of your jaw off. That might not even kill you.

    If, on the other hand, you go grip facing up/out, the ole’ Bud Dwyer…

    You have a much greater liklihood of obliterating a whole lot of your brain’s frontal lobe, the executive decision part.

    probably? You’d lose consciousness completely within seconds, 10(s?) of seconds at most, your brain activity would grind to a complete halt as the massive bleeding would just stop the remainder of your brain from working.

    But also: Phinneas Gage.

    Sometimes people can survive insane bullshit like this.

    Personally, I once met a guy that claimed he’d been shot with a .22 in the forehead, that that was the source of his scar there, and that his forehead skull was actually just thick enough that it stopped the .22 without the fracture creating any spall of loose bone fragments into his brain.


  • Neither of the two articles are well sourced.

    But you acted like yours was credible, until I presented another one, whereupon you admitted they are both equally valid.

    That’s assuming that the random article you found is correct, the veracity of which I can’t verify any more than the interesting engineering article…

    That is to say, you cannot verify either of these articles at all, ie, they are both of dubious legitimacy.

    You accused someone of being racist based of an article you admit you cannot verify, posted a bunch of related research papers that indicate, sure, they’re trying to develop the thing your article claimed they did… but doesn’t indicate that they actually developed it.

    I can link you a patent for a triangular shaped aircraft, listed as filed by a US Navy Scientist that claims to outline how to create an electromagnetic, gravity negating field around the craft.

    That would not be evidence that the US Navy officially announced that they basically built a UFO, that it works, and there’s a video of it, all officially documented and released.

    But to you, it would be, if China had done all those things.

    I am not saying China certainly has or has not developed a hypersonic passenger liner.

    I am saying your source for this claim is dubious.

    I am saying that you believe(d?) it credulously, without any skepticism, got very hostile with people who doubted its claim less tactfully than I did, and now you admit you got hostile based on a claim that you now admit is dubious, and shifted the burden of proof from the article making the claim to the skeptic questioning it.

    Again, this is the logic of a fanatic.

    If we just pick which dubiously sourced claims we believe based on vibes, truth stops existing.


  • So, you just assumed a unsourced, unverified story is true because you have a bias in favor of China, and put the burden of proof onto the other person to disprove it, and are completely fine with calling the other person a ‘sad racist’, despite now admitting that the veracity of the claim they are skeptical of is in fact not well established.

    This is the argument/personality style of a fanatic, a religious fundamentalist, a QAnon adherent, an Elon Musk simp.

    This is how we got ‘the Trump assasination attempt was staged!’

    Please stop posting trash tier misinformation as ‘technology news’, please stop jumping to ‘everyone who disagrees with me is rascist’, this level of unjustified vitriol only makes you appear manic.



  • Ok so 24+ hours later and I now see a few different websites I’ve never heard of before that basically have the same article as this:

    https://scienceinfo.net/chinese-hypersonic-aircraft-prototype-reaches-mach-6-speed.html

    Still no actual link to the apparently original source somewhere on some social media site.

    Now whats being said is that this was a flight test that actually occured 3 years ago, and was classified until now.

    And they do provide an image, and credit it to CAS (without an actual link, I still can’t find this on CAS’ english site, but again maybe they are still writing a proper English post?)

    This is a test article, that doesn’t appear to have any intakes for scramjet. I think I can make out two small rocket bells inside the thing, but the image quality is very low.

    It’s just a test article, launched by a rocket, that Inwould guesstimate to have a wingspan of about… 4 meters, ish?

    This new article also mentions that Cui, the team lead, did not mention anything about the current status of the hypersonic passenger jet which this was a test article for.

    So… this test article got up to mach 6.5, 3 years ago.

    Absolutely nothing about whether or not a successful test flight of a passenger jet sized craft achieved hypersonic speeds with an air breathing turbo ramjet / scram jet or something like that.

    Completely different than the originally report.

    … This is why I wanted an actual source.

    If this very poorly sourced article from this random, clickbait style website is more accurate than the OP article (another poorly sourced article from another clickbait style website) is more accurate, that would mean SCMP, and everyone in this thread saying China has built an air breathing hypersonic jet liner is wrong, and everyone saying that this is basically comparable to the X15 is correct.

    (Differences being the X15 was carried up to 45 thousand feet by a B52 instead of a rocket, and the X15 was manned, and this test article is presumably unmanned.)


  • I mean sure, thats a related research paper, but that isn’t the same thing as an official press announcement or video saying ‘Hey we actually built this thing, it works, take a look.’

    I know that the CAS has specifically been researching/developing a hypersonic, passenger liner sized craft for around a decade… and the US has been doing the same with the SR 72, both attempting to develop … something like turbo ramjet that transitions to scramjet at high speeds/altitudes.

    But a link to a research paper from 6 years ago is not actually a primary source to what your original link claims, but does not actually source.


  • I am willing to believe that this may have actually been developed…

    But a better source sure would be neat.

    Interesting/Wonderful Engineering both claim this was posted on ‘Social Media’ by the Chinese Academy of Sciences… with no link.

    South China Morning Post also claims a video posted by CAS on social media… with no link, no video.

    The english version of the CAS website is updated every couple of days, but this isn’t on it.

    Granted, they could be taking their time doing a proper translation.

    Does anybody know where to see this video?




  • Nope.

    If Trump can get alway with almost all of his bullshit, if the Supreme Court can just hurr durr away a hundred + years of legal precedent, then this whole system is bullshit.

    Anybody that is charge of or oversees the systemic application of violence toward great numbers of people, who is legally allowed to do so, in a system where the common person has 0 chance of ever altering this system to police itself and actually enact justice by preventing said person from doing that and prosecuting them for their crimes against the people…

    Anyone in such a position should be afraid, should keep suffering consequences until theyfinally figure out that they need to acquiesce to a reformation of the system, need to stop fucking over millions for the grotesque enrichment of thousands.

    When the game is rigged against you, play by your own rules, otherwise you guarantee your own defeat.