Debian Testing.

Learning about the xz backdoor was a fun week.

“Stop doing what I told you to do and start doing what I want you to do!” has been uttered in my office a few times.

I’m a software developer. My default explanation to people who don’t know what that means is, “I whisper to computers, and sometimes they do what I ask”.

Either:

• continuing to languish in obscurity with its rough-around-the-edges UX that fails to draw in anyone except self-sufficient computer savvy types who smugly proclaim they like it that way while impatiently tapping their feet and glancing at their wristwatches waiting for mainstream socials to collapse already, or
• wildly thriving, but dominated by an oligopoly of major breakout platforms that dominate the rest of the ecosystem, subtly altering it over the course of many small, tolerable nudges to the point that it hardly resemble what anyone who is currently here liked about it in the first place.

My money is on the former.

I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its “chemistry engine”, as they call it. That meticulously programmed system of interactions where absolutely everything in the world affects everything else in ways that are intuitive. Wooden objects burn, lightning strikes metal things, fire will melt ice, electrified objects will conduct through metal and water, etc. That, in tandem with its cel-shaded artstyle, minimalist piano flourish soundtrack, and general lonely, somber vibe in a mechanically lush but socially empty world. That’s the identity of BotW.

I haven’t played Genshin Impact so I don’t know how deep the similarities are. It sure superficially resembles BotW if you squint and look at it from a distance. Big open world, vibrant cel-shaded graphics, live in-overworld combat, you can climb walls and soar with glider physics, they got the high fantasy plus inexplicably advanced magitech thing going on… definitely some marks on the bingo card, but not really things particularly unique to BotW, either. I have no idea how much Genshin Impact actually resembles BotW up close.

Surprised how, of all the people who took the bait, not a single one of them complained about systemd.

My beard isn’t long enough to have an opinion about systemd. All I know is all my homies hate systemd for some reason.

The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.

Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.

50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.

The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.

The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.

Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.

Yes. On average.

If you specifically take 100 kilos of core material from the Sun, then it would be a no contest victory for the Sun. But the Sun is very, very big, and when it comes to producing energy, most of it is doing absolutely nothing. So it brings the average energy production per kilo way, way down.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we’ll help you find your footing.

I mean, yeah, kind of. In the same way pilots fly planes out of a stubborn sense of pride for knowing what all the flight deck controls do.

I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.

On the other hand, if you average the Sun’s energy generation across its entire volume and adjust for that volume’s mass, an equivalent mass of human body tissue generates more heat energy.

So your eyes may not have the raw lumen output of an entire star; but, pound for pound, your eyes would outshine a similarly massive piece of one.

Well, you know what they say. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it interested in learning about the water cycle to have a deeper understanding of why the river flows in the first place.

“Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.

I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.

Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It’s only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.

Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that’s the point, obviously. It’s the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.

Me, personally, I usually don’t need emoji seasoning. I’m fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that’s just my lame opinion.

And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I’m always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They’re not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it’s written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn’t quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I’m on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.

Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn’t rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I’d use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.

Pokémon Sun. Basically Hawaii with better healthcare. I’ll probably survive.

I’ll be homesick for the extreme four season climate I’m used to before too long, though. I just got back from a trip to Hawaii, and even just a week of it was bordering on too long.

At any rate, happy to answer this question today rather than two weeks earlier. I’d be better off in Alola than trying to survive alone shipwrecked on Nauvis.

Hawaii is exactly the place that made me write this comment.

Kind of a lame example that depending on who you are may make you go, “Uhh… yeah? Duh?” but…

Y’know how Hollywood has been using the same library of stock sounds for like half a century? Wilhelm scream tier stuff? Like, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of those stock baby noises, or that ape screeching, you know the ones, I’d have a good chunk of change by now.

And if you ever encounter real world examples of some of these things, they never sound quite like those recordings. This is in large part because Hollywood loves pairing sounds of specific creatures or objects with footage of completely different creatures or objects that in reality sound nothing like that (e.g. no, bald eagles do not make that noise at all). So these sounds become reified in your head as “the sounds fake shit in movies make”. The acoustic equivalent of what fruit flavored candies are to actual fruits. Does that make sense?

All this to say, it’s really disorienting when you encounter things in the real world that actually make these noises. Particularly if you aren’t regularly used to being around them.

For me in particular, it’s roosters and horses. My mind is conditioned to assume that the stock noises for these creatures I hear in films and the like are, I dunno, extremely cherry-picked noises from some specific breed or species of the animal that aren’t the ones I’d commonly find around me. Not the case! They really do sound like that! To a spookily accurate degree, too. Being around them feels like someone is pranking me with a soundboard, I almost can’t believe it’s real.

It’s a bit depressing that sound design of film has disillusioned me to the point I’m shocked to hear that roosters in real life actually sound like roosters in movies and on TV, but nonetheless here we are.