Well, tomorrow is election day in New York and New Jersey. My coworkers are complaining about how unfairly Zorhan Mamdani is going to treat the landlords. This irredeemable nation must perish.

About to write a crank essay titled “Are quality inspectors cops?”

I keep restarting in WR:SR. Trying a map of Cuba I grabbed from the Steam Workshop this time. Without the need to worry about heat plants, a lot of opportunities open up. I skipped the indoor pool to build a soccer field for once.

Accidentally had about 70 people move in early, but I was able to manage water/sewage by truck until the plumbing was finished.

With SLI you are limited to the amount of video memory present on one card. Because the 970 is already bottle-necked by memory, there is no point of trying this.

There might be some applications where you can put both cards to use. A second card can be “passed through” to a virtual machine (assuming the CPU / motherboard has the required features). This has the drawback that you need a second physical display to see the VM output though, and configuring the whole thing is not easy. There are also provisions in the Vulkan API for applications to make use of multiple GPUs, but this is pretty advanced functionality which the vast majority of applications don’t touch at all. It is not the kind of thing which unlocks extra performance for free. You won’t see any benefit unless someone wrote a few thousand lines of low level Vulkan API code to use this to implement a specific algorithm. Something where paying the round-trip cost of getting data from system RAM onto the GPU, then back into system RAM from the GPU for further processing is worth it. Useless for games, but possibly useful in off-line simulations or bulk video processing.

My brother still uses a 970 on Fedora. Anything Nvidia has made since 2014 is supported by the modern driver.

The idea of harnessing the power of monopoly social media algorithms is not much different from the idea of harnessing the power of the bourgeois state itself. We are talking about a set of rules which can be changed arbitrarily whenever they start losing. Whenever the corporation starts catching flak from advertisers or lobby groups. Whenever Congress threatens to impose regulations or issue subpoenas to humiliate their executives to force them to cooperate. We have witnessed several rounds of this now.

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is a reason the monopoly platforms pipeline people towards fascism. It isn’t because the Left is negligent when it comes to propaganda. It is because these platforms were designed from the very first brick for the purpose of advertising and surveillance. The right does not have to worry about surveillance the way the left does. They also have all the profits they reap from exploitation to invest in culturally reinforcing their ideological project. They have the funds to boost any mediocre streamer, video essayist, and debate lord. They have the funds to point a couple hundred thousands fake subs at Ben Shapiro so he shows up on the Apple Podcasts landing page every day. They will land their books on the NYT best-seller list simply by ghost-writing them for a politician and buying crates of them as a legally justified form of bribery.

It is important to agitate wherever there are people we can reach, but any structure we build on these platforms will never have a solid foundation. The important thing is to establish collectives capable of producing high quality media in appropriate formats for platforms like this and try to plug them in wherever we can. Something which can outlive the arbitrary censorship they are going to face.

You’re in luck. For the meantime, a lot of these embedded systems are still running operating systems like Windows XP, or Windows NT 4.0.

Let’s assume they would have their phone on me as well. Would a VPN protect them?

VPNs operate on layer 3 of the OSI model. The “physical” connection between your… friend’s phone and the service provider is layers 1 (radio) and 2 (4G/5G/LTE/whatever). The phone company knows who’s phone is connected and sending traffic to which tower (and how much traffic, when). They know the traffic is going to a VPN service (based on the protocol + publicly known address of the destination). They just don’t know the contents or the final destination of the traffic beyond the VPN service.

The information they have from layer 2 (signal strength at multiple towers, IMEI, SIM) is enough to identify the device, the subscriber and triangulate the source of the signal to a neighborhood. It may not be as precise as GPS, but it is enough to blow up an alibi or strengthen the case for a warrant.

If a phone is within 2000 feet of a crime scene, that might not be enough (under liberal democracy rules), but if a phone is always within 2000 feet of a series of intermittant crimes over the span of months, the owner is going to be the #1 suspect, and the police are going to seize it.

Everyone in this thread is wrong. Double space is good practice. Modern typesetting makes it unnecessary? Who cares? The layout engine can just ignore the space and function semantically. If it doesn’t, its broken and should be fixed. On the other hand, text editors designed for adults with functions that operate on sentences as a unit use the double space to distinguish between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence. Emacs users are a powerful enemy.

This is what they would do if they were smart, but a significant portion of the Dems still regard their constituents as serfs, wholly undeserving of any sort of concessions or relief even if it were in the best interests of preserving the Empire. They are mercenaries who do whatever their short-sighted donors pay them to do, and if their constituents don’t like it, well, I hope they like Trump!

The ultimate shortcoming of social democratic reformism is that it is a project driven by the desire to add creature comforts to the Death Star. Get some lower rents, better wages, better education and transit infrastructure and it doesn’t matter which governments we overthrow or which people we genocide. The billionaires still get to organize society and decide any significant matters of state policy. In truth, Bernie Sanders was their golden fucking ticket to reform the Empire, cut out a lot of the obscene waste and inefficiency, and position the US to remain competitive through the 21st century. They didn’t even consider it for a second. Not in 2016, not in 2020, and nothing is different today. They would rather accumulate the titles to empty luxury condos built with foam-clad particle board in a country full of illiterate peasants.

