Generally I think immutable distros are the best entry-level distros for newcomers. Stops people from accidentally bricking their system.

Yes, after the reign of Stalin, where Khrushchev took over, the USSR deescalated the Cold War, yet it was the actions taken by Stalin’s regime that let the conflict start to begin with, with the USSR not retreating from Iran as the other Allied Forces did, the threat of force in the Turkish Straits crisis, comparing Churchill to Adolf Hitler and breaking the Yalta Agreement by meddling with the 1947 Polish elections.

Also, the article seems to be paywalled, so I have to see when I get around to reading it.

It might be that my comparison wasn’t the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn’t as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn’t always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin’s later rule, after his wife committed suicide.

Yet I can’t really agree that it was “killed off” during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they “licked their own wounds” after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.

I am not so sure if the dissolution was really avoidable. I like to use the DDR as a comparison, as it does resemble the USSR post-war pretty well, due to the USSR pretty much dismantling factories in their occupation zone to compensate their own losses only to stop that as they realized the other occupation forces were strengthening their own zones and so reverting their course, leaving the then formed DDR in a similar state as the government that spawned in.

During the time of its existence, the DDR suffered from supply shortages to the point where the Trabant, the most driven car in the DDR had a chassis made out cotton-based thermoset. Yet at the same time government paranoia was at it’s peak, where the MfS (the East German equivalent of the KGB) coerced and blackmailed citizen to aid in the espionage and recruit them as informants against their neighbours, just to collect as much information on their citizen as possible in case they are suspected to be traitors as more and more people tried to flee the extreme poverty they had to live with. Yet the party was riddled with corruption, as the last generation of DDR politicians realized as the old ones resigned and allowed a new wave to take the lead, seeing the actual numbers of the debt of the government and the state of the country had to face with, even though the older generation of politicians were initially against Gorbachev’s Perestroika plan.

I think this level of hidden debt, corruption and paranoia/secrecy was the reason why Gorbachev claimed that the Chernobyl disaster caused the downfall of USSR, as it was the epitome of what plagued the whole nation ever since the war. Nobody wanted to speak out the truth for their fear of their status or even their lives, as they either get painted as a saboteur or gets silenced by those who would be targeted as well if the truth came out. Getting rid of that issue would be nothing less of a government dissolution, because no one could be really trusted.

The only issues I had with Laptops so far were the WIFI drivers, as some distros, such as Debian, don’t have them OOTB. I think especially the major players with a focus on recent patches however, such as fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch and many others can install them rather easily during the installation.

I had this problem at work a week ago or so, at least with Fujitsu PCs. For them, the main cause isn’t an empty CMOS battery, but rather that Fujitsu generally had too little BIOS cache, since there is nothing about it in the UEFI standard. The update basically overfilled that cache, rendering the BIOS completely unusable. The POST doesn’t even go through fully.

The PC are sort of bricked, you gotta put the mainboard into recovery mode, put the ROM file on a freeBSD formatted stick and wait until you see instructions on the screen. Follow them, restart the PC. I recommend setting the BIOS to the optimized default settings, as not doing that might make the boot of Windows pretty slow in some cases. I did hear that it can delete the keys from the TPM, but I haven’t seen that with my PCs at work.

I think it can be both. However they are no justification as to why one should buy and like a game they clearly won’t like for various reasons. Even more, trying to “fix” a game can alter the game’s impact on the player. There’s a reason why roguelikes/roguelites are so hard, and taking away the difficulty will lessen the experience. That’s why most people also, for example, won’t use cheating tools for their single player games apart from screwing around.

Honestly, I think that this was a horrid read. It felt so unfocused, shallow and at times contradictory.

For example, at the top it talked about how software implementation has the highest adoption rate while code review/acceptance has the lowest, yet it never really talks about why that is apart from some shallow arguments (which I will come back later), or how to integrate AI more there.

And it never reached any depth, as any topic only gets grazed shortly before moving to the next, to the point where the pitfalls of overuse of AI (tech debt, security issues, etc.) are mentioned, twice, with no apparent acknowledgement of its former mention, and never mentioned how these issues get created nor show any examples.

And what I think is the funniest contradiction is that from the start, including the title, the article pushes for speed, yet near the end of the article, it discourages this thinking, saying that pushing dev teams for faster development will lead to corner cutting, and that for a better AI adoption one shouldn’t focus on development speed. Make up your damn mind before writing the article!

I do like the hooks on Display Port, honestly. There were quite a few times where HDMI cables came loose while adjusting my screen due to the cable being tied together with other cables for organisational purposes. Putting it back in always a chore then.

