sylver_dragon

I hated pretty much every book I had to read for school. I realize that some of the classic literature is consider classic for very good reasons, but all it did to teenage me was turn me off classic literature. And seriously, fuck everything about Dickens. The only Great Expectations in that book were the expectations of the teachers that the students could stay awake and alert while slogging through it.

That said, there are two common books in US high schools which I do think are worth a read: 1984 and A Brave New World. Neither should be particularly surprising, but both provide a good view into how a modern dystopian society might work. References also show up all over the place in modern society.

It’s a spiritual successor to 538, but if anyone has a better option, glad to be informed:

I would argue that the actual successor to 538 is Nate Silver’s substack. You know, the guy who founded 538: https://www.natesilver.net/
There is also Galen Druke’s podcast/substack, where he continues the spirit of the 538 podcast directly: https://www.gdpolitics.com/
And then there is the Still Counting podcast which might as well be titled “The 538 podcast, but ABC still owns that name, so we called it something else”: https://www.youtube.com/@StillCountingPodcast

Ok ya, it’s second. A pretty distant second:

I care about corruption and would like to see everyone involved in the Trump Administration and ICE dragged into a RICO suit as soon as we have a DOJ which isn’t part of that corrupt conspiracy. But, voters are going to vote on the same thing they always vote on: their own perceived economic interest. Thankfully, Americans seem to finally be waking up to the idea that the GOP really doesn’t have their best interests at heart and now trust Democrats more on the economy.

If we’re going to stop the bleeding, we need to flip the Senate to get any sort of push-back against the corruption. We need to keep reminding people that the price of diesel is directly the fault of Trump and the GOP Senators who refused to stop his tariffs and war. And that the price of everything is tied to the price of diesel.

Ya, he sucks as a person, but he was right on that point. People vote based on how they perceive the economy to be.

Republicans have nothing to run on, so they are trying to manufacture something to run against. Given what the polls look like at the moment, and some of the numbers from early returns, it hasn’t been working. Year after year after year, James Carville keeps being proven right:

It’s the economy, stupid.

Maybe one of the reasons that folks are turning to alternative sources is that traditional sources feel the need to engage in this sort of bullshit presentation. Holy fuck, what moron thought that this was a reasonable way to present information?

Nice to see “better lighting” showing up in the fixes. The game could be almost as dark as a Game of Thrones episode, even with half a dozen lights in your house. I’ll have to give the game another run though with all the content now unlocked.

That has been tried before, in the US. It ended somewhat poorly for the unions, though long term it did drive change. Ultimately, unless your goal is a violent insurrection, being armed really only helps to protect you from other violent militias. That can be important when the government can’t or won’t prevent their activities (see the KKK and Pinkertons) but if they have full government backing, or the government just outright uses the military, you’re now in the thick of an armed rebellion. More often than not, those are a bad plan.,

Assuming it’s free. I’d take the Tesla, as it’s likely to have a better resale value than the unknown brand. Take the Tesla, sell it and use the money to buy a decent car.

I just find it abit ironic this is supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread even tho I’ve read multiple times Steam has bloatware and Spyware on it

Links?
Sure, it has the Steam Store on it, if that’s what you’re getting at. And it boots directly to Big Picture Mode. But that seems a bit of a stretch to call “bloatware and spyware”. There’s actually a bit of an irony in this claim, as SteamDeck suffers the same issues with Anti-Cheat software all of Linux does. Much of that stemming from an inability to stick the anti-cheat in kernel mode and keep the user out of it.
And Valve is so committed to locking you into SteamOS that they publish a helpful page with drivers and information for installing Windows. And on that point, Valve cares so much about lock-in that they are using open-source drivers. Also, Proton is open source and they keep pushing fixes back up to the parent WINE project. Indeed, these are the actions of monsters. (/s for the truly stupid)

it was created by two former Microsoft employees

Ok and? Active Microsoft employees have contributed to Linux. Hell, Microsoft has an active Linux distribution of their own, Azure Linux. And they aren’t above submitting code to the Linux kernel. It also turns out that Microsoft has a long history of hiring talented developers. Seriously, go check out Dave Plumer’s channel, the guy is wicked smart. Some stay there, some move on. Just because they worked at MS, doesn’t mean they are now irrevocably evil.

and has DRM

Yup, that’s built into Steam. We can debate the issue of “should DRM exist at all” but that’s largely mental masturbation. Part of the reason digital delivery took off was that publishers felt comfortable enough that piracy wasn’t going to eat their lunch. While I do agree with Gabe Newell that piracy is often an access and delivery issue, many publishers don’t and we’d still be buying boxed copies at physical stores without DRM backing those sales. If you hate it that much, use GoG instead. It’s a great option and it runs on the SteamDeck.

they used Linux as operating system does nobody see any irony in this ??

