• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.

    They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.

    Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.


  • is it dishonorable to find loopholes in the rules of the honor culture

    Dueling culture in 18th and 19th century Europe was commonly organized around concepts of “gentlemanly honor”. Even back then, people recognized the need for loopholes.

    Consider the case of two friends who got drunk at a tavern, each one declaring how much they loved the other. Eventually, one friend goes overboard “I love you more than you know!” to which the response is “But that cannot be, for my love of you is infinite!”. Soon this becomes an argument over who loves the other more, and eventually they have to settle their friendship like gentlemen: With swords at dawn. If they’re smart and sober up in time, their seconds will work out a solution before the fight, but there are cases recorded where the friends kill each other because honor trumps love.

    There were also loopholes which worked to favor the person that society already deemed more “honorable” (wealthy, connected, liked, etc). It was generally accepted that a gentleman of certain standing could honorably refuse another’s challenge to duel if their social stations were different. Think a “new money” banker’s son challenging a minor nobleman over a loan that’s due. It simply wouldn’t look good to have some commoner slaying an aristocrat, even if said aristocrat was an asshole.



  • Not sure what motherboard you have: Most consumer boards only support “FakeRAID”, which requires a kernel driver to actually function. Good luck finding a vendor who wrote a driver for Linux.

    I’d definitely recommend software RAID instead, as you’ll have better support. I like btrfs, so I’d recommend you set up your new drives to use a btrfs RAID configuration. mdadm is another option, if you really like ext4.




  • Oh, judicial duels have always been bad, tending to favor the wealthy who can afford training. The pistol duel was once considered egalitarian because you were just as likely to miss your opponent regardless of how much you trained. For most of the 20th century (until the 90s) Uruguay had legalized dueling. It was mostly used by politicians and the powerful to muder journalists and lawyers who “defamed” them.

    But if we are already living in a period where the rich act with impunity anyway, I want a world where there’s a nonzero chance that we get to watch Elon Musk take an estoc to the face because of a twitter argument.




  • You’ve laid out one potential development cycle: FOSS from the get-go, and open collaboration welcome.

    However, that’s not the only way that a FOSS game might be developed. The code could be freely licensed, but the upstream developers refuse to accept outside patches. In that case, there’s one “original” and then if you don’t like it, build your fork.

    Alternatively, a game could be developed entirely in-house under proprietary licenses, and then only made FOSS upon commercial release. Contributor patches could improve the project, but conception of the game would be entirely the domain of its original developers.


  • How about writing a script to automate the deletion, thus minimizing the chance of human error being a factor? It could include checks like “Is this a folder with .git contents? Am I being invoked from /home/username/my_dev_workspace?”

    In a real aviation design scenario, they want to minimize the bullshit tasks that take up cognitive load on a pilot so they can focus on actually flying. Your ejector seat example would probably be replaced with an automatic ejection system that’s managed by the flight computer.