Only time something like that happened to me was when LTT got hacked. I was suddenly subscribed to some channels promoting a crypto scam pretending to have ties with Elon Musk. Turns out they had hacked and renamed a bunch of channels owned by the Linus Media Group.

Are any of your previous subscriptions missing?

Ctrl-z to suspend the running program.

bg to make it continue running in the background.

jobs to get an overview of background programs.

fg to bring a program to the foreground.

“The”. The “th” in “the” is the only sound in English I can think of that doesn’t have a very similar counterpart in Dutch. The closest you could get using just Dutch phonemes would be “zuh” or “duh”.

Worcestershire

We prefer to be called “experiencers”!

“Threshold” is one show I really liked that nobody seems to have heard of. Sadly cancelled after one season before anything was resolved. Loved the twist about the motivations of the alien intruders, though.

Currently rewatching “People of Earth”. Most amusing part for me is always the corporate office like vibe in the alien spaceship.

After the initial shock wore of, I think I’d want to know as much about them as possible. I’d ask them a lot of questions about what the hive mind is like and how it works.

I’d ask them to show me how they live and work, what they eat, where they sleep. What do they do for fun or to relax? Does a hive mind need to entertain itself? Do they engage in sports? Do they create or imagine any sort of fiction? Perform plays? Do they engage in any sort of rituals or practice religion? I’d request tours of their cities, factories, hospitals, distribution centers, homes, etc, or whatever kind of novel use of people and infrastructure they’ve come up with.

I’d also ask them about major scientific questions. I figure the hive mind might have some insights. Lambda-CDM or MOND? How does the brain work? What is consciousness? What do you know about the aliens who transmitted the virus? Is there more life out there?

I’d feel bad if they went out of their way to accommodate me, like stocking an entire supermarket just for me. So I’d look for a way to live comfortably that integrated well with their society. If they still like tasty food, I’d go to their dining halls or ask to be added too their food distribution program or whatever.

I would do a lot of traveling and maybe settle down somewhere if I found a really nice place.

I’d ask them if they’d prefer if I joined them willingly. If so, I’d propose an experiment where they disconnect a single individual from the hive mind. They’d need to be disconnected for at least as long as it takes to go through withdrawal from hard drugs. If after that said individual wanted to rejoin the collective, I might be a lot more willing to also join.

The Millionaire Tax will impose an additional 2% income tax on the top 1% in NYC, who are earning over $1 million per year.

As a European I am shocked! Shocked that you call this guy a socialist!

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I hear the SideQuest app store is the place to go.

I’ve got a Meta Quest 2 as a hand-me-down and yes, it’s extremely locked down. It’s possible to use a third-party app store, but to make it work you have to get a developer account with Meta and enable wireless debugging.

YOUR HOUSE IS A HOUSE OF PSEUDOSCIENCE! IN THE NAME OF FEYNMAN, MAY NONE OF YOUR PAPERS PASS PEER-REVIEW!!!

In this house we do not recognize phosphine as a biomarker! Get the fuck out of my face!

Starship Titanic comes to mind, though the text parser is only used to talk to characters.

You might also enjoy playing around with KathaaVerse. It uses AI (LLM) to turn any book into a text adventure. Last time I tried it, a lot of the time it felt more like playing a fever dream than an internally consistent story, though.

I’ve been using Linux for about 25 years. I completely stopped using Windows at home more than a decade ago.

I do some volunteer work for an organisation that refurbishes old computers and gives them to people who can’t afford one. For the time being we’re using Rufus to bypass TPM and other hardware requirements so we can install Windows 11 on everything.

We’re willing to install Linux for people who want it, but unfortunately I haven’t seen that happen yet. Most of our customers have no idea what an OS is. A lot of people also need Windows for education or work. There’s a free course available that teaches how to use a computer and of course that is also Windows-only.

We helped one of our colleagues to install Mint on his old laptop, though.

Baz Luhrmann - Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen

Any of the large, easy to use distributions should work just fine. I’d recommend a popular distribution because it’ll be easier to get help online. So consider Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and maybe Pop!_OS.

I think the main consideration should be which DE (desktop environment) she’d like to use. IMO the main contenders would be:

• KDE - Very configurable, nice looking, a bit heavy.
• Gnome - Simple and very opinionated, so not very configurable, a bit heavy.
• Cinnamon - Should feel familiar to Windows users, a bit faster than KDE and Gnome.
• Cosmic - A middle ground between Gnome’s simplicity and KDE’s configurability, pretty fast.
• XFCE - Very fast and light-weight, fairly configurable, but not very flashy.

Based on which DE she prefers, I’d suggest getting a distribution that comes with said DE by default, for the best possible integration. How do you figure out which DE she likes best? Put Ventoy on a USB stick along with a few different Linux ISOs. Ventoy wil let you choose which one to boot from a menu. You could get the following ISOs:

• Fedora or Ubuntu with Gnome
• OpenSUSE with KDE
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon
• Pop!_OS with Cosmic
• Mint or Ubuntu with XFCE

Download an ISO for each, install Ventoy on a USB stick and copy the ISOs to the stick. Boot into each ISO and play around with the desktop for a bit. When she’s figured out which DE she prefers, install a distribution that comes with that desktop.

I installed Windows 11 Pro 24H2 yesterday and the oobe\bypassnro trick worked for me. You just have to make sure no ethernet cable is connected. Then if you tell the installer you have no internet, it’ll let you create a local account.

The SR-71 is really fast and sleek, sure, but how can it be your favourite when it doesn’t even have a massive gun that goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!..?

I don’t think it’s the lyrics that trigger me, though.

As for movies, I can probably relate. I get annoyed when movies try to push my emotional buttons in a way that feels phony or manufactured. A lot of Disney and Spielberg movies tend to have this effect on me.

That also makes me irrationally angry, even though people should be allowed to be wrong…

Seriously, though, I think there’s something about the trick(s) these songs use to get stuck in people’s heads that triggers a very negative visceral reaction in me, like I’m being violated somehow. This leaves me no room to appreciate the songs’ originality or sound design.