Linux is fucking everywhere. Seriously, the only place it lags behind is on the desktop. Linux has won in the cloud. It won so decisively that Microsoft spun up Azure Linux to deal with that. Half the internet infrastructure (routers, switches, embedded devices) which allowed you to post your drivel likely runs on Linux. Linux is on everything from physical door controllers to kiosk displays. Even NASA is getting in on the Linux game. Using Linux is kinda the default choice anymore. Valve choosing Linux was fantastic, as it pushed open the gaming market away from Microsoft’s stranglehold. What they have done with Proton is nothing short of a miracle. It’s let us gamers have some hope to escape the Window ecosystem for something far better. The only “irony” here is the irony lump between your ears. I’d suggest never getting near an MRI machine.

Drop it in investments and work for another year. The extra year of work is so that I can get the investments to move to long term capital gains tax rates. With that sorted, I can now retire. Even a simple index fund often returns an average around 7%. So that’s ~$350,000/year. Pull $200,000 and leave $150,000 for growth. Exact numbers will fluctuate, but it will be close. I’m going to get taxed at something like 12.5%, or about $25,000 leaving me $175,000 to live on. This isn’t monthly vacations in Tahiti money, but it’s a pretty comfortable living, if I’m not stupid and wasteful. If I really want to stretch things out, I can always move to a lower cost of living country. Though that often carries personal risk with it, and I don’t know if I’d want that extra stress. Numbers would also change based on how that original $5mil got taxed. If it’s something like a lottery win, it would shave the numbers down a good bit by taxes.

Other humans.
Seriously, we are a social animal for a reason. We have always existed in packs and are actually shit at surviving alone. We can do it for short stints and even some longer periods, but the work involved in gathering food and water, preparing meals, maintaining shelter, clothes, tools and everything else is immense. And then there is the whole issue of defense. We have archeological evidence of violent death going well back into the paleolithic era. You’re going to face packs of other people who want your stuff. No matter how good you think you are, you’re going to get overrun if you are alone. Your best defense is your own tribe.

So ya, if I’m alone in the woods when a nuclear apocalypse happens, I’m going to do my level best to find and integrate into some sort of larger social structure while there are hopefully enough not terrible people around to be able to survive the attempt.

What ads are you trying to remove?
For a browser, I use FireFox mobile with the uBlock Origin and NoScript extensions. Those two eliminate most ads while browsing, though NoScript does require extra effort to allow some pages to function.
For games and other apps, I try to stick to stuff which doesn’t have ads. This usually means paying for the stuff you use or sticking to pure open-source solutions. However, I still have some apps which have ads. For that there I use PiHole as a DNS at home, which eliminates most of them.

I could probably do more to avoid the few ads I do see, but at some point I just accept that advertisement is an inevitable consequence of our economy and just move on with life.

Ya, it was fairly big news a couple months ago. MS was apparently dicking around the researcher (NightmareEclipse) who uncovered it and he went nuclear and dropped that one along with a few others in rapid succession.

The YellowKey Vulnerability was an engineered backdoor for the CIA/FBI/NSA.

Why do I hear singing, and what are those ships on the horizon? I can’t seem to make out their flags, they all just look black to me.

The DNC also reported the matter to law enforcement, said the official, who stressed that the committee utilizes thorough training and security protocols to defend against fraud and other nefarious activity.

Those protocols obviously need a bit of a review. Though, my bet is on Martin being one of those leaders who regularly doesn’t follow protocol and throws a tantrum when other people try to insist he does. This sort of failure happens because the staffers are more afraid of pissing off the tantrum thrower than breaking protocol.

Are you really worried about the case where a thief steals the hard drive but not the rest of the computer?

Even if the thief steals the entire computer, BitLocker/LUKS and SecureBoot provide a reasonable level of protection against data theft. Yes, the drive (or bits of it anyway) are automatically decrypted (the whole drive is never decrypted, just the data requested by the OS). However, it still prevents the attacker from accessing that data outside the intended operating system, which makes data theft much harder. An attacker would also need a valid account to login to the system to start accessing data. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle, but it does mean that just having the computer isn’t the same as having the data.

Without encryption, once a thief has the computer, they have the data. They don’t need a valid account to access the data and they can even boot into a tool to reset passwords on the primary OS and start using it. Last I checked, chntpw still works with Windows 11. That sort of thing fails with encryption, even with TPM only. The TPM will not release the encryption key to an OS if SecureBoot fails. Granted, there is the YellowKey backdoor, but that was probably Microsoft giving the FBI a helping hand. But, that falls outside the intended design.

They are getting educated on just how bad of a choice Trump was.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that China managed to dump voter information. State governments have been pretty bad at security for a long time. The question on that is, “so what?” Sure, it sucks to have your data get siphoned off to yet another database. But, unless you are a significant target for blackmail or other high level operations, there’s not much China is going to do with it. It’s not really useful for election fraud.