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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Also Author of Future Sepsis (Also available on Amazon!)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

If it makes you feel better, my gentoo life started on a single core 800Mhz duron so I feel your pain.

Get used to it! That's gentoo life.

It won't be a VPN ban, because of VPN ban would immediately impact millions of people in the laptop classes which includes millions of people who work for the government.

It'll be a ban on using VPNs for unapproved purposes.

Which in some ways is much worse because it's like a digital feudalism.

Even before 2020, I did some quick calculations showing that the idea that inflation was 2% per year was absolutely absurd. Especially in my neck of the woods, every bill has gone up multiples, and groceries are the worst. Meanwhile, they need to pretend that inflation was 2% that whole time because otherwise everyone's going to point out that my country's economy has been in freefall for decades.

And they say nobody wins in war.

Unfortunately, global politics is looking a lot like bum fights at the old folks home.

A lot of these people really ought to be embracing something like Buddhism in their old age: when you're almost 90, you should be starting to let go of your attachments to the physical world, because you're not going to be here much longer. Instead they're still acting like they're in their twenties.

Cincinnatus was considered Noble and virtuous because after being the absolute leader of Rome during a crisis, he returned to his farm to till the soil. How many of the global politicians have been explicitly unwilling to do anything like that?

A lot of Eastern contexts, there are two different types of demon: one of them is closer to a devil as we understand in the west, a malevolent existence it was only purposes to cause harm. The other one is almost more mundane: mara refers to those who stop you from reaching enlightenment in your lifetime. Through that lens, contemporary global politics is a non-anthropological embodiment of mara, leading elders into an undignified attachment to worldly affairs perhaps leaving behind ghosts who are more concerned with their imminent political power than finding spiritual completeness in the final days of their lives.

In maintaining this spiritually stifling attachment to personal power until the moment that they die, they also fell in their duty to prepare future generations. The successors of long-standing political individuals instead of being vital younger individuals, become someone who is only slightly younger. In this way it is almost guaranteed that there is no future.

The philosophy doesn't mean that the elders withdraw completely from life, but that they recognize their role as elders in preparing the world to no longer have them in it. Instead of continuing the fight, long ago they should have begun transitioning into roles as teachers and advisors for those who will one day take over from them.

I made a neat Discovery tonight.

My Chromecast 4K came with a power supply that doubles as a network adapter. It supports high speed internet so I didn't really have a use for it. I think it was yesterday I mentioned the cell phone I was installing postmarketOS on, I basically wanted to be a fairly long-term device that I will be using for building things on arm64. Now I can and could use the Wi-Fi for that purpose, and I still might, but I decided to try out the USB micro power adapter with the ethernet port inside, and sure enough the ethernet port in the power adapter provides ethernet to the phone.

I would imagine that it is USB on the go, so it's probably capped at an absolute maximum of 480 megabits, which is reason enough probably to stick with the wi-fi, but it's just a very interesting thing to discover that this unusual device is obviously standardized enough that it can provide ethernet connectivity to something else.

Not on this device.

It's always like "wow, and yet there aren't enough government resources to go after major crimes, huh?"

They want a return to feudalism where all property belongs to the king first.

playing with postmarketos on a Motorola G4 Play.

I went with phosh, and I'm actually impressed. Compared to my first time using real linux on a phone with my pinephone, this is actually surprisingly smooth, and a lot of it seems pretty intuitive. I think the browser it ships with is a desktop browser, and I have every reason to believe it could work with other desktop browsers.

Of course, the CPU is lacking, it only has 2GB of RAM (and only 8GB of flash), and I don't think it has any 3d acceleration so it's hardly a daily driver, but I only installed postmarketos on it because I wanted an aarch64 device running linux to complete a future project, but it really was shocking how snappy it was and how intuitive phosh is.

I'm expecting to get my hands on something considerably more modern in the near future, I'll have to give it a shot again once I do.

And they constantly make fun of him for not having white enough skin.

Jesus Christ, runkeeper...

Ngl, regardless of the merits of war with Iran, "please don't go to war I want number to go up" is weak.