In the best case, Mamdani won’t be a revolutionary figure, but even in the apparent case, leading the biggest city in the US as a figure in the mold of Sanders, the amount of ire he draws from institutional power for basic policies like rent control and free transit is utterly discrediting to all of these institutions. They would be much better served by embracing and cooping him wholeheartedly, making the financial speculators take a haircut, and building a workforce of educated, LOYAL, and healthy subjects who aren’t living under conditions of debt peonage. Nothing would do more to take the wind out of the sails of revolutionary communism than putting the Millennials in houses and guaranteeing some plausible form of retirement that they won’t get sick and die before reaching, or see their 401Ks gambled away by the world’s most obvious charlatans and perverts if they suffer long enough. Across the board, they could buy themselves another generation or two by doing this, yet they are utterly incapable. Every day they fire up a brand new think tank to try to market doing absolutely fucking nothing as “Abundance,” or to frame the absolute failure of Liberalism as the aftermath of implementing socially progressive policies they never even entertained.

As much as these social democrats won’t save us, they do a tremendous job of showing us how few allies we have. How essential it is to plant the seeds of the social organizations which will replace these decrepit liberal civic institutions. How quickly “our sacred values” like truth, democracy, and the rule of law disappear the second the rent-seeking parasites are forced to consider running a tighter ship.

Once upon a time some 20ish years ago I was fucking around with the family computer setting up some Linux OS to dual boot. I did not have X server set up, but I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to connect to DSL using PPPoE and well on my way. My dad asked me if he could check something on the internet for a minute, and I hooked him up with Links pointed at the Google homepage. He was like “what the fuck is this?” and walked away.

Fennec is not a fork. It is just Mozilla Firefox built with the branding disabled (and potentially some other build-system flags depending on the distributor) so it can be distributed in places like F-Droid without trademark restrictions.

It was. A lot of people bounced at the time.

Running KDE (a.k.a. “Plasma”) does not require any changes to the underlying OS. It is just additional software which can be installed from the package manager. The display manager (the thing which prompts you for a username/password to log in) allows you to choose which desktop environment (I.e. Gnome, Cinnamon, Plasma) you would like to use for your session.

Distros which ship separate Gnome/KDE versions pretty much differ only in their default settings and out-of-the-box experience.

When I first saw this sketch I assumed the totenkopf insignia was fictional because it is comic book villain shit.

Asking a new EDM operator to gather the used wire from the back of the machine and wind it onto an empty spool because we’re running low.

I don’t think we will ever see a consolidation of Free Software operating systems. Individual people’s use cases differ. Some people favor security, some people favor the latest features. Some people have powerful workstations and want to flex them while others have older computers or battery-powered devices and want something light-weight. Other people specifically require compatibility with antiquated software or hardware, whether for nostalgia reasons, neccessity, or because they work for a kulak who is too cheap to spring for an inventory system from this century. Others still are tied to a specific software stack, like the popular pfSense firewall which is tightly integrated with the FreeBSD network stack. Things like this inevitably lead to software configurations which are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as one size fits all (though virtual machines go a long way towards mitigating this).

An operating system is a complex piece of technology. It’s like a car. They’ve all got engines and tires, but do you need? A sedan, a pickup, a van, a bus, a dump truck? A lot of people don’t give a shit if it’s a Mazda or a Toyota, but they still have to choose one or the other, even after narrowing their search down to cheap sedan which can plausibly reach 200k. There are differences between a Toyota Camry and a Mazda Protege if you are discerning or care about it, but a lot of people get hung up on this when they don’t even know what to look for and someone says “here try this, it has a steering wheel, a gas pedal, brakes, power windows, two roomy cup holders, and the replacement parts are relatively cheap.”

The breadth of choices available in Free Software operating systems is a reflection of the material conditions created by decades of consumer electronics production. Operating systems like Windows and MacOS are designed to sell new devices. They are not deeply concerned with technical debt, or keeping 10+ year old machines running. Free Software operating systems don’t have the privilege of shipping on new hardware, or the power to impose standards and consistency on hardware vendors like CPU architecture, firmware standards, minimum screen resolutions, graphical capabilities, memory availability, input methods, physical ports, etc. The task at hand is much broader. Anywhere there is a substantial amount of tech threatened by obsolescence, there is a motive to give it a second life. Anywhere there is “obsolete” tech and a lack of the productive means or the finances to replace it, there is a material need to make adaptations with whatever is available. This happens from the level of second-hand gaming PCs in the imperial core all the way down to the shoe-string computers and mobile devices in the global south. These adaptations don’t always involve just wiping the thing and installing Linux, but there are enough cases where this is the first step.

The problem is the platforms (e.g. Facebook / YouTube / Reddit / etc), not the medium (the “world wide web,” aka HTML/CSS/JS over HTTP). End-users are largely uninterested in the medium, they are interested in the content. Social media, news, banking, email, checking the weather, getting directions, etc. For an alternative to take off, there needs to be new platforms which provide comparable experiences.

The Fediverse comes close. Yes, you still use it largely through a web browser, but there is a substantial infrastructure there which, while based on HTTP, is largely agnostic to the contemporary web browser. The web interface is just a front-end. The front-end is non-exclusive and it is possible to implement Fediverse servers without using a web app at all. There is not much standing in the way of developing a Fediverse platform with a dedicated client, and the distributed nature of the network allows this to be done piecemeal.

People will be sending hyperlinks all over the place until the day the world wide web is dead for good though, so there needs to be some way of dealing with them.

I just assume he sounds like Gilbert Gottfried.

This isn’t strictly limited to tech. The same thing going on in manufacturing (minus using “AI” as a rhetorical device). They’re not replacing anybody they fire. Not at all in the past year. Institutional knowledge is dangling by a thread. There’s like one lead operator in any given department who is truly proficient with the machinery and capable of training new hires. Who knows the jobs, the history of defects, the problems to look for, the solutions to common technical problems, etc.