Hamartiogonic

Hamartiogonic, 10 days ago

No internal organs either! Looks like they were all scooped out, as if this dino was being prepared for mummification.

There’s also a clear fracture line in the chest. My guess is that’s where the chest pain was coming from.

Hamartiogonic, 9 days ago

After all, there are fake doctors, so why not fake patients too? There’s also fake medicine, so all of it should work out perfectly.

Hamartiogonic, 8 days ago

Yes. It’s fakeception all the way.

Hamartiogonic, 11 days ago

Yep. That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass the filter unharmed. In our case, the discovery of fossil fuels and nuclear weapons may be those kinds of stages.

Imagine what happens if we pass this filter and become an intergalactic species. Maybe one day we’ll start tinkering with technology capable of destroying a star, galaxy or the entire universe. If we are smart enough to squeeze energy out of the very fabric of space, we might also be dumb enough to cause the entire universe to collapse or something like that.

It’s a proposed solution to the fermi paradox. The idea is that we don’t see aliens out there in the stars, because they all nuked themselves to oblivion at some stage. Maybe they never reached the stars, before they destroyed their home planet. Maybe they blew up their own star and didn’t reach another one in time. Maybe their entire galaxy got sucked into a home-made black hole.

Hamartiogonic, 11 days ago

Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?

Meh, probably not.

Hamartiogonic, 11 days ago

That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.

Hamartiogonic, 11 days ago

I’ve been running Fedora on a desktop for many years, and recently I finally got tired of the updates not working. Sure, it’s nice to have GUI, but if you end up using the terminal anyway to actually get stuff done, can you really say the GUI is helping a new users.

Many years before that, I also experimented with a bunch of different distributions to see if there’s anything I can recommend to a new user. Manjaro was pretty close, but you end up using the terminal anyway, because you’ll eventually run into some weirds stuff that requires terminal intervention.

Mint was slightly better, because you didn’t need the terminal quite as often and installing proprietary drivers through the GUI was easy and it actually worked. That’s why, at the time, Mint was the only distro I could recommend to just about anyone. Most people would still need some help installing the distro, but once it’s up and running Mint is likely to give you fewer headaches than other distributions.

All the other distros I’ve tried absolutely needed some terminal time every now and then. If the user needs a smoother experience with less time tweaking and hacking, Windows would be my first recommendation. However, it’s all a matter of priorities. How much do you value your free time or privacy. Are you interested technology at all. Those sorts of questions determine if Linux is a viable candidate.

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago

As far as I’m concerned, it’s just another “random flu bug”. Most people are vaccinated, so they won’t be getting severe symptoms. Immunocompromised people are in big trouble, but that was also true before 2019. Basically any disease is dangerous to them; has always been.

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago

Yeah, you’re right. I was kinda hoping that people would wear masks more openly when they suspect they might have the flu and try to prevent it from spreading to everyone around them. That sort of cultural shift didn’t last very long once the restrictions were lifted.

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago

Technically correct.

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago

Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago

Never had CPU compatibility issues, but I’ve had similar frustrations with power supplies. Some of the strangest glitches I’ve seen were eventually traced back to a cheap PSU. If you hadn’t already found the root cause, I would have recommended swapping the PSU just to make sure.

Hamartiogonic, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

As a lazy Arch user, I can tell you that there will be frustrating moments, but not that many. Mostly you’ll be fine, but be prepared for minor annoyances.

Features

If you didn’t install it, it’s not on the system. That’s good for a minimalistic system, but frustrating for a lazy admin. Once you’ve ironed out all the issues you encounter during the first few months, the system should be pretty solid and worry free. However, once you encounter a new situation, you have to do your research, and install (and maybe even configure) that one missing thing. Later down the line, this becomes increasingly rare, but never disappears completely, so be prepared for minor annoyances like this.

Interventions

Before updating, check the official site for big news. Some rare updates require intervention, so you should know what you’re doing before updating your system. Usually it’s totally fine, and you can run the update command blind folded. It’s definitely not recommended, but it’s not going to destroy a simple installation any time soon. If you do complex stuff with your system, the updates become more frustrating. However, once you break your grub this way, you’ll learn to read those notes before updating. These things don’t happen often, but once a special update like that does roll out, you’re going to find it frustrating. Could take a few years, so you don’t really need to worry about it today. Just know what you’re getting into.

Updating takes a while

I update roughly once a week, but occasionally only once a month. Maybe there’s something wrong with my connection or settings, but I get timeouts all the time. As a result, I ended up just using the no timeout option instead of actually doing my research and looking into this problem. Need to take that deep dive one weekend eventually. One month worth updates is also a lot of data to download, and I’m getting 0 kb/s for several minutes at a time, so it takes even longer. A lazy admin suffers from annoyances like these. Be prepared for something similar to happen to your system sooner or later. Probably takes only 30 minutes of reading and two commands to fix, but I’ll get around to it another day. Before anyone asks, yes, I’m using a list of the fastest servers, and no, I haven’t updated that list in months.

I still have Arch on my main laptop, but recently I replaced the Fedora of my HTPC with Debian. I just can’t be bothered to spend a minute on system maintenance, so Debian is better suited for that purpose. I’m still going to stick with Arch for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Probably just sunk cost fallacy at this stage…

Hamartiogonic, 14 days ago

If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.

On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.

Hamartiogonic, 14 days ago

Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.

However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.

So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.

Hamartiogonic, 13 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Thanks. I should really look into automatically updating the mirrorlist. I’ll start with reflector and the others you mentioned.

Hamartiogonic, 13 days ago

Most likely AUR is the main issue here. I’ve specially avoided it to make my system as simple and easy as possible, so my experience has been a bit different. The thing about Arch is that every system is unique, and it’s hard to say something that would apply to all of them.

Hamartiogonic, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

Interestingly, that’s what someone said in the last post that claimed that people are doing it wrong. So, now we have two opposing claims, both of which are actually popular according to some people. Maybe half the world believes the other half is doing it wrong?

Maybe there is a a marginal belief which is truly unpopular. How about not voting at all? How about an even more obscure method where you never touch the upvote, but only selectively downvote specific posts that deserve to be buried?

Hamartiogonic, 12 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Is there a community where we can post whatever the popular opinion happens to be at the time? A sister community for !unpopularopinion seems to be increasingly necessary.

Hamartiogonic, 16 days ago

What would be a better way to use those buttons?

Hamartiogonic, 16 days ago

I’ve been thinking about these buttons, what they do, and what do I want to convey when using them. Just using them to convey what I agree or disagree with comes quite naturally, but I don’t think that’s the best way to do it.

IMO a better way would be to upvote when I believe that more people should see this post or comment, and downvote, when the society as a whole would benefit if fewer people saw this stuff. I may personally disagree with something, but still believe that this stuff is good for other people to see. It’s all highly subjective, so clearly right or wrong answers in this regard are bit rare.

Hamartiogonic, 17 days ago

But what about cutting steel with a plasma torch? Could you see macroscopic results of particles doing counterintuitive quantum stuff?

Hamartiogonic, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

So… no superposition, entanglement, tunneling or teleportation in macroscopic scale. ☹️

Hamartiogonic, 17 days ago

Next try to calculate what it would actually mean to make that much water follow a path like that. My guess is, it’s going to get very spicy.

Hamartiogonic, 17 days ago

“went viral on X this past week”

Wait, they are not using the official “previously known as Twitter” phrase anymore? World is really changing fast.