"shit dropped my keys"

In the continuing saga of the little Dollar store RC car that could (be a riced up Honda Civic)

It turns out my boy in particularly likes vehicles that light up when they're going forward and backwards, so, I looked around the garage and I have no have these little green LEDs and a red led, and so I hatched a plan. The project was going to be to mount headlights inside the chassis, and it turns out that there was room in the chassis for these headlights, and then later on I expanded to include a tail light, because that just seems more fun that way. As I was going, I realized that I had just gotten a call from the bank, and they told me that if I kept on buying double a batteries for remote control cars that I was going to go broke and we were going to have to live in the street. So, I decided to make this a rechargeable $5 RC car from the dollar store. Previously, the dollar store used to buy these little rechargeable battery banks. They don't really do much with modern phone, but they do provide 5 volts which is more than enough for a little RC car, and they have a charging port. I haven't figured out exactly how to get a charging port outside of the car yet, so for the time being the plan is to basically have to rip the car apart every time it's time to charge, but I was able to fit everything together in the chassis, and it works. It gets power, although I have to admit not very well, I think there might be a minimum load that forces it to cut out (might be a max load cutout as well). However, the way that it's wired up the lights light up when it's moving forward and the tail light lights up when it's going in reverse, and considering that even on AA batteries this thing was running for hours on end, I expect to get a pretty good battery life out of it.

Now some of you might be looking at my workmanship and say that that's disgraceful and really sloppy. To you I have to say, good catch. You're absolutely right.

I'd typically be on the same page as you here, but c'mon -- it's a toy pretending to be a car pretending to be a toy pretending to be a sort of phone best known for practically not existing for generations of people.

Jean Baudrillard's simulations and simulacra describe how you start with reality, and reality is then simulated and eventually the simulation is simulated to create a simulacrum, and the original reality may in fact cease to exist. This toy really reminds me of that. There was once a thing as a rotary phone. The rotary phone was simulated in a children's toy. Then the children's toy itself is simulated in another children's toy, and meanwhile rotary phones have disappeared, and in an example of hyperreality, the reference to reality has disappeared entirely and the toy which is the simulation becomes an icon which is represented separately from its original context.
A hot wheels car shaped like a Fisher price toy shaped like a rotary telephone

So, I began an experiment yesterday night around the same time, and I went through the motions of that experiment and now I am on the other side and I can definitively say it didn't work and I'm not going to do it again.

I've been absolutely loving proxmox. I start off by running my servers on it, but lately I've been using it for small side projects, such as a big job I'm doing with respect to the haiku operating system. Running lxc containers is pretty cool, and for alternative operating systems I like being able to run everything in a virtual machine that's relatively light.

My main laptop is a beast. It's about 8 years old at this point, but it's got a 2060 RTX gpu, and a decent cpu, 32 gigs of ram, and spots for three separate forms of storage, two nvme ssds and a 2.5 mm Sata hard drive. The problem is, it's fairly loud, and it's getting a little bit unstable without sufficient cooling.

So I had a neat idea, I wanted to try running Windows 11 in a VM, and then give access to that VM to my GPU. The specific model of laptop I have is about as good as you're getting gas in that regard, it doesn't have too many surprises.

As always getting proxmox up and running was relatively straightforward, and other than ththeact that I had just used my big computer as a server and so I didn't really have anything else to connect with besides ancient historical artifacts, I relatively painlessly got Windows 11 up and running in a VM.

Immediately I could tell there were a lot of problems with this. Without immediate GPU support, even trying to surf the web was a challenge. Modern web browsers use the GPU to accelerate rendering of web pages, and so the web worked, but it looks a little bit flaky. As well, I wasn't really able to get the resolutions I was hoping for. However, I was hoping that those problems would go away once I completed the GPU pass through.

I did start to notice that there were things that I was really going to miss if all my computing lived in a VM. I didn't get the impression for example that I can expect Miracast streaming to come back, and the nextcloud client was acting a little bit flaky and it never acts flaky.

The final straw was doing the GPU pass through. I found a set of instructions that worked reasonably well, but success meant failure. Once I had everything up and running, the VM immediately died, and never came back. It also seized up in such a way that you couldn't make configuration changes to undo any of the things that were going on. Finally, proxmox decided that this was the final straw and hard locked, not even a kernel panic, just the cursor would stop blinking and the system would no longer respond to pings or keyboard input.

It was my understanding that what I was trying to do was a long shot on laptop hardware anyway, but it was nonetheless interesting, and it's always interesting to try to drive to the edge of what is reasonably achievable. One thing that's definitely sad is I think we are coming to the end of an era with respect to computer hardware. Building a relatively mid-tier gaming PC looks like the absolute top of the line in the last few decades.

Black people should be made aware of why there are no descendants of black slaves in the middle east.

They might smarten up right quick.

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