I don’t think it is even much of a hassle when unplugging it from a machine, such as a PC. I do agree it’s a pain for monitors however, as the ports usually are in a more indented position.

Generally during the mounting process, which is pretty early on at the OS boot process.

Yeah, that’s a risk. However you’ll always risk having leftovers from programs, even when continuing to use an OS, simply because you might switch programs, the developer rethinks where they store the config files, etc…

In most cases these files are relatively small and won’t be very noticeable in the long run. However if that still bothers you have no other choice but to cleanup your config files regardless.

Also, those config files are generally only for your own user, i.e. user-related configurations, not program-dependent ones. System configs are generally stored outside the user profiles.

Honestly, I’d argue it depends on the use case. A lightweight distro meant for basic tasks will never consume as much as a gaming one. Factoring in that your snapshots will naturally grow over time (and thus disk space) will mean that repartitioning, and getting bigger hard drives, is always a thing.

I’d still just trust the general installation guide, if it offers automatic partition allocation. Just only do partitions for /boot, / and /home, I’ve never found much use for /var /log and such as a separate partition, at least as a home user.

And when in doubt: use LVM with ext4 for dynamic partitions. BTRFS has a similar feature, but it’s still experimental, and thus potentially unstable.

I recommend making your /home a separate partition. It makes switching distros easier and also allows you to not encrypt your installation and only your own files, saving you from the headache in the case LUKS doesn’t work properly anymore.

Scanners like to do funny things

I know it’s not very relevant, but that reminds me of a talk held during a CCC (Chaos Computer Club) convention.

It’s in German, but I’ll try to summarize it: Someone noticed the numbers on a scanned page didn’t match the original, so they hired an expert to find out what happened. Turns out that the printer they were using had a feature that would detect symbols that looked the same and basically copypasted ome cutout of the symbol onto the other to save space on the final PDF. Due to the print/copy quality, this substitution sometimes malfunctioned, substituting similar looking symbols, such as 8 and 0.

Fun fact: those gas station pills also contain Viagra, to make sure they work.

So, just buy Viagra instead. You’ll be safer.

I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.

I disagree. The Imperium of Man is basically slowly inching towards its downfall with corpse starch (i.e. ground up corpses) being a common food for hive cities and the Inquisition being an ever looming threat for the populace. Not to mention that if you ever have have the misfortune of being near anything Chaos-y, you are often greeted by the Ordo Hereticus before your life is snuffed out. And considering that Belisarius Cawl frantically fell into prayer when confronted by a powerful AI core of old does show that the Adeptus Mechanicus are far from their power way back when, let alone any promise of immortality for the masses.

Psychic blanks have it even worse, as they might not even be connected to the warp, meaning they might just fade into nonexistence after their death. And overall, being a Chaos Worshipper isn’t that great as well, as most citicem are not treated well, not to mention that the ruinous powers will slowly drive you insane as well.

Last but not least is that the end of the whole 40K in-universe might be overall crawling to an end, as the Tyranids might be unstoppable by organic beings (apart from possibly the Orks), so it might be that the universe-wide apocalypse is slowly inching closer, leaving only the Necrons behind after the Tyranids seek out the next galaxy to devour.

I’d rather choose the old boring life here in this universe any day over the one from 40K.

It seems interesting, but at the same time the demos all seem to feature presses/simple gestures like stroking an object. The article’s title however, at least in my opinion, implies something along the lines as we see in capacitive displays, mainly a touchpad.

Interesting tech nonetheless! Especially the plant example seems interesting, as it implies that interactions can also occur on less conventional surfaces.

While genetic research has huge potential in early diagnoses, and possible prevention, of illnesses caused by genetic defects, the statement that one can determine (general) intelligence of a potential offspring by checking embryos seems nonsensical from the get go.

First of all would be the definition of (general) intelligence. What exactly is it? Even when assuming that an IQ test cannot be cheated, the concept of reflecting one’s general problem solving skills by a number makes little sense. Can we really say that a savant that heavily struggles with everything but in one field has the same intelligence as someone that is completely standard in any way when both have the same IQ score? I would say not, as the former would need much more support than the latter.

Furthermore, often points concerning something related to eugenics ignore the nature vs nurture debate. How much of our skills are dependent on our environment? To what extent can we say that our minds have a limit on how intelligent we are? It’s hard to say, as there isn’t much research about it, and experiments on that topic are often inhumane, historically speaking. So we need to keep this lack of knowledge in mind when talking about topics like eugenics.

Alternatively you can also use aluminium. Snails have a natural allergy to aluminium due to a reaction happening between the metal and their slime. Therefore they will avoid aluminium at all cost.